In September 1899, Constable Burt Alvord led a posse out of Willcox, Arizona, in pursuit of train robbers. Posses were common enough in the Old West, especially in Arizona, where train holdups had become such a problem that the territory had made the crime punishable by death. What made this particular chase remarkable was that the men Alvord had deputized were the very same men who had just robbed the train. In fact, Alvord himself had planned the entire heist, a scheme so bold that historian Marshall Trimble later described it as one of the most bizarre train robberies in the history of the American West.
Albert W. Alvord was born on September 11, 1867, near Susanville, California. His father, Charles, had come west from New York like so many others chasing fortune, moving the family from one boomtown to the next before settling in Tombstone around 1880. Young Burt even worked sweeping horse stalls at the OK Corral.
Formal education never meant much to him; the streets were his classroom. By the time he was nineteen, he was already serving as a deputy under Cochise County Sheriff John Slaughter. Slaughter was a former Texas Ranger turned prominent Arizona cattleman. Small in stature but quick with a gun and utterly fearless, he had several killings to his name by the time he was elected sheriff in November 1886.
Over the next four years, he ran the rustlers out of the county with a cold efficiency still talked about today. He and Alvord made a solid team, employing a distinctive method of dealing with outlaws: they would track their quarry, wait for them to fall asleep, then creep into camp and wake them at gunpoint. Usually the tactic went smoothly, but on June 7, 1888, the bandits sprang from their bedrolls firing. Alvord and Slaughter managed to kill two outlaws and wound a third, and Alvord proved he could handle himself in a fight.
His problem was drink. By the late 1880s, Alvord was spending more time at the bar than chasing criminals, and he had begun making friends with the very men he was supposed to apprehend. When Slaughter told him to straighten up, Alvord chose to hand in his badge instead. He worked on nearby ranches, married a young woman named Dolores Ochoa, and settled in the town of Pearce.
For a time it looked as if he might settle down. He even returned to law enforcement as a deputy under Constable George Bravin, though he was cut loose after just a few months. Less than a year later, he was elected constable in Willcox. Willcox was a shipping hub for cattle, full of cowboys, drifters, gamblers, saloons, and brothels, a town arguably as wild as Tombstone.
It was there that Alvord allegedly killed at least two men. One was a man who locked him in a basement as a practical joke; Alvord reportedly shot him dead the moment he got out. The second was a Hispanic man who made the mistake of bad-mouthing the United States. Both killings remain uncorroborated, but by January 1899 Alvord had added the duties of deputy under Cochise County Sheriff Scott White to his constable badge.
He also deputized several personal friends, including Matt Burts, Bill Downing, and Billy Styles. With these friends, Alvord put his plan into motion. It was simple in theory. Alvord and some of the men would sit in the back room of a Willcox saloon playing poker.
When the train arrived, two of them would slip out a back window, ride eleven miles southwest to Cochise Station, and hold up the train when it pulled in. Meanwhile, Alvord had bribed a saloon employee to bring fresh rounds of drinks, emerging with trays of empty glasses to give the illusion that the poker game was in full swing. Billy Styles and Matt Burts carried out the robbery without a hitch, stashed the loot, raced back to Willcox, climbed back through the window, and resumed their card game as if nothing had happened. Alvord then organized a posse made up of the very men who had committed the robbery, and they rode out in pursuit.
Unsurprisingly, they failed to find themselves, returning to town the next morning claiming they had lost the trail. It seemed they had gotten away with it. But easy money is never enough. Five months later, the gang decided to take down another train at the little station of Fairbank.
This time, things went wrong. Alvord and Styles stayed behind while five others did the work, including the notorious Three-Fingered Jack Dunlop. The bandits lounged around the station pretending to be drunken cowboys when they spotted a Wells Fargo express agent named Jeff Milton. Milton had earned a fearsome reputation, a veteran of the Texas Rangers who had worked as a deputy U.
S. Marshal in New Mexico, a deputy sheriff in Arizona, and chief of police of El Paso. Dunlop and his men considered calling off the robbery at the sight of him, but Milton appeared unarmed, and they decided to take their chances. Without warning, they opened fire, striking Milton in the left arm and severing an artery.
Wounded, Milton still grabbed a ten-gauge shotgun from inside the car, tossed the keys to the strongbox into a corner where no one could find them, and dropped behind a trunk to conceal himself. Thinking he was dead, the bandits rushed the open door. As they drew near, Milton rose and fired both barrels. Three-Fingered Jack was in the lead and caught a load of buckshot in the belly.
Another bandit caught a load in the seat of his pants, a poor place to be shot when one planned to escape on horseback. The remaining outlaws fled empty-handed. Three-Fingered Jack only made it a few miles before his comrades abandoned him to die on the trail. Resentful, he told the pursuing posse everything, including that Burt Alvord was the ringleader.
Alvord and the others were rounded up and jailed in Tombstone. To make matters worse, Billy Styles turned snitch and agreed to testify in exchange for freedom, but it was a ruse. Styles stayed in town living large until the day of the trial, when he walked to the jail with a pistol and demanded the guard release Alvord. The guard was George Bravin, the same man who had cut Alvord loose in Pearce.
