SILAS DOTY
A Reminiscence of a Notorious Character
Hillsdale, Michigan, September 6, 1890. This little city is now a typical American place of the civilized variety, with an extra dash of refinement thrown in to boot. It has model churches, model schoolhouses, a model college, a model hotel and several citizens who come, as near being models, as the wicked world around them will permit. It is practically a Michigan Yankee town, inhabited largely by New Englanders and their children.
But this quiet, moral, well-principled
borough, where good people come to educate their children, die, and be buried
with a first class funeral, was once a rough, rattling frontier town; it was
the Julesburgh, or the Deadwood, or the Roaring Camp, of the western point unto
which a railroad dared to go; it was long the terminus of what forms now the
Lake Shore and Michigan Southern. And
it was for some time a headquarters of the banditti of the West.
A large
amount of inhuman nature was to be found at that time among the forest jungles
of Michigan and Indiana. While most of
the first settlers were honest men who wished to chop and plow a quiet home out
of the hard-timbered forests, there were many whose natural villainy came
promptly to the fore when they found themselves in a region short of sheriffs
and unencumbered with court houses.
Such men soon detected each other, and became bound by close ties of the
most diabolical nature. They enlisted
themselves into an army of depredation, occupying several of what were once the
western, but are now really the middle states.
They depended upon each other; protected each other, testified falsely
for each other, and very rarely stole from each other. They kept quiet farmhouse inns, where
borrowed horses could be entertained all day in an underground stable before
taking the next night run for a more or less innocent purchaser. There is an island in Baw Beese Lake, near
here, called Bogus Island, where they conducted a small United States Mint
without the collusion of the government.
Even now picnickers sometimes find old-fashioned coins there that fail
to stand the acids. They elected each
other to many important offices, and were always ready to serve on a jury. They were a grand—or rather an
ignoble—Association of Lawlessness and Disorder. No upright pioneer farmer knew that his horses or cattle were
safe over night; no storekeeper could be sure that his whole stock of this
evening might not be invoiced tomorrow in an adjoining state.
Of course this army of robbers could not exist very long without a general, and in 1834 he came, with all the natural and acquired accomplishments for such a position. He assumed command without controversy. He was probably the most consummate and unmitigated thief that America ever produced—which is saying a great deal. In his terribly unique nature were mixed the robber instincts of a Bedouin and the ingenuity of a Yankee locksmith. He cold duplicate any key, ride any horse, swim any river, and steal any neighborhood hungry, naked
and blind in one
night. He was born of honest parents,
and left honest sons who now live in this county, respected and prosperous; but
the commandment upon which hang all the rights of property he had no use for on
any day of his life. He was a nursery
thief, a pantry thief, a schoolroom thief, an orchard thief, a shop thief, and
finally became a national and even international robber, highwayman and
murderer. He was a kind of plebian
Claude Duval, with a certain spasmodic sort of generosity in his nature, which
often looked very much like chivalry.
He never hoarded anything, and sometimes gave freely to the poor. A neighbor would visit him to borrow a plow. He would answer that he had one lent out
and would get it for him next day. That
night he would steal one from an adjoining township, and the friend would find
it in his yard next morning. He
furnished his neighbors, many of who were honest, unsophisticated people, with
all the farming utensils they needed.
They thought that a truly good and great man had arrived among them,
until it was suspected that he was robbing Peter to lend to Paul.
But this was only the knitting work of this
kleptomaniac with a clear brain and unholy heart. He soon reduced the villains of four states to almost military
discipline, and taught them to rob, steal and plunder in systematic and
thorough methods. He numbered in his
ranks all sorts of rascals, from a chicken thief to a highwayman—anyone that
would break the law in whatever manner.
He adopted it as life mission to smash the statutes, and the name of
“Old Sile Doty” became as familiar all through the western country as Jack
Sheppard’s ever did in England. His
headquarters, liked General Pope’s, were generally in the saddle, and generally
upon some valuable horse that he had kidnapped. He was always ready to steal a steed or to sell one; to crack a
store or supply one with goods filched elsewhere; to nurse a pal or kill an
enemy. Heaven or the other place had
given him a genius for getting in and out of every kind of building that the
hands of man could construct. He was as
agile as a serpent and strong as a bear.
He was cross-eyed, and saw more with each of his optics than most men do
with both of theirs. He stole none
expect the fastest horses, traveled only at night and was rarely
overtaken. When jailed he could escape
through holes that might crush any other man of his size. He was once convicted of murder, escaped from
the jail, went to the Mexican war, stole almost as much from the poor greasers
as our army “captured” from them, presented a horse which he had assimilated to
General Scott, robbed and killed everybody he could find that had money and
then came back to Indiana scot free, because of his supposed enlistment in the
army.
But the end of the rope was reached at last;
a bright-eyed detective came from the clouds and began traveling to and fro
across the country on wires. This was
something that the ingenious mind of Doty had never dreamed of; the telegraph
was a serious blow to the fleet-horse-stealing industry. In 1854, at the age of fifty-one, he was
sentenced to state prison at Jackson for seventeen years, which the judge
stated, would probably last him the remainder of his life.
Strangely enough, this king of jail-breakers, with so much ingenuity within, and so many friends without, remained quietly in prison the entire term, and gained two years by good behavior. He had outlived the judge who sentenced him, and most of the jury that pronounced him guilty. But he found opportunity to indulge his favorite passion of stealing even while in prison. He was converted several times by clergymen and others who visited him, and was always ready to be reconverted, whenever a new religious friend appeared. Once he told a minister that he would like to make him a pair of boots as a slight repayment for his religious attentions. The good man consented and Doty promptly stole enough fine leather from the
prison contractors,
and constructed the boots (for he was an expert at the trade). The first damp day that came he sent for his
clerical friend and persuaded him to wear the new boots home, which fitted like
gloves and were as easy as an old shoe.
Alas! He had not proceeded more than half his way home when the mucilage
with which the fine new foot gear had really been put together gave away in the
humid atmosphere, and our unsuspecting divine was left upon the pavements in
his stocking feet!
At the close
of the sentence, our chief of lawless clans undertook to once more find his unruly
subjects; but they were exiled, imprisoned or dead, with the exception of a
very few who had developed into staid and respectable citizens. He could not pilfer very well alone, and
tried hard to find some friend worthy of his steel, or rather of his stealing. But times were different; he found himself
single handed and alone. Such pals as
he did go into partnership with stole his share of the plunder, with more than
the usual amount of dishonor among thieves.
He was homesick, and stole a valueless gripsack just to get back to
prison again. He was now in his seventy
third year, and says in his confession, made a few days before death:
“My
reflections were not altogether pleasant at times. I felt that I would never be able to distinguish myself in the
different avenues of crime. I possessed
no other qualification—had no other occupation to fall back upon—and it seemed
as if I was left alone on a tideless and waveless sea to rot and moulder in the
winds and rains of heaven, like a vessel without sail, mast or rudder.”
Strange,
again, to say, he lived this term through, gaining once more a slight reduction
of time for good conduct, and then decided to spend one more year in thieving,
after which he would leave the business to a younger class of thieves, who were
up with the times.
He commenced
his depredations, but the great robber Death had sighted him, and ere long the
greatest thief America was ever cursed with, had been placed in his last narrow
cell.
His life is
a warning not only to children but also to parents. It was as natural for him to steal as for Edison to invent, Burns
to sing, or Spurgeons to preach. Why?
Silas Doty’s
ancestor came over on the Mayflower in 1620.
Will M. Carleton
Published in the New York Star