INTRODUCTION
In all of recorded history, mankind has needed to transfer money and goods from one place to another. The enduring difficulty has been finding a safe way to do it. From marauding brigands attacking desert caravans, to pirates on the high seas, to robbers of Wells Fargo stagecoaches, and to modern hackers stealing identities on the Internet, security has remained one of our greatest challenges. For the simple truth is this: As soon as someone gets legitimate wealth, there is always a crook figuring out how to steal it. And with every new secure method to transfer money, criminals are quick to catch up.
This book focuses on a time in American history when the safety and security in the eastern states was not enjoyed by those living in the wild lands of the West. How to connect the civilization of the East Coast to the rugged frontier, how to cement continental commerce, and how to form a bicoastal nation were mammoth tests for American enterprise. This challenge could not have been met without the efforts of Wells Fargo & Company’s Express. And Wells Fargo’s mission would not have been possible without the valiant shotgun messengers and detectives who protected its treasure, its stagecoaches, and its railroad express cars.
Wells Fargo sprang to life during the California Gold Rush and came to the forefront of every successive American frontier that followed. As soon as a new mining camp or cattle town burst forth, Wells Fargo was there. The company provided both express and banking services, taking in gold and silver and shipping it out of the mining regions. Wells Fargo followed the money, and robbers followed Wells Fargo. The connection between commerce and crime was never more evident than in the story of Wells Fargo. America’s frontier regions were violent and lawless in the extreme; study after modern study has shown that to be true. As a result, Wells Fargo and the Wild West became synonymous.
To this day, the name Wells Fargo conjures up vivid images of brave shotgun guards riding atop Concord stagecoaches, battling highway robbers and mounted Indian warriors. It also brings to mind the Broadway musical and 1962 film The Music Man, and the unforgettable lyric, “O-ho, the Wells Fargo wagon is a-comin’ down the street / Oh please let it be for me!” In a few brief scenes, the iconic Wells Fargo wagon, a familiar sight to generations of Americans, came back to life. From 1852 to 1918, Wells Fargo & Company’s Express was an integral part of American society. It was the perfect equivalent of today’s Federal Express: Wells Fargo delivered packages to customers throughout the country and was faster and safer than the U.S. mail. The company’s agents, messengers, helpers, drivers, and porters lifted, loaded, hauled, and shipped everything from small money packages to crates of fruit, poultry, merchandise, and machinery to destinations near and far. When merchants hung “call cards” in shop windows, Wells Fargo messengers, with their ubiquitous blue caps and black sleeve garters, stopped by in horse-drawn wagons to pick up packages for shipping. Of course, there was nothing dramatic or exciting about that. Ninety-nine percent of Wells Fargo’s express service was the routine delivery work so artfully re-created in The Music Man.
It was that other 1 percent that made Wells Fargo stand out from every business enterprise in American history: the company’s relentless battle against thieves, highwaymen, and train robbers. Wells Fargo hired tough men who were good with guns to protect its express shipments; it employed crack detectives to unravel robberies and track down bandits. Some of the fabled characters of the Old West acted as Wells Fargo messengers, guards, or special officers: Wyatt and Morgan Earp, Bob Paul, Jeff Milton, Jim Hume, Fred Dodge, Harry Morse, and even the poet Bret Harte. But the stories of most of the company’s expressmen have been long lost in the shadows of the past. Since the 1930s, many volumes have been published about Wells Fargo, but no book has ever been written about its express guards and sleuths.1 In the pages that follow are the true stories of twenty of the company’s most valiant shotgun messengers and detectives of the Old West.
Wells Fargo’s story began with the discovery of gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in January 1848. The news did not reach the East Coast for ten months, and when it did, all hell broke loose. Gold fever swept America and then the world as one of mankind’s greatest mass migrations erupted. The gold seekers were overwhelmingly young and male, far from the settling influences of home and family. Once in California’s mining region—known as the Mother Lode—young men behaved in ways they would never have dreamed of in front of their mothers, sisters, and sweethearts. They drank, gambled, whored, and brawled. With little or no law enforcement, every man was responsible for his own safety. Thus forty-niners carried bowie knives and the newly invented Colt revolver. This mixture of testosterone, alcohol, and blue steel was a deadly brew, resulting in extremely high rates of violence. The pattern set in the gold camps of California, replete with saloons, gambling halls, brothels, weak police forces, and active vigilance committees, would be followed in every successive boom frontier for the rest of the century: from the Comstock Lode in Nevada, to the gold fields of Idaho, Montana, and Colorado, to the cattle towns of Kansas, to the silver camps of Arizona, and finally to the gold mines of the Klondike.
