Gentleman Bandit
The True Story of Black Bart, the Old West's Most Infamous Stagecoach Robber
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
As seen on Netflix's Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War
New York Times bestselling author and award-winning historian John Boessenecker separates fact from fiction in the first new biography in decades of Black Bart, the Wild West’s most mysterious gentleman bandit.
Black Bart is widely regarded today as not only the most notorious stage robber of the Old West but also the best behaved. Over his lifetime, Black Bart held up at least twenty-nine stagecoaches in California and Oregon with mild, polite commands, stealing from Wells Fargo and the US mail but never robbing a passenger. Such behavior earned him the title of a true “gentleman bandit.”
His real name was Charles E. Boles, and in the public eye, Charles lived quietly as a boulevardier in San Francisco, the wealthiest and most exciting city in the American West. Boles was an educated man who traveled among respectable crowds. Because he did not drink, fight or consort with prostitutes, his true calling as America’s greatest stage robber was never suspected until his final capture in 1883. Sheriffs searched and struggled for years to find him, and newspaper editors had a field day reporting his exploits. Legends and rumors trailed his name until his mysterious death, and his ultimate fate remains one of the greatest mysteries of the Old West.
Now historian John Boessenecker sheds new light on Black Bart’s beginnings, reputation and exploits, bringing to life the glittering story of the mysterious stage robber who doubled as a rich, genteel socialite in the golden era of the Wild West.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The real man behind a Wild West legend is revealed in this immersive chronicle from bestseller Boessenecker (Wildcat). Credited with 29 stagecoach robberies in northern California in the 1870s and '80s, Charles E. Boles, better known as "Black Bart," was born in 1829 in England and immigrated with his family to New York the following year. After failing to strike it rich in the California gold rush, he met and married Mary Elizabeth Johnson in Iowa; the couple eventually had three daughters and a son. Boles struggled to make it as a farmer, however, and after serving in the Union Army during the Civil War, he abandoned his family and headed west, drifting between Montana, Nevada, and Utah before returning to California, where he began his life of crime. Targeting Wells Fargo stagecoaches, Boles—wearing a flour sack mask and armed with a double-barreled shotgun—would politely ask the driver to throw down the strongbox and mail pouch. Twice, he left behind scraps of poetry signed "Black Bart, the Po8." Distinguished by his "gentlemanly demeanor" and disinterest in robbing passengers, Boles was a favorite of California newspapers, who helped spread the myth that he was "a sort of modern Robin Hood." Caught in 1883 after a silk handkerchief he left at the scene of a robbery was traced back to him, Boles served four years in San Quentin prison, then robbed at least three more coaches before disappearing in 1888. Scrupulously researched and smoothly written, this is an entertaining slice of Americana. Illus.
