Photo courtesy Calaveras County Historical Society.
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Why? Well that is a good question. To a lot of people
Black Bart was a fictional character right out of a dime novel.
However, Black Bart was a real character, a real bad guy, a stage
robber. Actually, I discovered that Black Bart was real and fictional.
When asked after his capture why he chose the name Black Bart he said
it just popped into his mind when he was writing the first poem,
probably a memory from reading the dime novel about Black Bart some years before.
What we do know for sure is that Black Bart was one of the most successful Wells
Fargo stagecoach robbers in California history. He was not the vile villain of the dime
novel, but a polite gentlemanly robber who made his demands with a “Please throw down
the box” and a double-barreled shotgun
As a child I would play cowboys and there were good
guys and bad guys. I played both sides. Sometimes I would be Wyatt Earp
or Wild Bill Hickok (neither of these "good guys" were very
nice people in real life). Sometimes I was the bad guy: Billy the Kid,
Jesse James, Black Bart. How did Black Bart get into this group? I
don't know. I did some research and after a while I was caught up in
the mystique of the Legend of Black Bart. I compiled the following
information about him. I tried to get as much accurate
information as I could, but as with many of the bad guys of the old
west, it is hard to get all the true facts.
This site will be constantly
evolving as we get new data or correct inaccuracies. If you have
information on Bart, please send it to me. I would be interested in
seeing it and including it on the site.
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