Gentleman Bandit: The True Story of Black Bart, the Old West’s Most Infamous Stagecoach Robber

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. (Mar.)