We’re blessed to live in one of the most vanilla and safest communities anywhere. ’Tweren’t the case, a century ago. The Roaring 1920s were a decade of fantastic crimes, accidents and disasters.
Considering the Santa Clarita Valley housed only 500 souls then, the numbers and stories are phantasmagoric. Sheriff Ed Brown was ambushed and murdered by a lovestruck drunk. Brown’s partner, Jack Pilcher, died a year later when he and his rookie partner (first day on the job) John Seltzer, were investigating a Bouquet cabin break-in. While simultaneously looking under a bed for a big lizard, Seltzer’s pistol fell from his pocket, discharged and fatally shot nationally famous crime fighter, Jack Pilcher, right betwixt the eyes. Pilcher’s massive 1925 funeral, picnic and parade through Downtown Newhall was paid for by the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1928, the St. Francis Dam disaster washed away 500-plus souls, dear and otherwise. Bank robbery shootouts were common. Add cattle rustling and prostitution dens. Prohibition turned the SCV into a beloved brewery for moonshiners. Add the jim-dandiest crimes in all of American history — The Great Saugus Train Robbery.
An ex-Colorado lawman, Jim Biddison, homesteaded here in 1902, taking over as the SCV’s top lawman after Brown and Pilcher died via gunshots. Biddison quickly solved the mystery of who derailed the massive Southern Pacific No. 59 5000 steam engine and the 12-car passenger train it was pulling on that cool eve of Nov. 10, 1929. The wreck was right past today’s Del Taco at Bouquet & Soledad, right behind the historic (and recently torn down) Saugus Speedway.
It was Biddison who deduced the secret perp was “Buffalo” Tom Vernon.
The robber’s tracks were traced to a railroad tool shed. Vernon loosened several yards of track, then crouched in the weeds to watch. Soon, the still Saugus air was broken with the sickening sound of metal grinding against metal as the huge locomotive flipped and crashed. Vernon then calmly climbed aboard the hissing wreckage.
At first, Vernon posed as a helpful train official, walking among the injured and screaming passengers. Then, the smallish robber pulled a pistol and liberated passengers of their valuables, about $300 worth, before disappearing into the night. For decades, Vernon’s fanciful verbal autobiography served as the only known authority for his life. Years passed. More information surfaced. Besides a train robber, Vernon was a fibber.
What are the odds?
Vernon claimed to be the son of saloon owner Jim Averill and that his mom was Cattle Kate, who ran a brothel in Carbon County, Wyoming (they and Buffalo Tom were part of the story in the box office bomb, “Heaven’s Gate”). Besides Tom lying about being the son of Cattle Kate, there NEVER WAS a Cattle Kate. She was the fabrication of mainstream and yellow journalism of the late 19th century.
One newspaper carried the story of Tom’s fake mom’s lynching with this headline:
“Blaspheming Border Beauty Barbarously Boosted Branchward.”
Even The Signal’s front pages re-broadcast Tom’s tall tales, Xeroxing his fibs, over and over. Well. They were pretty entertaining yarns.
There was no Cattle Kate. But, there WAS an Ella Watson, a hard-working honest woman. With her Sweetwater, Wyoming, postmaster and fiancé, Averill, they built a modest cattle ranch, restaurant and general store on their property. Ella and Jim adopted an 11-year-old boy (NOT Buffalo Tom), abandoned by his drunken father. Ella wasn’t a prostitute, didn’t run a whore house and wasn’t a cattle thief. She and Averill were literally murdered by cattle ranchers, eager to steal their prime property.
Vernon also claimed, true or not, he was raised by the Sioux and rode with Buffalo Bill, hence the “Bison” moniker.
The Saugus Train Robbery of ’29 was horrific. Hundreds of tons of cast iron and steel train cars cascaded from the tracks and were twisted into scrap metal. It made front pages of most major newspapers in America. Tourists by the hundreds drove to Saugus to see the work crews removing the disfigured train. Railroad workers built an emergency track around the fallen cars, righted the engine and rerouted train traffic along Soledad. That 5000 engine? They don’t make them like they used to. It would soon get back into service and run until 1960. Vernon? Tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. One story had him being pardoned as an elderly man in 1964. I talked to his supposed prison guard, who confessed Vernon then died from — ahem — “… a social disease.” However, a later letter and photo from a Carolena Rezendes to our local SCV Historical Society noted Vernon was pardoned in 1957-58 and lived with her family in Sacramento. Her family buried Vernon after he died of tuberculosis.
So. Back to lawman Biddison? How did he know the mastermind of The 1929 Great Saugus Train Robbery was our local, diminutive crook?
It was easy. Buffalo Tom was a double idiot.
Some of us have grand themes, coursing through our lives. For Vernon, it was hookers. At his spectacular 1930 trial in Los Angeles, BTV confessed the Saugus derailment was to raise money for yet another prostitute’s — ahem, again, operation — which, had he waited, is now legal and encouraged in California.
It wasn’t that lawman Jim Biddison identified Tom Vernon by his footprints, leading back to that Saugus tool shed. While crouching above the tracks right before the crash, Buffalo Tom had dropped a note on the ground from his back pocket. The note had Vernon’s name on it. Better? It had his travel itinerary. Biddison traveled to Denver to arrest Vernon. Vernon was gone. But, he did leave his SECOND note with an attractive hotel maid. It, too, had Tom’s travel plans.
Vernon? He was captured, without incident, a few weeks later after derailing a SECOND train in Wyoming.
That boy of ours. Good thing he was caught. America was running out of trains …
Do pick up “Naked Came the Novelist,” John Boston’s sequel to the international bestseller, “Naked Came the Sasquatch,” at JohnBoston-Books.com. A lifelong SCV resident with 119 major writing awards and nearly 12,000 columns, Boston is Earth history’s most prolific humorist and satirist.
