← Back to the front page

The Notorious Men of the Wild West

Khalid Elhassan December 4, 2019 32 min

17. Don’t Mess With Boles

Charles Earl Boles, AKA Black Bart (1829 – died after 1888) was born to English parents who emigrated to New York in 1831. He joined the California Gold Rush in 1849, and spent a few years prospecting before trekking back east and settling in Illinois. Boles enlisted in an Illinois regiment during the Civil War, and proved a good soldier, getting promoted to Company First Sergeant within a year. He was brevetted as a lieutenant before his discharge in 1865.

After the war, Boles returned to gold prospecting, but a run in with Wells Fargo agents in 1871 left him seething, and vowing vengeance. He changed his name to Black Bart, after a character from a dime novel, and took up a career as a highwayman, whose specialty was robbing Wells Fargo stagecoaches in northern California and southern Oregon.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.