Skullduggery, Secrets, and Murders: The 1894 Wells Fargo Scam That Backfired

by Bill Neal, Gordon Morris Bakken (Foreword by)

Overview

In 1894, George Isaacs, the penniless black sheep of his family, was running with the worst of the outlaws in the Oklahoma Territory. There, a get-rich-quick scheme that seemed foolproof was hatched up. The plan was for George to present money packets falsely purporting to contain $25,000 in cash to the Wells Fargo office in Kansas City. Wells Fargo was to ship the packets via the Santa Fe railroad to George at Canadian, Texas, where George’s cronies would then rob the depot office and steal the phony money packets, thus allowing George Isaacs to sue Wells Fargo for his lost fortune. The plan backfired when the sheriff was on hand when the train arrived. The bandits killed the sheriff but then panicked and raced back to the Territory without grabbing the bogus packets.
        Wells Fargo sent an undercover agent to investigate, but the outlaws discovered him, and the agent was assassinated. The two murders led to eight trials, but only one man, George Isaacs, was ever convicted—and even he managed to beat a life sentence. One question lingered: was George truly behind the scam?
        The identities of the masterminds behind the foiled plot have remained a mystery for more than a hundred years. With his usual rough-and-tumble tenacity, Bill Neal undertakes the investigation of these two cold-case murders.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780896729179
Publisher:	Texas Tech University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2015
Series:	American Liberty and Justice
Edition description:	1
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

As a practicing criminal lawyer, Bill Neal spent more than four decades frequenting county courthouses in West Texas and hearing tales of sensational crimes and celebrated trials of bygone years. Shortly before his retirement from active law practice, Neal decided to resurrect these old tales of frontier justice—and injustice—through research in the basements and backshops of courthouses and country weeklies, family histories, and interviews with oldtimers. His multiple award-winning books are the results of his efforts. He lives in Abilene, Texas, with his wife, Gayla.

Table of Contents

Illustrations xi

Foreword xiii

Preface xv

Acknowledgments xviii

Prologue 3

1 Midnight at Woodward 5

2 The $25,000 Wells Fargo Money Packets 10

3 An Unlikely Aggregation of Heroes, Villains, and Spectators 14

4 Shootout at the Canadian Depot 21

5 Struggling to Hide Those Money Packets 27

6 The Isaacs Brothers 30

7 George Isaacs Decides to "Do the Right Thing"-Sort Of 33

8 The Murder of a Wells Fargo Undercover Agent 40

9 Lizzie Isaacs Upstages Husband George with a Murder of Her Own 52

10 The Murder Trial of George Isaacs: "Jim Stanley Was There" 54

11 Getting Rich on Thirty-Dollars-a-Month Cowboy Wages 67

12 Jailbreak! 78

13 The Trial of Jim Harbolt: Turning Gold into Dross 89

14 The Trial of Joe Blake: The Jailhouse Letters 94

15 The Fred Hoffman Murder Trial: Temple Houston's Magic 105

16 Pardon Me, Please! 117

17 Here Comes Lizzie Again 132

18 Fitting the Pieces Together 134

19 Striving for Respectability 154

Epilogue: Sunset on the Trail 159

Appendix 163

Notes 175

Bibliography 197

Index 207

Editorial Reviews

Skullduggery, Secrets, and Murders is another splendid analysis of a crime gone wrong. Bill Neal does what crime historians too often fail to do: follow the crime and the criminals to historical conclusions. He makes clear that the insurance fraud scheme was legally flawed and the criminal too uniformed to know the scheme could not work. Nonetheless, a man was dead, and law enforcement went to work. Unfortunately, only one of the guilty paid with incarceration. Yet a guilty verdict did not end the tale, and Neal follows each and every one of the parties to the grave regardless.
—Gordon Morris Bakken, from the foreword

Skullduggery, Secrets, and Murder is crammed with lethal shootouts, audacious swindles, violent retribution, and compelling courtroom drama. This saga of the waning frontier is skillfully crafted by Bill Neal, a veteran attorney who has no peer at describing the animated tactics of flamboyant frontier lawyers. Don't miss this one! —Bill O’Neal, State Historian of Texas
 
Bill Neal’s work on the 1894 attempt to defraud the Wells Fargo in frontier Oklahoma and Texas is an interesting piece of history, told with wit, frontier jargon and color, and a sense of irony. Neal tells us a great deal about the labyrinthine, colorful, and often bizarre developments that surrounded a rather “two-bit” scheme that went wrong, but somehow eluded a satisfactory outcome at various legal proceedings in the latter part of the 1890s.
—Paul R. Spitzzeri, Assistant Director, Homestead Museum, City of Industry, California

The 1890s criminal system was not a sophisticated legal machine.  From beginning to end, the goal seemed to be geared toward assuring an anxious public it was capable of making someone responsible for the crime committed. Add a bevy of egotistical law enforcement officers competing for fame and fortune, a hint of stupidity by everyone involved on both sides of the crime, and you have the ingredients for a mystery few will attempt to resolve.  Fortunately, Bill Neal has the exact combination of investigative and legal skills to put such an enigma to rest and he does so brilliantly.
—Mike Tower, author of The Outlaw Statesman: The Life and Times of Fred Tecumseh Waite

From the Publisher