Englishman Lord Langsford is leaving California after an adventurous visit, but finds more excitement in a Dime Novel that he shares with his two fellow travelers on the train bound to New York: This is the embellished but true tale of Black Bart and Special Agent James B. Hume of Wells Fargo & Company. It's California gold country and the notorious Black Bart robs his twenty-eighth Wells Fargo Stagecoach. The stage driver shoves down the heavy cash box then whips his team into a gallop away from the gunslinger. When the outlaw dismounts his horse to gather up his loot, a rattler slinks onto the road and bites him through his boot. He shoots off its head, but his horse bolts, leaving him snake bit and on foot. The gold from the local mines is heavy. He must carry the bounty out of the Sierra Mountains or die trying. Special Agent James B. Hume of Wells Fargo & Company, a friend of Lord Langsford, has been after Black Bart for eight years. Now for the first time, Hume has some of the outlaw's possessions. He has to use his wits, but the gunslinger has nearly a week's head start. Can Hume catch the outlaw once and for all? Or will Black Bart escape to terrorize again?

New York Times bestselling author and award-winning historian John Boessenecker separates fact from fiction in the first new biography in decades of Black Bart, the Wild West’s most mysterious gentleman bandit. Black Bart is widely regarded today as not only the most notorious stage robber of the Old West but also the best behaved. Over his lifetime, Black Bart held up at least twenty-nine stagecoaches in California and Oregon with mild, polite commands, stealing from Wells Fargo and the US mail but never robbing a passenger. Such behavior earned him the title of a true “gentleman bandit.” His real name was Charles E. Boles, and in the public eye, Charles lived quietly as a boulevardier in San Francisco, the wealthiest and most exciting city in the American West. Boles was an educated man who traveled among respectable crowds. Because he did not drink, fight or consort with prostitutes, his true calling as America’s greatest stage robber was never suspected until his final capture in 1883. Sheriffs searched and struggled for years to find him, and newspaper editors had a field day reporting his exploits. Legends and rumors trailed his name until his mysterious death, and his ultimate fate remains one of the greatest mysteries of the Old West. Now historian John Boessenecker sheds new light on Black Bart’s beginnings, reputation and exploits, bringing to life the glittering story of the mysterious stage robber who doubled as a rich, genteel socialite in the golden era of the Wild West.

For eight years Charles E. Boles lived a double life as Charles Bolton, mine owner and San Francisco man-about-town, and as Black Bart, poetry-writing stagecoach robber.

Depicts the suspenseful Old West rivalry between a legendary Wells Fargo chief of detectives and a notorious stagecoach robber who between heists poses as an upper-class San Francisco gentleman.

Who really was Black Bart? While he was a notorious nineteenth-century bandit known for robbing stagecoaches in gold rush California and Oregon, Black Barts true identity is still cloaked in mystery. After being jailed in 1883 as Charles Edward Boles, his picture appeared in all the papersyet hundreds of miners and old neighbors and friends would keep a secret: that the man in the papers was actually Alvy Boles. In History in Plain Sight: Joaquin Miller, Ambrose Bierce, and the Real Black Bart, author and historian Margaret Guilford-Kardell investigates the true identity of the man known as Black Bart, and she draws from Harry L. Wellss History of Siskiyou County, California (1881) and other historical documents, newspaper articles, and letters to explore the fascinating connection between the real Black Bart and poet-novelist Joaquin Millertwo of the most colorful but misunderstood figures from Californias gold rush days. Call me what you will, said a defiant Black Bart upon his arrest. Yet while he was called C. E. Boles or Charles Bolton by the authorities, a story of reputation, competing journalism, and family will show how the real Black Bart was none other than Alvy Boles.