So here I’ve stood while wind and rain
have set the trees a-sobbin’;
and risked my life for that damn stage
that wasn’t worth the robbin’.
AFTERWORD
My tale it is finished, and my race it is run;
but there’s one more confession I owe everyone.
I speak not of inventions, though admit to this crime;
I own to the evils I’ve committed in rhyme.
Well, I never claimed to be a poet; or even a “Po8” on the scale of Bart. But the seductive alliteration of the book’s title called for some verses to justify the presence of the word “ballad.”
In the interest of reducing confusion, I’ve taken some small liberties with fact as it applies to Charles E. Bolton, né Boles, and known more infamously as Black Bart; but the most implausible portions of the narrative are a matter of historical record.
I am hardly unique in playing fast and loose with some of the lesser details. Sources professing to be authentic contradict one another over such things as the names of Boles’s wife and daughters, and where he was born. One in particular provides two different addresses for both the Webb House and Thomas Ware’s tobacco shop, without claiming to be in confusion on the matter; they change without explanation. This is sloppy research, and I cherry-picked my way through it hunting down bits I could swallow, backing up what I could from other sources. The historical novelist has the privilege of improvisation and invention; the historian does not.
I have applied creative license mostly to the investigating part of the narrative. Criminal forensics (and Bart’s is at least half a detective story) is a tedious business outside the world of entertainment, characterized by routine and repetition and complicated by false leads, bad tips, and unreliable eyewitnesses; it benefits from some telescoping in the retelling. Aside from such embellishments as appeal to the dramatic, the efforts of James B. Hume, Harry Morse, Benjamin Thorn, and others to identify and apprehend Black Bart are as reported. Sherlock Holmes brought nothing to the science of criminology that wasn’t already there.
Where Charles E. Bolton is concerned (with the single exception of a Pilgrim’s Progress–like journey to the site of his domestic past—there’s no evidence it took place, but the melodramatist in me couldn’t resist), I’ve clung as scrupulously as possible to historical fact. (In the interest of balance, I sent James B. Hume off on a similar journey through the gold country, seeking to increase his knowledge of his adversary. Although there is nothing in the record to support this, it seems entirely within his method, and presents him with the prize of personally having retrieved the storied handkerchief; if I vouchsafed to allow Bolton the mercy of revisiting the haunt of his family desertion, I felt I should make a similar concession to his nemesis.)
Reality is by necessity hard to accept. As Mark Twain said, “Of course truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense.” That a middle-aged man traveling almost entirely on foot should manage to rob a national banking concern twenty-eight times over the course of eight years—with an empty shotgun, no less—before tripping himself up on something as trivial as a misplaced handkerchief would never fly in the rigid world of pure fantasy. Yes, he was as elaborately polite in the commission of his felonies as represented; yes, he acted without accomplices. And yes, he left some cheeky lines of doggerel at the scenes of robberies. This, even more than his astonishing record of success, guaranteed him a unique place in legend.
He was no Robin Hood, mind; he robbed from the rich and gave to himself. Worse, he abandoned his wife and family, and for this indecency we must withhold pardon; but Paul Gauguin did the same in order to pursue his art, and history has forgiven him for the sake of his genius. Some daubs on canvas may outlast one’s sins; but so too many a romantic legend. If we are to commute a painter’s sentence because of his skill and talent, we should review a nonviolent highwayman’s record in view of his own unique gifts.
Of Bolton’s life after he vanished from the Nevada House following his incarceration, we know next to nothing, theories notwithstanding. (He was reported to have exported his larcenous talents to such exotic places as Japan, China, and Australia.) He may have been responsible for a number of later stagecoach robberies that matched his modus operandi; James B. Hume seemed convinced that he was, although he later recanted, possibly for the simple reason that a thief-catcher is loath to admit that his thief is again at large and back to his old ways despite his drubbing. Wells, Fargo’s able chief of detectives remained in his position long after he’d achieved his greatest public triumph: he oversaw the recruitment of Wyatt Earp, just the kind of shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later lawman he distrusted, as an undercover operative for the Company throughout Earp’s turbulent time in Tombstone, Arizona—and with the decline of valuable stagecoach shipments in a settling West shifted his attention to train robberies. He continued in his position for many years until failing health forced him to retire.
