No Jail Can Hold Lawman Turned Outlaw

Burt Alvor Convict Constable Lawman-turned-robber proves no jail can hold him

Burt Alvord came from the right side of the tracks, but he ended up, via the rails, on the wrong side. Hired to catch robbers, he became one instead. A jailer, he broke jail twice. A lawman, he became a model of lawlessness.

A big brawling tough guy, even for gnarly Tombstone of Territorial days, Alvord was, in the lingo of the Old West, "a bad egg" or, in the words of a recent chronicler, "spawn gone wrong: lawman, train robber, fugitive."

After a spectacular rash of robberies, betrayals, confessions and two daring jailbreaks, the former deputy sheriff and constable finally found himself on the wrong end of a posse, when on February 19, 1904, he was shot twice and captured by County Sheriff Adalbert V. Lewis and a crew near Naco on the Arizona-Mexico border.

But even that didn't end the controversy that dogged the daring and dishonest Albert "Burt" Wright Alvord. He served just 19 months of a two-year sentence for attempting to rob the U.S. mail, and his early release ended up hastening the retirement of Yuma Territorial Prison Warden Jerry Millay.

The clang of the heavy cell door punctuated five years of dark deeds, saloon gossip, blaring newspaper headlines and ceaseless searches. Once a trusted law man, Alvord had in six months master minded train robberies at Cochise and Fairbank, broken jail twice in Tombstoneand led posses, sheriffs and Wells Fargo detectives into the mountains of Cochise County and Sonora, Mexico.

As biographer Don Chaput, puts it: "Burt Alvord turned bad."

Yet, he started good.

He was born Sept. 11, 1867, in Susanville, California, the sixth child of Lucinda and Charles Elbridge Alvord, whose ancestors had originally emigrated from England in the 1640s and fought in the American Revolution. After the Civil War, Alvord's family joined the Gold Rush to California, crossing the country from their home in Missouri. In the placer-rich counties in the Sierra Nevadas, Alvord's father worked as a miner, mechanic and constable, and served as a member of the Company A, Fifth Brigade during the Civil War. Eventually, C.E. Alvord moved his family to Tombstone, Arizona, where he served as justice of the peace and a miner.

His son, meanwhile, was picking up skills as a mechanic, liveryman and driver. Unfortunately, Burt also picked up on the dark side of Tombstone-cockfights, faro, hard liquor, brawls, billiards, brothels and Boot Hill.

Just a block or so from his Toughnut Street home, the young Alvord imbibed the world of the gambling tables, billiard halls, saloons such as the Crystal Palace and the Oriental. Here he would rub up against scoundrels, blackened miners, grizzly gunfighters and easy-virtue gals such as "Crazy Horse Lil," "Madam Moustache"and "Lizzette the Flying Nymph." Alvord quickly established his reputa-tion as a fighter. He was a muscular 6 feet, with attitude, and a big drinker. For character, or the lack of it, Alvord made "mean" meaner, "nasty" nastier and "ornery" as mean and nasty as tough-town Tombstone ever saw. But, as chroniclers have shown, he also used a big smile to his advantage and was a practical jokester with, as Chaput writes, "a rollicking sense of humor."

Cochise County Sheriff John Slaughter -who knew tough when he saw toughappointed Alvord deputy in January 1887. During the next decade, he served succeeding county sheriffs, including famed photographer C.S. Fly. Burt also worked as deputy constable at goldand silver-rich Pearce. In 1897, he became constable of Willcox Township.

However, working as a lawman wasn't making Alvord rich. He had heard short tales and tall tales of railroad robbers and knew the terrain intimately. So he devised his first, best robbery for the evening of September 9, 1899, hoping to snatch the Pearce mining payroll. At midnight, as he established his alibi by drinking and playing cards in Josef Schwertner's Saloon in Willcox, three accomplices stopped the Southern Pacific train at Cochise, a remote station about 10 miles southwest of Willcox.

His cohorts, Matt Burts, Billy Stiles and Bill Downing, were equally character-challenged-cowboys and even deputiesAlvord had recruited from Pearce and Tombstone. The robbery was quick and to plan: Burts covered the engineer and fireman, Stiles held the mail clerk and the Wells Fargo agent, and Downing, a rancher, minded the horses and held people on the platform.

'He had... a reputation for being a bad man.'

When the Wells Fargo safe exploded, it yielded about $2,500 in cash and jewelry. The culprits either walked or rode away into the early morning darkness to the Alvord home in Willcox, where they cached their stash in the chicken house. They may also have left some money at Alvord's ranch in Pearce.

