The Outlaw Burt Alvord: From Arizona to the Amazon

On September 10th, 1899, Constable Burt Alvord led a posse out of Willcox, Arizona, in pursuit of train robbers. Not really all that unheard of back in the Old West, right? Especially in a place like Arizona Territory, where the problem with train hold-ups had become so severe that they literally passed a law making the crime punishable by death.

But here is what makes this particular robbery different. The men that Alvord deputized for that posse were the exact same men who had just taken down the train minutes before.

In fact, it was Constable Burt Alvord himself who planned the entire heist. A rather bold endeavor that historian Marshall Trimble described as one of the most bizarre train robberies in the entire history of the American West. But trust me when I say that is not even close to being the strangest act ever committed by the man they called the outlaw Burt Alvord.

We are talking about a guy who managed to bust out of jail down there in Tombstone, Arizona, on two separate occasions. Somebody who then helped the Arizona Rangers take down one of the most feared killers that ever rode along the Mexican border, only to then rob a gold mine and vanish deep into the Amazon rainforest. So, how exactly did a deputy who got his start riding with the legendary Sheriff John Slaughter end up becoming one of the country’s most wanted outlaws?

And how on earth did an Old West outlaw from Arizona end up displaced somewhere in the middle of Brazil? And is it true that Alvord once murdered a man because of a practical joke?

Stick around, and we will find out.

Albert W. Alvord was born on September 11th, 1867, near Susanville, California. His father Charles, originally from New York, had come out West chasing the mountains.

He embraced into the role of a man with no real occupation, but Charles would be damn lucky, or maybe unlucky, to end up moving his family from one boom town to the next. He finally put down roots in Tombstone, Arizona around the year 1880. And it was there that young Burt grew up within the wild beating heart of the old Southwest.

As a kid, Burt once held a job sweeping out horse stalls at the OK Corral, the very site that would go down in history. Yet despite this close proximity to fame, Alvord never got a formal education. From what I can gather, he was all self-taught, and just about all of his learning was done right on the rough streets.

By the time Burt was just nineteen years old, he was already working as a deputy under Cochise County Sheriff John Slaughter. Now, I have mentioned Slaughter on previous episodes, but just in case you are not familiar with the man, he was a former Texas Ranger turned prominent Arizona cattleman. Although not large in stature, Slaughter was known for being tough, quick with a gun, slow to talk, and absolutely fearless.

He’d already killed frontier outlaws before he was even elected sheriff in November of 1886, and over the next four years, he virtually ran the rustlers clean out of the county with a cold efficiency still talked about to this very day.

He apparently saw something in young Burt, because the two men made solid partners in the pursuit of the lawless element. They even came up with their own special strategy for dealing with these criminals. They’d track outlaws down, wait ’til sleep overtook them, and then sneak into the camp quiet as church mice.

Then, they’d wake the sleeping bandits at the point of their guns. Usually that went off without a hitch, but at least once, things did not go according to plan.

On the night of June 7th, 1888, they crept into an outlaw camp, only for the bandits to become alert and jump to their feet with guns blazing. Blue gun smoke filled the air, but despite the danger, Burt and Slaughter managed to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 two of the outlaws and wound a third. It was an escapade that proved that Burt Alvord could handle himself out in the desert.

But his fight with the glass was an entirely different story.

Alvord had a serious drinking problem and by the late 1880s, he was spending his dog time in saloons and gaining more and more of the wrong kind of associates. Those old bandits he was supposed to be putting behind bars began to see him as a friend. When Sheriff Slaughter finally caught wind, he told his deputy to either leave the whiskey behind or turn in his badge.

Alvord chose the latter.

That’s right. Burt walked away from the Sheriff’s office and began making a living working the local ranches. Eventually, he met a young lady by the name of Delores Ochoa and the couple married.

The happy couple struck out for the booming town of Pearce, where they bought a house right on Main Street as well as a ranch on the outskirts of town. He kept horses, trying to make a go of it as a rancher.

Heathered, things turned around. Burt had the ranch and the wife. In fact, things were going so well that he even got himself another badge, this time as a deputy under Constable George Braven.

