The Sacramento Bee from Sacramento, California • 39

THE SACRAMENTO EEE MAY 4 1940 MAGAZINE SECTION PAGE THREE WHEN ROAD AGENTS TOOK THEIR TOLL Stage Robbers Qf Early Days Turned To Railroad Holdups In Eighties And Nineties BY HARRY P' BAGLEY STAGE coaches Jolted their passengers over the flung frontier Atop the driver's feats skilled Jehus cracked their whips The galloping mustangs raced across fiats plunged pell mell down twisting narrow canyons or strained and panted as they hauled their loads up difficult grades In the forward boots of the east bound stages or firmly bolted to the floor were Iron boxes' the temporary repositories for millions of dollars In gold bullion and coin A mass of wealth moved piecemeal from California and other western gold fields to financial centers Of he east 1 Naturally this treasure aroused cupidity The "have of the sixties seventies and eighties Included their number plenty of audacious desperadoes who were willing to stake their lives for the gold The risks were great but the prize was wortn the gamble in the eves of many an adventurer-Nor example the Wells Fargo Express Company in 1866 carried $14907894 from booming Virginia City to San Francisco A record of early losses by stage and express companies to enterprising road agents probably never will be known but an article that appeared in the San Francisco Call in 1884 indicated the extent of depicdations in the preceeding fourteen years The Wells Fargo Company alone the account declared lost $927726 In holdups which included 317 stage robberies thirty four attempted rge robberies and four train robberies Twenty bandits fell before the fire of shotgun messengers during those fourteen years and many more were injured The fatalities among drivers guards and messengers numbered sixteen -w vv vyse Right McKee an early stage driver hero of many desperate encounters with road agents Below Smith convicted of stage robbery during the early 70 FROM the time gold was discovered in '49 almost until the turn of the century stage robbery might have hern listed as a highly popular outdoor Indeed at times it almost attained the status of one of the accepted estern piotessions Some of the notorious road agents whose deeds were the bests of many legends were Tiburclo Vasquez hanged for robbery in San Jose In 1870 Juan So'o his p'nyful pal whose deeds earned him the nickname of "wildcat" Dick Fellows who tindoned crime to become a pro-fe-sor of languages in a university Reelfoot Williams of Illinois-town Rattlesnake Dick of Yuba City fr Bell of the crushed nose and gentlemanly manners genteel Jark Davis and Dutch Kte of Marysville a buxom wench who drank swore and gambled with the roughest bladts in the camps who habitually wore clothing snd was not averse when times were hard to perpetrating an occasional stage robbery From the ranks of the road agents were recruited the train robbers when the transcontinental railroad supplanted many of the stage lines THE appellation has an interesting derivation Joaqem Miller the famed Poet of the S-'rra who rode as an ex-pi ess messenger aboard a stage coach in Idaho long before his verses made him famous declared that a couple of desperadoes Dave English and Nelse Scott gave birth to the expression Fleeing before a posse after having successfully pilfered a stage coach English and Scott found their horses failing They pulled up at a stage station explained to the attendant that they were on an inspection trip for the express company and commandeered the two best horses on the place Soon the posse thundered into Dick Fellows a graduate of Harvard wno after abandoning a career es a stage robber became a professor of language at a university press messenger on the Oroville-Forbcstown stage in As his singe coach rounded a heav lly wooded curve two masked men clad only in long underwear stepped into the roadway and halted the horses Hackett at pistol point threw down the express safe containing $650 in dust and the bandits melted into the forest Hackett drove down the road a piece climbed down from the seat shotgun in hand and back tracked He located the camp nnd the clothes of the bandits before they reach their rendezvous He settled down to wait Soon they appeared laden with loot Hackett ordered them to one of the men bolted and outran a chatge of buckshot Liverpool Harry however still gorbed in -wwlerv est and drawers stayed put He explained that the underwear idea was adopted to minimize the chances of Identified as the perpetrators of Jhe holdup Haoket recovered not only the stolen du but an'addilional $256 the robber gang Newby following a career as a stage robber with the Davis gang was convicted in Missouri as a counterfeiter When his term was ended he joined Davis With part of the swag from the train robbery he was to return to the Midwest engage the service of an expert safe cracker and return to Virginia City The gang planned to open a saloon in a building adjoining