"Throw down the box!"
That was the warning every stagecoach driver dreaded. Sometimes there was a gun fight, but only on rare occasions. The highwayman had all the initial advantage. They could ambush a stage at a sharp turn or in a lonely canyon, snatch the treasure, and disappear like ghosts into the mountains. Not until the Wells Fargo detective force began bringing bandit after bandit to justice did the mounted robbers begin to fear the law.
Here Ralph Moody gives a rousing but authentic history of the Wells Fargo company, from its early beginnings in the East and its arrival in California in 1852 to its present position as one of the greatest banking institutions on the Pacific Coast.
Here are vivid portraits of the three most notorious highwaymen Wells Fargo has to fight:
Rattlesnake Dick, young, handsome and courteous, whose first big strike netted him eighty thousand dollars.
Tom Bell, "Terror of the Mother Lode," a redheaded giant and bully with a fine medical education, who loved violence for its own sake, and finally dangled from the end of a rope.
And finally Black Bart, "the Phantom Highwayman," whose bright blue eyes shone through the slits in the flour sack over his head -- gentle, elderly, kindly Bart, who never harmed a soul, and often wrote amusing verse to "identify" the mysterious perpetrator of some twenty-eight stagecoach holdups.
But brilliant Wells Fargo detectives such as Jim Hume proved to all these highwaymen that, even in the West, "Crime Does Not Pay"!
—from the dust jacket
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