The Black Hills, Mid-Continent Resort

by Albert N. Williams

Modern Deadwood—seventy years later

With the shot the horses bolted, and shortly thereafter they pounded into Deadwood, guided by a hatless passenger who had managed to secure the ribbons as they dangled. Within a matter of minutes a posse had been formed and riders were making their way into the woods. Inasmuch as Bass and his companions had been acting suspiciously during the afternoon and evening, the finger of accusation pointed altogether correctly in their direction, and before the moon was down Sam Bass was well on his way to Texas, escaping Deadwood’s justice only to go to his lathered doom.

This tragic foray against law and order set the stage, so to speak, and before long the spruce trails of the Black Hills, once so still and harmless, could be passed over safely only in the company of “shotgun messengers,” as the armed attendants were called. It did not take the stage companies long to come to this way of operating, for Wells Fargo, which contracted for the express business, had had a quarter-century of rugged experience. Bringing their brave talents swiftly to bear on the situation, the Wells Fargo men steel-plated the coaches to be used for bullion shipments, and brought into the Hills the famed treasure chests which had figured so largely in the history of the coming of law and order to California—metal-bound cases too heavy to be transported quickly from the scene of crime, and too sturdy to be opened except after arduous work with chisels and crowbars. The chests had been developed with the idea that a posse could be gathered at the spot where a stage had been held up before the gold could be removed from the chest or the chest itself taken far away.

A more important safety factor than the chests was the reputation of the shotgun messengers. The express companies went to great lengths to engage only the most fearless and law-abiding men they could find for this dangerous task, and time and time again thousands upon thousands of dollars in bullion rode across the lonely trails with no more than one man, his shotgun, and his reputation for bravery guarding it.

Wyatt Earp, perhaps the most noted of these messengers, entered his long tour of Wells Fargo duty through that firm’s Deadwood office. Earp, as any lover of western legend will tell, earned his vigorous reputation as marshal in the bloody Kansas cattle towns of Dodge City and Abilene. After the excitement of these Gomorrahs had worn off, he made his way to Deadwood in 1876—not as a gold-seeker, but apparently merely in search of honest and not too dangerous employment. At any rate, his brief stay in the Hills was given to the profession of coal and wood dispensing rather than to law enforcement. Either the weather or the lethargy of the place suited him poorly, for within the year he was casting about for some means of making his way back to his own plains country.

Taking advantage of the public clamor against road agents after the Sam Bass affair, he offered his services to the express agent and was hired for the single trip out for fifty dollars cash and free passage. The agent was by no means doling out any charity in this exchange, for he knew the value of Earp’s reputation and looked upon the fifty dollars as a cheap form of insurance. He advertised in the local newspaper: “The Spring cleanup will leave for Cheyenne on the regular stage at 7 AM next Monday. Wyatt Earp of Dodge will ride shotgun.”

Bullion shippers were quick to take advantage of this extra protection, and it was recorded that no less than two hundred thousand dollars in bullion was weighed in for that special trip. It would be most dramatic to recount that Earp’s one trip was marked by attempted mass raids, burning coaches, and wounded drivers, but the truth of the matter is that the journey was made on time and in good order. Only one shot was fired, and that by Marshal Earp, who took offense at the suspicious actions of a rider whose course seemed to parallel the stage route for an unaccountable distance. Without stopping the stage or otherwise alarming the passengers Earp dropped the offending horseman a few miles out of Deadwood, and the rest of the trip was made without incident.

Despite the vigor with which the treasure coaches were protected, armed robbery continued to take place sporadically all during the final decade before the rails pushed through from the East. By and large these forays, while bloody, were unsuccessful, and not a single desperado was able to rise to any sort of fame during that period. On the other hand, there was one robbery which must go down in history for the strange way in which the loot was recovered.

This particular villainy, remembered as the Canyon Springs robbery, took place on September 28, 1878. The locale of the outrage was not far out of Deadwood on the rough way through Beaver Creek and Jenney Stockade into Wyoming and thence to Cheyenne. The coach, on this fateful occasion, was rumored to be carrying nearly one hundred thousand dollars in ingots from the Homestake, as well as from other works; and although shipments of such size were not altogether rare, they were sufficiently out of the ordinary to suggest the services of additional shotgun messengers. It may well have been the mere fact of the scheduling of additional guards that called the attention of the bandits to this particular manifest.