the Bank of California where huge sums in gold coin and bullion generally were kept The gang planned to tunnel into the vault and loot the bank Sacramento officers aided in the Verdi train robbery case and arrested a man named Odium who was a member of the gang There were conflicting stories on the fate of Jack Blair head of the first western train robbers Some said he escaped with Sam Bass renowned in old range ballads following a successful train raid near the Black Hills Bass and Davis reputedly escaped in an old buckboard and even joined a posse searching for them while crossing Kansas Another version Is that Davis attempting to hold up the Pioche-Elko Nevada stagecoach was killed by Eugene Blair an express messenger The train that Davis and his fellows robbed at Verdi seemed fated for robbery When it reai hed Pequops Nev on the following day it was looted by four bandits presumably deserters from old Fort Halleck where troops were stationed to protect overland travel The men escaped with $70000 Two were captured in Idaho and two in Utah and were returned to Carson City for trial A SERIES of mail robberies and a resultant man hunt that shocked the nation oecuired in the San Joaquin Valley in 1889 and Chustopher Evans and John Sontag blamed foi the foras were run to earth following a man hunt that lasted more than a ear and a half Sontag died of wounds incurred in a desperate fight at Stone Corral and Evans an eye shot out and an arm so riddled that amputation was necessary staged a successful jail break following a conviction in Fresno for first degree murder in 1894 Then he terroi ied the area for another seven weeks before he eventually was trapped and sentenced to a life term in Folsom State Prison He pardoned by Governor Hiram Johnson in 1911 and died six vears later The San Joaquin robberies hsd a background of violence and oppression The Southern Pacific Railroad Company running a line through the valley in 1870 was held by the settlers to have broken faith in the matter of land sales Strong feelings developed The matter came to a head In 1880 at Mussel Slough where five ranchers were slain and seventeen Jailed by a United States marshal and his deputies The Southern Pacific had many enemies and when robbers raided the trains public sympathy favored the desperadoes despite tlje fact that officers and railroad employes had been killed Suspicion finally settled upon George Sontag John Sontag and Chris Evans The latter was one of the ranrhers evicted bv the railroad Sontag also nursed a grievance Suffering a crushed the station and the attendant was roundly berated for heeding the plausible tale of the fugitive bandits afforded plenty of meat for fiction writers but perhaps no experience was more fraught with humor than the capture of Liverpool Harry Norton George Hackett was the ex which he surmised was the fruit of an earlier robbery FE first train robbery in the West was hatched in the fertile brain of suave Jack Davis as nefarious and sinister a villain as ever graced the harrowing pages of a Diamond Dick dime novel Gentleman Jack was a debonair gambler and business man of Virginia City He had a saloon where desperadoes posing as lespectahle cowpokes or miners lurked innocuously But Gentleman web was widely flung Even In San Francisco he had his spies to tell him when money shipments were moving Three miles from Virginia City Jack had a little stamp mill Nobody knew where his ore came from but the mill remelting bullion filched from express box reputedly paid enormous dividends gang robbed stages at will So often had they halted Baldy Green's stage that the expression "Throw' down the box became a byword all over the state When the Central Pacific Railroad began operations and served to transport treasure shipments J8ck and his gang turned their attention to the matter of train robbery then in its early stages of development ONLY a couple of train robberies had occurred In the East before Davis et al tried their hand in the game It was midnight of November 5 Illustrations by courtesy of the California division State Library 1870 when the Cential Pacific train from Sacramento reached Verdi Nev As it pulled away fiom the station seven men boarded the locomotive and express car A brakeman petulantly told them to he operate the brakes while Ihey weie on the but froze inlo silence as the gang diew guns The bell cord was cut the express car was uncoupled from the remainder of the train and the engineer was ordered to take the train down the track to Crossing The bandits lifted the express safe escaping with $41-000 The money was In double eagles destined for distribution among the employes of the famous Yellow Jacket mine Posses armed with rifles and revolvers scoured the country Charles Roberts a hotel keeper in Antelope Valley was the first man arrested His place was another hangout for the Davis gang Sol Jones arrested in Clover Valley confessed the robbery and guided