On this day in 1883 Charles Bowles, better known in some circles as Black Bart, was wounded while trying to rob a stagecoach. He fled leaving his eyeglasses and a handkerchief with a laundry mark on it. Wells Fargo detectives used these bits of evidence to trace the notorious bandit and poet.
Black Bart spent four years in prison after which he disappeared into the mists…
He was a figure of myth in my California childhood, there was even a festival celebrating him and a rock to which people could make pilgrimage behind which he was said to have hidden before his leap in front of the stagecoach. I gather it isn’t the right rock. But, stranger things have been built upon wrong rocks before…
He was a gentleman robber and poet.
Two poems survive that are assumed to be authentic. The first, and I think, the more important, was left after a robbery in 1877.
“I’ve labored long and hard for bread,/For honor, and for riches,/But on my corns too long you’ve tread,/You fine-haired sons of bitches.”
I find Black Bart one of those carriers of the archetype of discontent with the systems within which we are all entangled.
That he never hurt anyone helps.
That he was a gentleman about it all.
And that he left a bit of verse.
Created someone to hang a story on.
The story of the little guy who has been pushed around too much.
By the railroads.
By the rich.
By the one percent.
May his memory be celebrated.
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