In New York, financiers Henry Wells and William G. Fargo, two of the owners of the American Express Company, recognized that huge profits could be made in California. Their principal competitor, Adams & Co. Express, began operating on the West Coast in 1849. On March 18, 1852, they organized Wells Fargo & Company in New York, and three months later opened an office in San Francisco. Because local mail delivery was all but unknown during the Gold Rush, letters and shipments were carried by private express companies. Wells Fargo bought out these smaller concerns and rapidly expanded. By 1866, the company had 146 offices and carried express on four thousand miles of stagecoach lines. Ten years later, it had 438 offices throughout the West, operating on six thousand miles of stage lines and three thousand miles of railroad lines. As railroads expanded, so did Wells Fargo, which grew exponentially: 2,654 offices in 1890, 5,643 offices in 1910, and 10,000 offices throughout the United States in 1918. By that time, it was one of the country’s largest business enterprises, with 35,000 employees. However, wartime emergency in 1918 resulted in the federal government’s merging all express companies into a single entity, American Railway Express. Although Wells Fargo’s lucrative banking business was unaffected, its colorful history as a pioneer express company abruptly ended.2
In the popular imagination, Wells Fargo is inextricably linked to stagecoaching. Although Wells Fargo owned and operated stage lines in various places in the West, it was an express company, not a transportation business. It carried letters, packages, and valuables, not passengers. For the most part, Wells Fargo paid local stage lines to carry its green strongboxes. However, in 1866, Wells Fargo began running overland stages, and it acquired ownership interests in numerous local stage lines. After the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, Wells Fargo increasingly transported shipments aboard trains. During the 1870s, as railroads expanded throughout the West, Wells Fargo express cars, usually coupled behind the tender and in front of the baggage car, became a common sight.
Wells Fargo’s first messengers, during the California Gold Rush, carried letters by horseback to and from the mining camps; soon they began transporting treasure from the mines on riverboats to San Francisco. They carried guns to ward off highway robbers. In the 1850s, if a stagecoach had a large shipment of gold on board, the local Wells Fargo agent would guard the treasure. Wells Fargo agents, contrary to popular belief, were not secret agents or detectives. They were typically merchants who owned the Wells Fargo franchise for a town and operated a Wells Fargo office inside their general stores. Their principal duty was to send and receive letters and packages; Wells Fargo agents also acted as bankers by buying gold dust.
During the late 1850s, as stagecoach holdups became increasingly common in California, Wells Fargo authorized its local agents to hire armed guards, later called “shotgun messengers,” to accompany treasure shipments. As early as September 1856, newspapers reported an armed Wells Fargo messenger aboard a stage in Shasta County. Years later, friends of Samuel P. Dorsey, Wells Fargo’s agent in Grass Valley, claimed that he “introduced the famous shotgun messenger service” about 1857. Allen Kelly, a noted journalist, wrote in 1906 that the credit belonged to James Gannon, a San Francisco politician and police detective who acted as a Wells Fargo special officer in Nevada’s Comstock Lode in 1865. However, in England as early as the 1780s, armed “mail guards” rode on stagecoaches, so the tradition had been established long before the Gold Rush. The term shotgun messenger did not come into popular use in the West until the 1870s. Such terms as shotgun rider and riding shotgun were coined by twentieth-century fiction writers and were unknown in the Old West.3
Wells Fargo messengers on stagecoaches and trains carried sawed-off double-barreled shotguns, and occasionally a revolver. During the 1860s and early 1870s, the company’s shotguns were muzzle-loading percussion guns, purchased by Wells Fargo from San Francisco firearms dealers. Percussion firearms were difficult to reload and became obsolete after the early 1870s as metallic cartridge firearms came on the market. In 1874, E. Remington & Sons began making affordable breech-loading shotguns. They were quickly loaded by snapping open the barrels and inserting a pair of brass shells filled with buckshot. Wells Fargo first used Remington shotguns, and then, in the 1880s, those of other makers, including Parker Brothers and L. C. Smith, all twelve-gauge double-barreled hammer guns. They were known as “messenger’s guns” or “cut-off shotguns.”4
Wells Fargo’s shotgun messengers did not guard stages; they protected the company’s express boxes. Most coaches did not carry shotgun messengers; a guard was on board only if there was a large express shipment of gold or coin. By 1861, Wells Fargo employed sixteen shotgun messengers. As Wells Fargo’s business expanded, so did the number of holdups, and so, too, did the number of guards. Even more were hired as Wells Fargo expanded its operations beyond California and into other western states and territories. By the mid-1870s, the company had thirty-five shotgun messengers. That grew to 110 in the early 1880s, and then to 200 by 1885. By 1918, the company employed 3,000 shotgun guards, mostly on railroads. Every Wells Fargo car had at least one armed messenger, and often a messenger’s helper. Of these guards, Wells Fargo’s Jim Hume explained, “In all my experience, there has never been an occasion when a regular shotgun messenger showed the white feather no matter what the odds against him or the promise of danger might be. They are the kind of men you can depend on if you get in a fix, with the certainty that they will pull you through or stay by you to the last.”5
Shotgun messengers on stages occasionally rode inside the coach with the passengers, but their usual seat was next to the driver, on his left. The driver, known as a “whip” or a “jehu”—the Biblical king of Israel famed as a charioteer—worked the reins, or ribbons, for four- and six-horse teams. The typical overland stage was pulled by six horses, consisting of three pairs of animals. The wheel horses, or “wheelers,” were the largest and were hitched closest to the coach. Next were the center, or “swing,” horses. In front were the leaders, the smallest horses. The animals on the driver’s right were the “off” horses, those on his left the “near” horses. Each rein controlled one horse, and it took extraordinary skill to handle a six-horse rig. The driver used his whip not to flay the horses (which he counted as his closest friends), but instead to crack it in the air above the animals’ heads to urge them forward. However, in case of emergency, such as a holdup, a driver might lay the lash down on his team.