For a minute there, it really did look as if Alvord was putting his past behind him and about to be a fine upstanding member of the community.

But sadly, he was cut loose from Braven’s employment after just a few short months. Why he was let go, I cannot trace, but the pattern was set. Less than a year later, he was elected Constable in the dusty town of Willcox.

Now, Tombstone gets a lot of attention for being wild and woolly, but a fair argument could be made that Willcox was just as wild, if not worse. It was a boom town, a cattle shipping hub, full of cowboys, drifters, gamblers, boom and busts, saloons, gambling joints, and brothels. And it was right there in Willcox that Burt allegedly killed at least two men.

The first was a man whose only real crime was locking Burt into a basement. A practical joke gone wrong, but Burt did not get the joke. When he got out, he shot the jokester dead.

The second was a Hispanic gentleman who allegedly spoke out against the United States. That was quite enough to get himself a fatal bullet wound.

Whether or not these shootings actually happened is un-clear, as an evidence is shaky, but the legend has long been attached to the man. Regardless, by January of 1899, Burt had added even more authority, working as a deputy under the new Cochise County sheriff, Scott White. He also held the constable position over in Willcox, and all the while, he was forging a crew of men who would prove to be his own downfall.

Deputizing a few of his personal friends, men like good tips, Bill Dunning, and Billy Styles, helped Burt create the crime network that would make him infamous. And it was with these very men that he conjured up the train heist I mentioned earlier.

The plan was a deceptively simple one. At first. Burt and the boys would be seen sitting at a poker table in the back of a Willcox saloon.

Once the train arrived in a few minutes, two of them, specifically Billy Styles and Matt Burts, would slip out the back window. They would mount up their horses and ride eleven miles southwest, all the way to the tiny depot of Cochise Station.

Once the same train crossed to the next town, the train would leave the station, leaving the two disappointed men behind. They would then pull the stick up at that station and knock over the train there.

Meanwhile, Burt had bribed a saloon employee to keep the drinks coming, to bring out fresh glasses of whiskey every few minutes. The porter would walk out with a tray full of empty glasses and a smirk, selling the impression that the boys were simply drinking the night away, playing cards.

Back at Cochise Station, Billy and Matt were successful in taking down the train without a hitch. They stole fortune, stashed the loot, and hightailed it back into town. Dropping claves over the saloon, they climbed in through the window, took their seat at the poker table, and began playing as if they’d never left it for a moment.

In the morning, Constable Alvord organized a posse comprised of the men who had literally just robbed the train and rode out into the wilderness under a badge of authority, chasing themselves. Amazingly, they rode back the next morning empty-handed, claiming they were simply lost the trail while they tried very hard not to laugh at the situation.

It seemed like they had gotten away with it. But fortune does not favor the foolish.

You should know by now, you can never stop with just one, especially when it comes to easy money. Sure enough, five months later, the gang decided to take down another train, this time over at the small station of Fairbank.

And this time, things would not go as planned.

Burt and Styles, despite being the brains of the outfit, were apparently also the biggest risk-takers. They sat out the actual robbery. Five others got down to the dirty work, including the notorious Three-Fingered Jack Dunlop.

Dunlop and his accomplices were lounging around the little station, pretending to be drunk cowboys.

That was when they saw him. Jeff Milton. The very capable lawman of Wells Fargo.

I got to do a whole episode on Milton one of these days, but for now, let me just say, he too had gotten his start riding for the Texas Rangers. Over his lifetime, he would be a deputy U. S.

Marshal in New Mexico, a deputy sheriff in Arizona, and even the chief of police of El Paso.

So dangerous was Milton’s reputation that the gang, when they saw him standing alone in the open doorway of that express car, thought about calling off the entire fiasco right there. But he appeared unarmed, and so the greed far outweighed their caution. They drew their guns and started blasting, striking Milton in the left arm, and generously puncturing an artery.

But even as the gunfire was spreading, the cowboy through it all found the office was to still fight. Milton, though bleeding, managed to get a 10-gauge shot at his children. He tossed the keys to the strongbox safely into a dark corner, then hunkered down behind a trunk, playing dead.

