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On July 26, 1865, the
coach set out once again. Around midday, it reached the stream near
the place that the three
outlaws were hidden in the brush. Slowing down to cross the
water, the coach traveled through, went up the bank, and suddenly stopped. There, across the road were the boulders the bandits had placed to stop
the coach. Suddenly, the
outlaws appeared from their hiding places with guns raised.
From the coach, one of
the passengers, a professional gambler named Sam Martin, poked his head
out of the side door with a revolver in his hand. Aiming at Whittmore, he pulled the trigger and shot off Whittmore’s left index
finger.
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Stage robbery. |
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Enraged, Whittmore shouted, “It’s a trap!” and began to
empty his rifle into the side of the stagecoach. In a desperate
attempt to escape, Charlie Parks tried to break through the brush but Brockie Jack shot both of the lead horses and the stage stopped dead in
its tracks.
Hit by some of the
buckshot, the injured Parks scrambled down from the coach and made a mad
dash towards the woods. In the meantime, Fred Williams, the
outlaw
accomplice, and James B. Brown, a Virginia City saloon-keeper, were also
able to escape into the nearby timbers.
Finally, Brockie Jack
grabbed the rifle out of Whittmore’s hands and the sounds of gunfire
ceased. Cautiously, Jack approached the stagecoach while Whittmore
and Updyke
covered him. “Come out of there with your hands up,” he called, but
was met only by silence. He then opened the door of the stage and
shouted, “My God, they’re all dead.”
Inside were the five
broken bodies of Sam Martin, the professional gambler who had shot
Whittmore; Mr. and Mrs. Andy Ditmar, a Mormon couple who had been visiting
relatives in
Bannock,
Montana; Jess Harper, an ex-Confederate soldier who was on his way to
visit his parents in
Sacramento,
California;
and a man named L. F. Carpenter, who was headed for San Francisco to catch
a steamship to New Orleans. All were dead except Carpenter, who was
injured and feigned his death in order to survive.
As the bandits began to
loot the stagecoach and its dead passengers, accomplice Fred Williams
staggered from the woods with a shattered arm from one of Whittmore’s
deadly bullets. The three other
outlaws barely noticed as they were too busy with their frenzied
plundering.
Whittmore and Brockie
Jack soon hauled the two heavy strongboxes from the stage and cracked the
large iron locks with an ax. Inside were 15 heavy gold bars and two
large pouches filled with gold dust and nuggets. Two more pounds of gold
dust and nuggets were found in the passenger compartment. Pleased
with their stolen cache, the four
outlaws packed up and rode out of the canyon. |
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 After they were out of
sight, Charlie Parks, the stage driver, and James B. Brown, the Virginia City saloon-keeper, cautiously emerged from the timbers. Brown
pulled the still breathing Carpenter from beneath the dead bodies and made
him and the injured
Parks as comfortable as possible inside the coach. He then cut the stage loose from the two dead horses and drove it to
Miller Ranch Station.
As the survivors told
their story,
Parks recognized Brockie Jack and
David Updyke,
while James Brown positively identified Fred Williams and Willy Whittmore. The insurance company, in an attempt to reclaim its $86,000 loss,
immediately offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the
recovery of the gold and the capture of the robbers. In the
meantime, the ever active vigilance committee issued orders to hang the
criminals once they were captured.
Willy Whittmore, the
hot-tempered gunman who had killed all the passengers, was the first to be
caught. While on a drinking binge in Arizona, he resisted arrest
when lawmen tried to take him in and was subsequently shot. Just a
week later, Fred Williams, was captured in Colorado and hanged by the
local vigilance committee. Both men were nearly penniless when they were
killed.
David Updyke
was a different story. Having been duly elected as Ada County
Sheriff in March, 1865, the
vigilantes were more cautious and waited until
the opportune time to punish him for his suspected wrongdoings. On
September 28, 1865, the Payette River Vigilance Committee arrested him on
a charge of defrauding the revenue and failing to arrest a hard case
outlaw
named West Jenkins.
However,
Updyke
made bail and knowing the reputation of the Vigilance Committee, he
immediately left town, fleeing to Boise City where he had more influence. However, the citizens there too, were fed up with the criminal elements
and began to form groups for the purpose cleaning up the county. By the
next spring,
Updyke feared for his own safety and accompanied by another
outlaw
by the name of John Dixon, the two departed Boise on the Rocky Bar Road on
April 12, 1866. Unaware that a
vigilante party was following them,
the two overnighted at an abandoned cabin some thirty miles out of town.
During the night, the
vigilantes captured the unsuspecting pair and lead them some ten miles
farther down the road to Sirup Creek. The next morning as the
vigilantes prepared to hang the men, they questioned
Updyke
about the whereabouts of the stolen cache. The crooked sheriff only
glared at them in contempt, refusing to respond. The
vigilantes
then hanged both men under a shed between two vacant cabins.
Updyke
had only $50.00 on his person at the time of his death.
On April 14th, the bodies
were found with a note pinned to
Updyke's
chest accusing him of being “an aider of murderers and thieves.” The
next day an anonymous note appeared in Boise that further explained the
committee’s actions. “Dave
Updyke: Accessory after the fact to the Portneuf stage robbery,
accessory and accomplice to the robbery of the stage near Boise City in
1864, chief conspirator in burning property on the overland stage line,
guilty of aiding and assisting escape of West Jenkins, and the murderer of
others while sheriff, and threatening the lives and property of an already
outraged and long suffering community.”
As to the last
outlaw
-- Brockie Jack, he seemingly disappeared into oblivion.
There is no record of the
gold bars as having ever been sold. This, coupled with the weight of
the bars and the destitute state of the three men killed, has led to much
speculation that the gold was buried somewhere near the site of the
robbery. The gold, valued at $86,000 at the time of the theft, would
now be worth about $1.6 million. The robbery site was in the canyons
around the Portneuf River a few miles south of present-day Pocatello,
Idaho.
©
Kathy Weiser/Legends
of America, updated August, 2009.
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