Rumors surfaced that a shotgun-wielding masked bandit gunned down by a shotgun messenger during an attempted robbery on the run between Virginia City and Reno, Nevada, in the summer of 1888 was Bolton. The man was buried mere yards from the spot where he expired, in a grave soon obliterated by wind, rain, and dust, and now impossible to locate. If this was indeed the finish of Black Bart, it would eliminate him as a suspect in the “wasn’t worth the robbin’” raid the following November. In any case, no record of Bolton’s existence extends beyond that year.
To my knowledge (and with apologies to those who may have made the effort, which I failed to notice), this singular chapter of frontier history has never before been recounted in dramatic terms. In 1948, Dan Duryea—a talented and overlooked actor in westerns and films noir—starred in a programmer entitled Black Bart, but the storyline bore no resemblance to the more fascinating reality. In those days, with a few notable exceptions, frontier fiction on-screen and in print favored spirited gunplay, midnight rides, and fleeting romance over authenticity, superior though it was to the fevered imaginings of screenwriters on contract. In any event I thought it high time the man had his day.
“Black Bart” acted partly from revenge, partly from a yearning for the finer trappings of wealth. He paid his debt to society—when it came due—and walked away from prison essentially unchanged by his four years and two months in incarceration. This was no small feat in those pre-rehabilitory days of inhuman punishment, barely sufficient meals, and sundry other atrocities unspeakable even today, which shattered the will of many a more obstreperous inmate. And he never took a cent from an individual, preying instead upon a commercial enterprise as large as some countries of the world. In view of recent discoveries regarding the practices of Wells, Fargo & Co. in our own day, one might ask, along with Bart: “After all, why not rob a bank?”
BOOKS BY LOREN D. ESTLEMAN
AMOS WALKER MYSTERIES
Motor City Blue
Angel Eyes
The Midnight Man
The Glass Highway
Sugartown
Every Brilliant Eye
Lady Yesterday
Downriver
Silent Thunder
Sweet Women Lie
Never Street
The Witchfinder
The Hours of the Virgin
A Smile on the Face of the Tiger
Sinister Heights
Poison Blonde*
Retro*
Nicotine Kiss*
American Detective*
The Left-Handed Dollar*
Infernal Angels*
Burning Midnight*
Don’t Look for Me*
The Sundown Speech*
The Lioness Is the Hunter*
VALENTINO, FILM DETECTIVE
Frames*
Alone*
Alive!*
Shoot*
Brazen*
DETROIT CRIME
Whiskey River
Motown
King of the Corner
Edsel
Stress
Jitterbug*
Thunder City*
PETER MACKLIN
Kill Zone
Roses Are Dead
Any Man’s Death
Something Borrowed, Something Black*
Little Black Dress*
OTHER FICTION
The Oklahoma Punk
Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes
Peeper
Gas City*
Journey of the Dead*
The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association*
Roy & Lillie: A Love Story*
The Confessions of Al Capone*
PAGE MURDOCK SERIES
The High Rocks*
Stamping Ground*
Murdock’s Law*
The Stranglers
City of Widows*
White Desert*
Port Hazard*
The Book of Murdock*
Cape Hell*
WESTERNS
The Hider
Aces & Eights*
The Wolfer
Mister St. John
This Old Bill
Gun Man
Bloody Season
Sudden Country
Billy Gashade*
The Master Executioner*
Black Powder, White Smoke*
The Undertaker’s Wife*
The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion*
The Branch and the Scaffold*
Ragtime Cowboys*
The Long High Noon*
The Ballad of Black Bart*
NONFICTION
The Wister Trace
Writing the Popular Novel
*Published by Tom Doherty Associates
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LOREN D. ESTLEMAN has written more than eighty books—historical novels, mysteries, and Westerns. Winner of four Shamus Awards, five Spur Awards, and three Western Heritage Awards, he lives in central Michigan with his wife, author Deborah Morgan. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
I. Shank’s Mare
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
II. Out in the Wash
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
III. Ballad’s End
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Afterword
Books by Loren D. Estleman
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE BALLAD OF BLACK BART
Copyright © 2017 by Loren D. Estleman
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Michael Koelsch
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-7653-8353-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-9211-8 (ebook)
eISBN 9781466892118
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First Edition: November 2017