The city of Bodie has its entire freight and passenger traffic carried as mentioned above. A short time ago its population was 10,000; there were three daily papers and free mail delivery, and all the improvements necessary to any modern town or city. The prospect of a holdup always added to the thrill of staging. Yosemite literature is not replete with road agent episodes, but highwaymen did occasionally appear along the routes to the valley. “Black Bart,” whose fame as a gentleman stage robber was world-wide during the early ’eighties, met his downfall in the Yosemite region on his twenty-eighth robbery. Black Bart was a very unusual bandit. He took no human lives. In fact, he never fired a weapon in any of his exploits. He carried an unloaded shotgun and bluffed, successfully, twenty-seven times. His forays began in 1877, and his returns were such that he was enabled to reside in San Francisco as a respected and rather dapper citizen. His absence from the city on the occasions of his robberies was accounted for through his story of visiting mines in which he held interests. His desire to be well dressed and his penchant for clean linen proved his undoing. It was a laundry mark on a handkerchief which brought about his capture after his twenty-eighth robbery. Not all the holdups along Yosemite roads took place in the distant past. D. J. Foley’s _Yosemite Tourist_ for July 10, 1906, carries the following account of a robbery that brings the melodramatic influence of highwaymen into the very end of the period of stage coach days. It was entitled “Five Stages Held Up by the Lone Highwayman of the Chowchilla, An Event Full of Excitement and Interest,” and reads: This is the story of a plain, ordinary “hold-up” of the Raymond-Wawona-Yosemite stages; and the time was Saturday afternoon at ten minutes of four. The place was about six miles this side of Ahwahnee, upon the side of the Chowchilla Mountain, about a mile and a half this side of where a similar, but less important, event took place last August. The point, carefully selected by the bold robber was an ideal one. The road here is in the form of the letter _S_, flattened out, and he selected the upper part of the letter, about all of the other parts being visible. The first stage was in charge of Will Palmer, one of the new drivers. Puffing and sweating, the team of four were rounding the turn in the road, when Walter Brode, who, with Mrs. F. J. House, occupied the front seat, yelled: “Hold up!” For up the road a hundred or more feet away he saw the fellow jump out from behind some brush and, with his old 44 Winchester up to his shoulder, he was advancing toward them. And in tones, musical and soft but determined, he said: “Throw out that box!” The driver was not aware of the presence of the express box, but it was there and Mr. Seth Hart threw it out like a gentleman.