He had stolen a gun and held up a farmhand for $3 just five minutes before he stopped the stage. Scott, who had vamoosed from a Folsom Prison work gang on August 22. Within a few days after the robbery, Undersheriff David Reese and Deputy Sheriff Charles Schwilk had identified the escaped convict as William A. One of them colorfully stated that it was “an antiquated Remington, dated 1858, with a barrel eight-inches long and loads with powder, ball and cap, instead of using the modern cartridge.” In his 1937 interview, Bryan added, “We never heard of the bad man again, but he left the gun behind, and it turned out to be an old powder-and-ball pistol that an escaped convict had stolen from a Chinese at Mormon Island.” Two different September 4, 1902, newspaper articles agreed in their description of the robbery weapon. Left behind were the $50 that Isham had in his pocket and the $160 in gold coins that Bryan had hidden inside the coach. The pistol was left in Isham’s hand when the highwayman fled.” The weapon, the article noted, “was out of order and would not work after the first discharge.” The robber got away, but he had only taken $16 from Fisher and $4.50 from Bryan before Isham overpowered him.
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He was up in a second, and got three more blows from the butt of the revolver before he escaped into the brush.”Īnother newspaper article added: “The robber’s pistol was kept at full cock all the time before it went off. The thug, who was big and strong, dodged, but caught the blow on the shoulder, and went down under it. Isham’s hand, but he wrenched the weapon from the highwayman and swung it for his head. The revolver was discharged, the powder burning Mr. He grabbed the barrel of the gun with his left hand and swung his right against the mask, which he tore from the head of the robber. Isham was next to the last man in line, and as the robber finished with the man next to him, he shifted the revolver from his left to his right hand. I mean business.” A 1902 newspaper account described what happened next: “The highwayman bundled the passengers out of the stage, lined them up with their hands in the air, and beginning at the head of the line, made a systematic search of the pockets of some of them, standing behind their backs as he did so, and shifting his big revolver from one hand to the other as occasion required. Henry Isham of Courtland and a stranger who was never identified.Ī 1937 newspaper article quotes Bryan as remembering that the bandit shouted: “Get out of there and do as I tell you and nobody’ll get hurt. There were three other passengers on the stage, Mr. The driver, Ed Bryan, was eating a sandwich, and he had just turned the reins over to passenger Joseph Fisher. The strange saga began to unfold on Wednesday evening, September 3, 1902, when the stage from Sacramento to Walnut Grove was stopped four miles north of Courtland at about 8 o’clock by a lone masked robber wielding an old long-barreled revolver. And the story of the bungled robbery illustrates the high reputation that the Remington six-shooters had with good guys and badmen alike, even in the sunset years of the shoot-’em-up era. Although not one of those blood-and-thunder incidents that attract frontpage attention, this early 20th-century holdup did grab headlines throughout the state because of the holdup man’s weapon-an obsolete Civil War period Remington cap-and-ball Army Model revolver more than three decades past its prime. Compared to other infamous stagecoach holdups of the Wild West, the robbery of a southbound stage near Sacramento, California, in 1902 was rather tame.