Bravin refused, and Styles shot him in the foot, taking off two toes. Styles then grabbed the keys and opened Alvord’s cell. About a week later, the sheriff received an envelope with the keys and a message from Alvord: “Tell the boys we are all well and eating regular. ”
Alvord and Styles spent the next couple of years roaming back and forth across the Mexican border, spotted openly at Alvord’s old ranch and playing cards at the Sonora Club.
Meanwhile, the newly formed Arizona Rangers were hunting a Mexican bandit named Augustine Chacon, reputed to have killed more than thirty men. Chacon lived in Sonora but raided across Arizona before retreating to his fortified ranch. In 1896 he was captured and sentenced to hang for killing a deputy sheriff. Fate intervened: Chacon shared a cell with a full mariachi band.
Each night, as he sawed through the bars with a file smuggled in by a señorita, the band played loudly enough to cover the noise. On the night of the jailbreak, the señorita lured the guard outside for a midnight stroll, and Chacon slipped through the severed bars to freedom. The Rangers wanted him badly. Their captain, Burt Mossman, knew Alvord and Styles were looking to come home, especially Alvord, whose wife had threatened divorce.
Mossman offered an olive branch: help capture Chacon, and he would put them on the Ranger payroll and seek clemency. They agreed. The plan was to lure Chacon across the border with a scheme to steal thoroughbreds from a ranch in the San Rafael Valley. Styles would act as messenger, and Alvord would cozy up to Chacon and deliver him to Mossman.
Over more than three months, Alvord managed to track Chacon down, even traveling with him to the Yaqui River. He sent word for Mossman to meet them at a spring sixty miles south of the border. Chacon had no idea Mossman was a Ranger, but he remained on edge, heavily armed and refusing to lower his guard. On the morning of September 4, 1902, Alvord slipped over to Mossman, told him his part was done, and left, oddly warning Mossman not to trust Billy Styles.
He then told Chacon he was going for water and would return shortly. While the three men were eating, Chacon grew suspicious of Alvord’s absence. After breakfast, Chacon offered corn husk cigarettes to Styles and Mossman. As they sat smoking around the fire, Mossman let his cigarette go out, reached into the fire, picked up a burning stick, and re-lit his cigarette.
As he tossed the stick back, his hand slid past his holster. Quick as a flash, he drew his revolver and got the drop on the surprised bandit. Chacon was taken, and this time there would be no escape. Alvord turned himself in at Tombstone a few days later, but things did not go as he had hoped.
He was moved between jails for months until July 1903, when a grand jury indicted him on six counts of tampering with the U. S. mail. Notably, he was not indicted for train robbery, a crime punishable by death in Arizona.
No one had ever been executed under that law, and juries were reluctant to hang a man for robbing a corporate safe, especially when no one had been killed. The mail tampering charge was the safer path for prosecutors. Alvord was convicted and sentenced to two years at Yuma Territorial Prison. Nine days later, he and Styles, who had also turned himself in, loosened a bar in their cell, dug through an adobe wall, and escaped back into Mexico.
In January 1904, they robbed a large amount of gold from a mine in Sonora. Legend has it they even tried to fake their own deaths by sending a pair of dead men to Tombstone with a note claiming the bodies were theirs, but the authorities were not fooled. The Arizona Rangers tracked them to a Mexican village, and in a brief gunfight, Styles escaped and Alvord was wounded. He was taken to Yuma to serve his sentence, where he was said to be a model prisoner.
Released two weeks early, he knew the Mexicans wanted to extradite him for the mine robbery, and if he went back across the border, he was a dead man. Instead, he fled to his sister’s place in Los Angeles, changed his name to Tom Wright, and caught a ship to Central America. He spent the next few years helping build the Panama Canal, then drifted to Brazil, where he took a job building a railroad along the Amazon River. It was the hardest work of his life, and ironically, honest labor was what killed him.
Alvord came down with a severe case of yellow fever. He was sent to the island of Barbados for medical care, but it was too late. He died there on November 24, 1909, at just forty-two years of age, some reports placing his death in April of 1910 instead. Either way, he died in Barbados under an assumed name, and whatever money he had was sent to his sister.
Billy Styles’s story ended nearly as strangely. After escaping the gunfight in Mexico, he vanished. Rumors placed him everywhere from California to the Philippines to China. In truth, he had settled in Winnemucca, Nevada, where, believe it or not, he became a deputy sheriff.
On December 8, 1908, he was shot and killed in the line of duty while serving civil papers to a ranch owner ninety miles northwest of Winnemucca. The man opened fire, striking him three times. A suspect was charged but acquitted. Deputy William Stiles is reportedly buried in an unmarked grave in the old Pioneer Cemetery, his criminal past unmentioned on his memorial page.
As for Dolores Ochoa, the wife who had threatened divorce, she finally got her wish. She remarried at least twice more and passed away in Tucson in 1948, having lived long enough to see World War I, World War II, and the invention of television. The Old West, it seems, was not really all that long ago.