Not banking on this possibility, the bandits crept forward, thinking the fight was over. As they drew near, Milton arose from behind the freight, and let loose both barrels of the 10 gauge double barrel, filling the air with a hearty charge of buckshot.

Three-Fngered Jack was in the lead and caught the full load dead in the gut. The impact carried him backwards, bleeding heavily. One was too late to turn and get a load in the seat of the pants.

This would be a big problem, because it gradually became very difficult to maintain a saddle when you had wet, wild buckshot in the backside.

The remaining outlaws, seeing the tide turn, decided they had enough and fled into the night, empty-handed. Or rather, one source says, they managed to escape with around 42, but either way, it wasn’t worth it. Three Finger Jack was in too rough a shape to get away.

He made it just a few miles before his own friends—no, his partners—discarded him, and left him to bleed out on the side of the trail.

In the desert, abandoned by his comrades, Jack made a decision. When he was found by the posse, he would not go to his grave quietly. In his last hours, he sang like a canary, giving up the entire story, including the fact that Burt Alvord was the mastermind behind the entire operation.

Everything he knew, He laid it all out there, not resisting when the law took their guns away.

Burt and the others were soon all rounded up and tossed into the Tombstone Jailhouse. That’s the very same place where many a notorious outlaw had sat waiting for the gallows, the case against them leaking strong. And to make matters worse, Billy Styles agreed to testify against Alvord, supposedly.

At least, that’s the move he was rumored to be. This was a ruse. Billy Styles stayed in town, living the high life.

On the day of the trial, he simply walked over to the jailhouse with a pistol, demanding that the guard release Alvord.

Now, that guard was none other than Constable George Bravin. He was the man who had cut Alvord loose back in the town of Pearce, and Brava isn’t a blue man. He kept his nerve, telling Bill to back off.

In response, Style shot him in the foot, taking off two toes of Bravin’s foot, and sending the man to the ground in pain. At that moment, Styles sauntered forward, plucked the keys from the injured man’s belt, and let Alvord out.

The jail was empty. The jailer wounded, complaining about his foot, the would-be prisoner gone.

Burt and Billy linked down and laid low, making their way across the border.

It wasn’t until about a week later that the sheriff received an envelope containing the missing keys along with a cocky note from Alvord, which read, “Tell the boys we are all well and eating regular.”

They went dead silent for a while. In the old west sparsely populated region, it was easy to vanish if you had the will. The Tombstone Epitaph reported that Alvord was seen at his old ranch near Pearce, and another reporter spotted him playing cards over at the Sonora Club, all flaunting that old swagger, as if he had nothing to run for.

All the while, he was just a wanted man.

But the law got help from the most unexpected of allies; all his old buddy, the newly formed Arizona Rangers, were having their hands full with a Mexican bandit by the name of Augustine Chacon. A name that truly deserves a place in the old West’s long history.

Chacon was the most badass of the border killers. According to some, he had thirty notches to his credit, though that number is almost certainly exaggerated. But the point still was this: not a man to be crossed.

Chacon lived in Sonora, but did most of his killing up in Arizona. A ghost with a taste for hyperviolence. He would cross the border, lead his swath of raids across places like Nogales and the San Rafael Valley, then hightail it back to his fortress-like ranch, deep in the interior of Mexico, where no American partition could easily follow.

The man was also known for his tricks and cruelty. One of his favorite settings for escape, aside from his own ruthlessness, was to keep a full mariachi band within his cell, to play music while he saw through the bars. As he worked, the music would drown out the sound of the file biting into the rigid metal bars.

Eventually, with the help of a quartet of Mexican señoritas who were plenty full of spies and diversions, he broke the Trinity and slipped out.

He went back to raising hell. Therefore, the Arizona Rangers wanted Chacon badly, and they knew the perfect man to capture, a man as slippery as he was. That’s one of the most controversial unanswered questions of the business soon.

Ranger Captain Burt Mossman had a plan to bring him to heel. He was familiar with Alvord and Styles and had heard—small world—through the grapevine that they were both looking to come back home. Burt especially, on account of his wife Lola, threatening him with divorce.

