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The Notorious Men of the Wild West

Khalid Elhassan December 4, 2019 32 min

15. Tracking Down the Outlaw Poet

As Black Bart fled from his last robbery, he dropped some personal items, including a handkerchief with a laundry mark. Wells Fargo detectives canvassed San Francisco, found the laundry using that mark, and learned the identity of the handkerchief’s owner. Under interrogation, Black Bart eventually confessed to robbing Wells Fargo stagecoaches, but only before 1879: he mistakenly thought that the statute of limitations had run out on robberies committed before that year.

The company pressed charges only for the last robbery, and he was convicted and sentenced to six years. He was released after four years in 1888 for good behavior. Ailing, Black Bart did not return to his family, but he did write his wife that he was depressed and wanted to get away from everybody. His last known whereabouts were a hotel in Visalia, CA, from which he vanished a month after regaining his freedom.

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.