Books: Stagecoach Business

WELLS FARGO: ADVANCING THE AMERICAN FRONTIER (274 pp.)—Edward Hungerford—Random House ($3.75).

San Francisco detectives who ate their lunch at a Kearney Street bakery back in the 1870s all liked soft-spoken old Charley Bolton. Charley, a Civil War veteran who lived in a nearby rooming house, often sat at the detectives’ table and chatted with them, sometimes about Black Bart, the bandit nemesis of Wells Fargo stagecoaches.

“Those up-country sheriffs are no good,” Charley Bolton would say. “Too bad they couldn’t send a few of you up into the hills to get hold of that Black Bart.”

Bread & Poems. Black Bart was not the first man to snatch a Wells Fargo treasure box,* but he was far & away the most dashing. Wearing a flour sack with cutout eyeholes over his head and a long linen duster, he pulled his first job one sun-baked day in July by stepping out from behind a rock on a Calaveras County road and waving a sawed-off shotgun at Billy Hodges’ stagecoach. “If they dare to shoot, give them a solid volley, boys,” Black Bart shouted toward the rocks alongside the road. Driver Hodges, able to see half a dozen gun barrels covering him, eagerly threw down the green, ironbound Wells Fargo treasure chest. Next day an investigating party discovered that the “guns” Driver Hodges had seen among the rocks were only sticks.

Working alone and on foot, Black Bart held up 28 stagecoaches in eight years. While Californians built legends around his name, Wells Fargo detectives scoured the mountainsides for clues. They found little except handwritten poems which Bart often left in the strongboxes he had plundered. One stanza:

I’ve labored long and hard for bread

For honor and for riches,

But on my corns too long you’ve tred,

You fine-haired sons of bitches.

Nuggets & Dust. Finally Black Bart slipped up. Hurrying away from a stage robbery near Sonora in 1883, he dropped a handkerchief bearing the mark of a San Francisco laundry. That was all his pursuers needed to track him down. He turned out to be a 55-year-old man who lived in quiet “retirement” and often ate his lunch at a Kearney Street bakery. His name: Charley Bolton.

Author Hungerford’s history of Wells Fargo contains only a few nuggets like the story of Black Bart. It concerns itself chiefly with lavishing praise on Wells Fargo executives and listing company assets and dividends through the years. Most readers had better look elsewhere for the sound & fury of early California days ; but ardent collectors of Americana will want to sift its dry-as-dust style for new facts about the old West.

* “Rattlesnake Dick” Barter was. His gang held up a Wells Fargo mule train near Shasta in 1855 and carried off $80,000 worth of gold dust.