Placer County outlaw history (Richard Barter, the 1856 Trinity mule-train robbery)
Richard Barter came to the California diggings from Lower Canada and worked Rattlesnake Bar on the North Fork of the American River until two theft charges, one of them a wrongful conviction, wrecked his name. He turned highwayman and told one of his victims he was Rattlesnake Dick, the pirate of the Placers. In the summer of 1856 he planned one of the biggest holdups of the gold rush. A Wells Fargo mule train was carrying bullion from the Yreka mines through the Trinity Mountains. The express mules carried the WF brand, so Barter and Cyrus Skinner went off to steal unmarked mules to swap in, while George Skinner, Cyrus's brother, led the rest of the gang against the train on Trinity Mountain.
The robbers struck without warning, tied the guards to trees and made off with $80,000 in gold bullion. Then they waited at the meeting place, and Barter and Cyrus never came. They had been arrested for stealing mules and jailed in Auburn.
With a posse sure to follow, George split the loot. Half went with the men toward Folsom. The other $40,000 he hid by himself, and his men knew only that he was gone a long time. At Jack Phillips' Mountaineer House near Auburn the gang met a posse riding with the Wells Fargo detective James Barkeley, and George Skinner was killed on the spot. The Folsom gold was handed over by one of the survivors, who was pardoned. George's share stayed wherever he had put it.
Barter and Cyrus broke out of the Auburn jail. Cyrus was retaken; Barter got away, raised a new gang and broke out of every jail in Placer and Nevada counties. On 11 July 1859 he came into Auburn for a drink, was recognised, and ran into three lawmen outside town. Deputy tax collector George W. Martin was killed. Barter's body turned up the next morning beside the road with two bullets in the chest and a third in the head, which may have been his own. On him was a letter from his sister Harriet in Oregon, begging him to write home and give up his life of crime. He lies in the Old Auburn Cemetery.
The missing $40,000 then took on a life of its own. A legend on Vancouver Island put it at the gold camp of Leechtown, 18 inches down in a leather boot under a frying pan, and a Victoria engineer named William Lubbe hunted it for 40 years until his death in 1953. As late as the 1960s the California State Library answered queries with a plain line: so far as anyone knew, the gold on Trinity Mountain had never been found.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
