Legends of the Lost

The sound of the safe exploding shattered the night si-lence. The dynamite charge created a thunderous boom that reverberated for miles across the huge alkalai flat called Willcox Playa, setting off a frightening howl of coyotes. It was Saturday, September 9, 1899, and Arizona's last successful train robbery was under way.

Four days later, the Arizona Range News, speculating on who held up the Southern Pacific Express at Cochise, 11 miles southwest of Willcox, noted that probable suspects in-cluded "haymakers, cowboys from Willcox, McGinnis and a partner of the Folsom gang, and other mysterious strangers."

But Cochise County residents were shocked when the truth was revealed. Not only were none of the four men involved in the heist strangers in Willcox, but one of them, Burt Alvord, was constable there at the time, and another, Bill Downing, held the same job in Pearce, a nearby mining town. (See Arizona Highways, October '92) Alvord and Downing helped set up the robbery, but it was the other two, longtime outlaw Billy Stiles and cow-puncher Matt Burts, who boarded the train at Cochise bran-dishing six-guns. Working quickly, the masked men uncoupled the express car and engine from the passenger cars and directed the engineer to steam ahead a half-mile to a thicket of mesquite trees.

There the robbers rigged the safe with dynamite and blew it up. According to an account in the Tucson Citizen in 1923, the explosion littered the ground with bags of money and boxes of jewels.

"The money and jewels were placed in gunnysacks [after which] the robbers spurred their horses and dashed into the mesquite," the Citizen reported.

When word of the robbery reached him, Constable Alvord quickly assembled a posse and set out in pursuit of the culprits. Given his complicity in the deed, the search was predestined to fail. Alvord inspected the area of the heist, declared he'd discov-ered the robbers' trail, and led his posse onto Willcox Playa, exactly the wrong direction. Just how much money the robbers made off with is a matter of considerable debate.

MONEY, JEWELS FROM A TRAIN HEIST LOST NEAR WILLCOX

Most accounts agree that the train, at least early in its run that night, carried the payroll for the mine workers in Pearce, an amount estimated at up to $75,000. But some re-ports say rumors of an impending holdup reached the Southern Pacific, and the money was removed from the train at Willcox and hauled to Pearce by buckboard, leaving only $2,000 to $3,000 in the safe.

Although that theory gained some credence, word-of-mouth reports have long contended the take was indeed huge, and that part of it lies buried near Willcox waiting to be found.

But those tales took time to spread. In the days following the robbery, area residents tried to figure out who did it, while the four thieves were concerned with the doggedness of the Wells Fargo detectives looking for them.

First to be captured was Billy Stiles. Suspecting that he knew more than he was letting on, the detectives eventually extracted a confession and an agreement to testify against the others.

Burts had quit the territory, fleeing to the state of Washington. But he was found, arrested, and held for trial. Alvord was arrested in Willcox February 21, 1900, and Bill Downing was picked up about the same time in Pearce. The two were taken to jail in Tombstone.

Details of the heist, based on Stiles' testimony, were published in the Tombstone Prospector. Stiles said he and his co-horts had plotted the train robbery for two months. Downing's role was to supply the horses and Alvord's, to provide the powder and fuse to blow the safe, which he did by breaking into the Soto Bros. Mercantile in Willcox days before the holdup.

Stiles and Burts, who also testified for the prosecution, contended that immediately after the robbery, the loot was taken to Alvord's house and later transferred to Downing's Willcox ranch where it was hidden in a haystack.

Railroad employee Charles Adair, who was on the train the night of the heist, testified that the take was about $3,000: $1,700 of it in cash, $300 in Mexican pesos, and the balance in jewelry, mostly watches. Adair said $344 in Mexican money was left behind.

Three of the four robbers were eventually convicted. Burts and Downing were sentenced to serve time at the Yuma Territorial Prison, but Burts was pardoned after five months by Governor Nathan O. Murphy. Downing served about seven years.

Alvord, who had broken out of the Tombstone jail, with Stiles' help, fled to Mexico where he stayed on the run for several years before being picked up by the law again. He eventually paid for his part in the train rob-bery with 18 months in the Yuma prison, getting out October 9, 1905. On July 22, 1910, The Arizona Daily Star reported that "Alvord, a notorious outlaw died of fever three months ago in Barbados, West Indies."

Because of his testimony, Stiles was never tried for the crime. Some reports state he was shot dead years later in Sparks, Nevada, while working as a sheriff under the name William Larkin. But no one is certain if that story is true.

Despite the persistence of local legend about a buried cache of train loot, Mark Simmons, a Willcox businessman who has researched the case, doesn't believe the tales.

But many others have doubted the paltry $3,000 figure given by the Southern Pacific's Adair. Among them were Arizona Ranger William Speed and W.L. Tay Cook, a Willcox resident and former speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives whom Simmons interviewed before the politician's death.

"Just about the whole town, not just Speed and Cook, believed there was a lot more than $3,000 taken," says Simmons. "That's because it was a payroll train, and the mine at Pearce was still going great guns."

One of the stories Cook told Simmons was that Downing, after his release from prison, would pace up and down along the fence next to his ranch house, looking for the post near which he buried his cut of the loot.

No one knows if Downing ever found his stash, or whether someone else retrieved it while he was in prison. But Downing's persistence in keeping to his search convinced many in town the loot was still there.

An intriguing aside to the legend of the train robbery emerged in a 1988 story in the Tucson Citizen that quoted B.A. Gardner, a lifelong Willcox resident, now deceased: "I'll tell you something else about Downing that nobody else around here knows. Downing would take his cash from the saloon and whorehouse [the Free and Easy, which he owned in Willcox] and convert it into gold coins every day early in the morning."

But in 1908, after Ranger Speed shot and killed Downing while trying to arrest him for assaulting a saloon girl, only $212.55 was taken from the body. This caused Gardner to wonder what happened to Downing's cache of gold coins. "There's a pile of loot," Gardner told the Citizen, "buried someplace."

As in most tales of vanished fortunes, though, it's the location of the money that gets lost in the telling."