A History of the Old Outlaws of California : Bad Guys Are a Good Draw at Exhibit

Californians hate crime, but they love outlaws.

Old outlaws. Dead outlaws.

About 200,000 visitors have come since last March to ooh and aah and muse and chuckle over California badmen, notorious and obscure, whose deeds are on display in the State Museum in the Capitol building.

There’s Black Bart, the poetic stage coach robber. There’s the legendary Joaquin Murrieta, the Mexican Robin Hood. There’s Willian Miner, the Grey Fox, also called the Gentleman Bandit and the subject of a recent movie. And there’s long-forgotten Walter Hitchcock, wanted for murder and described on a poster as shifty-eyed with a prominent, pointed nose “very red, apparently from excessive drinking.”

Popular Exhibit

The exhibit, “The Outlaws of California, 1853-1925,” has been rivaled in popularity at the museum only by a former display portraying the calamitous San Francisco earthquake of 1906, according to exhibits technician Paula S. Jow. After the outlaws exhibit closes next Tuesday, the display material will be available for public viewing at the California State Archives, a block from the Capitol.

For the last seven months, ordinary, law-abiding folks from all walks of life have come to the State Museum to gaze at the modest exhibit, their fingers streaking the glass of the five display cases as they ponder prison ledgers, mug shots, letters and photographs, appeals for parole denied and granted.

“It’s fascinating,” said Vivian Gulley a retirement home worker from Hemet.

“What did they do?” she asked as she peered at a page from the San Quentin prison ledger dated 1883. “The crimes are just the basic crimes, murder, robbery. . . . There’s no drugs on here. . . . They’re not like the real terrible crimes we have today. There’s no hurting children.”

‘Black Bart the Po 8’

At the top of the ledger that Gulley was examining was the name C. E. Bolton, with the notation “Alias Black Bart the Po 8.”

That was the way Bolton signed the verses he sometimes left at the scenes of his 27 successful stagecoach holdups. A photograph of the gray-haired, distinguished-looking bandit is displayed next to the prison ledger which notes that Bolton served five years of a six-year sentence.

“He was a pretty good robber,” said Charles Aney, a construction worker from Sacramento who visited the museum.

Beneath the notorious Black Bart on the prison ledger are the names of other convicts, none of them ever well known and now all forgotten.

On the same day Black Bart entered San Quentin on Nov. 21, 1893, a Chinese cook with the melancholy name Ah Sam was imprisoned to begin a year’s sentence for grand larceny.

What Became of Him?

Ah Sam, what did he steal? What became of him?

And on the same page, on Nov. 29, it is noted that Ella Amador, a brown-eyed, 24-year-old seamstress from Los Angeles began a five-year sentence for a “felony.”

What did Ella Amador do, mused Gulley. What felony cost her five years at San Quentin?

At an adjacent exhibit case, John Salinas, an automobile detailer from Fresno, pondered a display dealing with Joaquin Murrieta, who, as legend has it, began robbing the rich and helping the poor in the 1850s after suffering discrimination and violent mistreatment by whites in the California gold fields.

“He was sort of a folk hero to the Mexican race,” said Salinas. “The struggle that a man went through back then . . . might be like what a Mexican-American goes through today--prejudice, our legal rights.”

1853 Petition

The Murrieta display case contains an 1853 petition from Mariposa County residents to then-Gov. John Bigler, complaining that “our county is now being ravaged by a bunch of robbers under the command of the daring bandit Joaquin or some equally desperate outlaw.”

The leader of a band of California Rangers subsequently claimed to have killed Murrieta and collected a reward. A human head--alleged that of the bandit--was put on public display.

Bette Rudick, retired realtor from Los Angeles, looked at a display case showing that writer Jack London had helped a prisoner named Joe King gain parole in 1915 by offering him a job at his ranch in the Valley of the Moon.

“I think that’s great,” said Rudick, “if they’ve done their time and they can come back into society. (But) today, I don’t know. It’s completely different. Crime is a little different.

“We don’t live as they did then,” she added. “We live with bolted, locked doors, security systems, guards. I hate it.”