In Willcox, Alvord acted surprised by the news. He dropped his cards and whiskey, gathered 30 men, rode out to the site and divvied up the citizenry, including two of the perpetrators who had joined the posse. Stiles went north, Downing went south and Alvord led Sheriff Scott White into the Chiricahuas.

Not surprisingly, Alvord couldn't seem to find the bad guys.

Five months later, on February 15, 1900, the Alvord group tried the same trick at the Fairbank depot, about 45 miles southwest of Willcox. Alvord gathered a motley gang of ne'er-do-wells, since Downing had opted out and Burts had fled the Territory. Alvord's mixed bag of desperados included horse thief "Three-Fingered Jack" Dunlap; Texans George and Lewis Owens; the infamous "Bravo Juan" Thomas Yoas; and Bob Brown, who had heard of the Cochise robbery through Tom Burts, brother of glib Matt. Once again, Alvord would establish his alibi, this time guzzling in a Benson saloon.

The New Mexico & Arizona Railroad train pulled in on schedule at dusk, with universally feared Wells Fargo express The messenger and former Texas Ranger Jeff Milton sitting, unexpectedly, in the baggage car. Lewis Owens and Bob Brown held the engineer and fireman at rifle point. Three-Fingered Jack warned the unflappable Milton to exit. When he refused, the outlaws opened fire, shattering Milton's arm. Milton returned fire with his shotgun, hitting Bravo Juan in the buttocks and Dunlap in the stomach and groin. Then the wounded messenger slammed the baggage door, tossed the keys into a corner and took cover.

Unable to find the keys, the bandits rode off with little more than $42, Bravo Juan having been wounded in more than his felonious pride. The outlaws abandoned the wounded Dunlap in the desert, and he later died in Tombstone. Before expiring, Dunlap fingered his confederates, including Stiles and Alvord. The Owens brothers and Bob Brown were apprehended; Bravo Juan was captured in Mexico. Burts was also apprehended and readily ratted out his partners.

Downing and Alvord were caught in mid-February by Wells Fargo detective J.N. Thacker, with an assist by Sheriff Scott White and his posse. Stiles won his release by confessing the details of both robberies, which he blamed on Alvord. However, Stiles broke Alvord out of the Tombstone jail less than two months later-"dastardly work," reported The Tombstone Epitaph on April 8. The jailbreakers hightailed south to Mexico.

Two and a half years later, Alvord, tired of running, surrendered to Sheriff Lewis in early September 1902, after making a deal to deliver the infamous outlaw Augustine "El Peludo" Chacon to former Arizona Ranger Captain and now U.S. Deputy Marshal Burt Mossman. (Chacon hanged Nov. 21, 1902, in Solomonville.) Once again, to the embarrassment of Sheriff Lewis, Stiles broke Alvord out of the Tombstone jail in 1903 and, they escaped to Mexico through the Huachuca Mountains. But Alvord again surrendered two months later, although Stiles and a Mexican with him escaped. In the melee, Alvord was wounded twice, in the ankle and the thigh, and was in considerable pain.

The elusive Stiles escaped cleanly, was cornered again and escaped again. One epilogue has it that he ended up as a lawman in Nevada.

Burt Alvord left the Yuma Territorial Prison three weeks earlier than his scheduled October 26, 1905, release. A federal warrant for Alvord's arrest was to be served at his full-sentence release. Millay, who had differently, although innocently, gauged Alvord's release date, ensured that this did not happen, providing Alvord opportunity to trek to Los Angeles to stay with his sister, May Shoults. Further adding to the confusion, Millay also had not informed other law enforcement officials about the early release, including the U.S. marshal with the warrant. When Los Angeles detectives finally arrived at his sister's home with the necessary extradition papers, Alvord was gone. Millay came under sharp criticism for the mix-up and later apologized for whatever hand he might have had in Alvord's evasion of justice.

Historian Harold L. Edwards has recently written about how the Alvord story ended. In Los Angeles, family friend H.M. DuBois helped Burt Alvord get work on the Panama Canal. There he became Tom Wright (his middle name). With foreman George Wilson, Alvord then moved on to build a railroad along the Amazon River in Brazil, where both men contracted malaria or yellow fever. For recuperation, they were relocated to Bridgetown, British Barbados, but Alvord succumbed and was buried there on November 25, 1909.

The railroad, this time in the tropics, had delivered Burt Alvord, the liveryman, lawman and outlaw-whose epitaph might have quipped that here rested a man who wasn't that good at being bad-to his last stop. Al