Black Bart, PO Eight

Between eighteen seventy-five and eighteen eighty-three, someone robbed twenty-eight Wells Fargo stagecoaches across the Mother Lode country, from Shasta County in the north to Sonora in the south. He always worked alone and always on foot, which no one expected. He carried a shotgun, which he never fired. Several of the robbery scenes had something unusual: a handwritten poem left in the empty strongbox, signed with the alias he had given himself. Black Bart, the Po Eight, a play on the word poet.

His real name, as investigators eventually determined, was Charles Boles, sometimes recorded as Charles Bolton. He was born in Norfolk, England, around eighteen twenty-nine, immigrated to the United States as a child, and served in the Union Army during the Civil War before drifting west and turning to robbery under the alias that made him famous.

What the record is clear about: he was caught through a laundry mark on a handkerchief he dropped at a Calaveras County holdup in eighteen eighty-three. The mark led detectives to a San Francisco laundry, and from there to a boardinghouse, and from there to the man himself. The trial was here, in the Calaveras County Courthouse in San Andreas. The building still stands.

He was sixty years old when he walked out of San Quentin. He gave one interview to a reporter and said he would not rob any more stagecoaches. He disappeared from the historical record almost immediately afterward. Nobody has satisfactorily explained what became of him.