The major stage lines used the ornate but rugged coaches made by the Abbot-Downing Company of Concord, New Hampshire. A Concord stagecoach could carry up to eighteen passengers, ten inside and eight on top, including the driver and the shotgun messenger. The front seat, also called the “driver’s box,” was located in the front boot, and just behind it was a front dickey seat, which faced forward and held three passengers. At the back of the stage, also on top, was the rear dickey seat, which faced backward. Behind the stage was a leather rear boot, which held luggage and mail. Concord coaches were drawn by six-horse teams and traveled night and day, with the teams changed every twelve to twenty miles at stage depots along the road. Many stagecoaches on the frontier were uncomfortable and inexpensive “mud wagons,” built by local wagon makers and used on short stage routes. Only about one-fourth of all western stages were Concord coaches; the balance were mud wagons.6
Stage robbery, like horse and cattle theft, is a crime that has long been identified with Wells Fargo and the western frontier. In California, holdups of Concord coaches and mud wagons first occurred during the Gold Rush, especially in the Mother Lode country, where bandits preyed on shipments of gold from the mines. Stage holdups became increasingly frequent during the 1860s, and between 1870 and 1884, there were 347 actual and attempted robberies of Wells Fargo express shipments aboard stagecoaches, in which six guards and drivers were killed and ten wounded. One persistent myth, kept alive by repetition, insists that stage robberies all but vanished by 1890. The truth is that stagecoach holdups were almost as numerous during the late 1880s and the 1890s. Wells Fargo detective John N. Thacker reported that between 1886 and 1892 the express company was the victim of seventy-four stage robberies in California. Dozens of additional stage holdups took place later in the 1890s and in the early 1900s. The last holdup of a horse-drawn stage in the West took place near Jarbidge, Nevada, in 1916.7
Unlike the typical stage robbery portrayed in film and television, bandits did not gallop after the coach across open prairie, riding at breakneck speed and exchanging gunfire with the guard and the passengers. The method real highwaymen used was less dramatic and far more effective. The bandits, or road agents, would simply post themselves on a steep grade where the driver was forced to walk his team. While one robber stepped in front of the coach and seized the lead horses, a second would cover the driver and give the time-honored command “Throw down the box!”
Shootouts rarely occurred, for most coaches did not carry armed guards, and those passengers who carried firearms were often loath to risk their lives to save their own pocketbooks or Wells Fargo’s treasure. But if the stagecoach carried a large bullion shipment or a payroll, a Wells Fargo guard was sure to be on board. The highwaymen who preyed on stages were a mixed bag of ex-convicts, loafers, professional thieves, and luckless miners and laborers. Some, like Charles E. Boles (better known as “Black Bart”) and Bill Miner (depicted in the 1982 film The Grey Fox), had lengthy criminal careers and robbed stagecoaches as a vocation, rarely giving a thought to honest work. Their target was the Wells Fargo treasure box, built of pine, strapped with iron, and painted green. These were carried in the front boot, under the driver’s seat. Beginning in the early 1860s, some coaches carried an iron box, known as a “pony safe” because of its small size, bolted to the floor under an inside passenger seat.
With the rapid growth of railroads throughout the West, bandits turned their attention to train robbery. The first western train holdup took place on the newly finished transcontinental railroad near Verdi, Nevada, in 1870. Nonetheless, train holdups in the far west were quite rare at first. Nevada saw two in 1870, California one in 1881 and another in 1888, Utah one in 1883, and New Mexico two in 1883 and 1884. During the late 1880s, train holdups became increasingly common and violent, reaching epidemic proportions in the 1890s. Between 1890 and 1903, there were 341 actual and attempted train robberies in the United States, which resulted in the killing of ninety-nine persons. And just as in the stagecoach era, Wells Fargo’s shotgun messengers and detectives led the way in fighting the new terror.8
Their stories have been mostly lost in the dustbin of history. That is an injustice that must be corrected. This, then, is the saga of the fighting men who rode for Wells Fargo.
Copyright © 2018 by John Boessenecker