arresting officers to a cache of $7345 the first of the stolen money to be recovered Chapman from San Francisco a spy who sent the "tip telegram to Jones and then rode to Verdi aboard the treasure train was the next man arrested Then James Burke and James Gilchrist ran afoul of a posse in Dog Valley and bargaining for a light sentence revealed the hiding piece of $12000 Davis was arrested by Chief of Police Downey of Virginia Citv and also made a clemency deal Every dime of the loot was recovered The entire gang with the exception of Roberts there wera doubts that he was were sentenced to Nevada's state prison DAVIS candidly discussed the crime while a prisoner In the Carson City penitentiary He said his original plan was to blast the locomotive from the track at Verdi with a cannon the gang had obtained This procedure was reluctantly abandoned for fear that a lynching party might ensue before they could escape with the olunder The capture of the gang circumvented another bolder robbery according to James Newby of Solano County also a member of Left A new technique in acquiring sudden wealth developed after the transcontinental railroad began to carry gold and bullion and one of fne first big train robberies occurred at Verdi Nevada on the Central was pardoned by Governor Hiram Johnson THE last of the western despera does who carried the old time traditions well past the turn of the Twentieth Century was Roy Gardner who last January 11th executed himself with lethal gas in a San Francisco hotel Gardner seasoned himself for train robbery in a career that started as an arms smuggler in Mexico for rebel aimv A jewel robbery sent him to San Quentin Assistance in quelling a piison riot won his release 1912 and shortly thereafter he annexed $85000 in securities from a mail truck in San Diego He captured convicted and sentenced to twenty five years at McNeil Island where he overpowered a guard and escaped in 1920 Gardner's next escapade was 'light in Sacramento's front yard Near Roseville in 1921 Gardner with no assistance successfully purloined $175000 in securities ills arrest followed within a few da Eventually he was transferred to "Die and remained at Alcatraz until 1937 when afterserving sixteen of a twenty five year term he was released Changing conditions spelled the doom of the frontier banditti when the vulnerable stage coaches and early express cars weie supplanted with better equipment Steel cars practically impregnable lightning communications and well organized police facilities headed by the federal bureau of Identification serve as crime deterrents So the western bandits whose deeds thrilled and horiified millions live only in memoiics of the past ankle while working as a brake- man he was expelled from the company hospital in Sacramento before his Injuries had healed 0EORGE SONTAG an ex convict fiom the Middle West attracted attention to himself bragging of having been on one of the robbed trains He was lured Into a sheriffs office and arrested Officers called at home seeking John Sontag Thev are said to have insulted his 16 year old daughter and were liberally sprinkled with birdshot by the infuriated Evans Evans and Sontag escaped to the mountains and one of California's biggest man hunts was on In the meantime George Sontag was convicted of train robbery and sentenced to life Imprisonment in Folsom Sontag and Evans apparently moved at will among the dwellprs of the mountains adjoining the San Joaquin Valley They returned home on occasions Once when a posse surrounded the house they shot their way out fatally wounding Deputy Sheriff Oscar Beaver A reward of $10000 was posted by the railroad company and the mountains were so filled with enthusiastic man hunters that several narrow escapes from careless gunfire resulted The outlaws spent a Winter planning the escape of George Sontag from Folsom daughter Eva thiough an accomplice stole the weapons of possemen In pursuit of her father and the guns weie smuggled successfully into the prison In a desperate try for freedom three convicts were killed and George Sontag and another convict were seriously wounded The attempted prison delivery occurred in June of 'as Sontag and Evans eventually walked into an ambush at Stone Corral Both were practically shot tp bits but managed to put up spirited resistance Sontag suffered wounds that proved fatal within a few days hut Evans recovered was convicted of murder but made a successful Jail break After seven hectic weeks he was recaptured and convicted on a charge of first degree murder In '93 he was committed to the state prison at Folsom where lie remained uptll 1911 when he Right Christopher Evans accused train robber whose pursuit and capture constituted one of the most thrilling man hynts in California crime annals Left John Sontag who with Evans made officers and railroad detectives the objects of ridicule for more than two years before he was driven to cover end fatah' wounded.