So Mossman approached the old outlaw with an offer he couldn’t refuse. If Alvord would help him capture Chacon, Mossman would not only put him on the Ranger payroll but would also speak to the territorial governor about getting his sentence cleared.

And the plan worked, somewhat. Alvord agreed. Why wouldn’t he?

It was a chance to get back to his old life and spend the next few years just staying free.

The plan was to lure Chacon across the border for a scheme to steal some prize thoroughbreds from a ranch over in the San Rafael Valley. Styles would act as the hot, scandalous messenger. It was Alvold’s job to cozy up to Chacon as a fellow crook and deliver him to Mossman.

It took over three months, but Alvold was eventually able to track him down. Alvold played the part to perfection, meaning to him, in hair-ransomed stolen horses, even down at the Yaqui River. Then, he sent word to Styles and to Mossman to meet him at a certain spring sixty miles south of the border.

Keep in mind, Chacon had no idea that Mossman was a Ranger. As far as he knew, Mossman was just another corrupt American I can feel, looking for easy money. Still, Chacon was cautious: not only was he platelier armed, but an old schooling would be plenty of times a ton how dangerous arrest meetings with strangers could be.

It was hard not to let his guard down.

It was on the morning of September 4th, 1902, that Mossman finally saw the chance to pull himself into the book. Alvord, deciding his part was done, quietly slipped over to Mossman and said, he was heading out and to keep a careful eye on Billy Styles, that he could not be trusted. With that, he left, and one of the most infamous capture of the border territories began.

Let’s let the historian Blair Richmond take it in his own words: “While the three men were eating, Chacón’s eyes narrowed and he become suspicious , wondering what was taking Alvord so long to return. After breakfast, Chacón reached into his pocket, took out some corn husk cigarettes and offered them to Styles and Mossman. As they hunkered down around the fire having a smoke, Mossman saw his chance.

He let his cigarette go out, then reached into the fire with his right hand to pluck a burning stick and relight his cigarette. As he reached out and tossed the stick back where it had come, Mossman’s hand slid past his holster. He drew his revolver faster than a devil’s eye.

He got the drop on the startled bandit.”

Oh, sometimes method the world marches on silver sounds. That was pretty much the end of Chacon’s long reign. He’d already been sentenced to hang back in ’97, and this time, a final court date would come.

There would be no mariachi bands and no señors coming to his rescue. He was taken back to Florence and sentenced to the gallows.

As for Alvord, he turned himself in, as promised. But if he thought things would go smoothly now, he was wrong. Over the next several months, he was shuffled from jail to jail, held in a legal limbo.

Finally, in July of 1903, a grand jury indicted him on six counts of tampering with the US mail. But what he would not be indicted for was his case concerning the train robbery, which in Arizona at the time was, as I said earlier, actually punishable by death.

Which is an interesting quirk of the law, to say the least. There was similar legislation on the books in New Mexico. But by standard after the law was enacted, they never used it.

In fact, there’s only one man, in all of U. S. history, that was executed for train robbery.

A man I talked about months ago, known as Black Jack Ketchum, and his hanging was such a looted gruesome 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 that even the executioners were morally destroyed, the law was chucked out almost right then, out of pure astronomical shock.

But let’s get back to Burt. See, they had built a good case against him on his robberies and mail tampering, but behind the scenes the politicians in Washington were reluctant to send him to the gallows over a train robbery. The law threatened it, but it started to go shaky in its old stagecoach.

Part of it was, moving you had a guilty or nothing scenario. But if any one of the hundreds of good men sitting on the jury refused to put a nice enough citizen like a train robber to be to death, the case would crumble, and the whole damn thing would need to be dropped.

So rather than undergoing a high stakes trial for the train robbery, Alvord was tried on the more flexible lesser charge of mail tampering. This had a natural hold. It makes sense, after all.

Not only was Burt found guilty, but he was also sentenced to two years at theYuma, the Yuma Territorial Prison.

But a full-on belief didn’t seem to set into await. Just nine days later, Burt Alvord and Billy Styles, who had turned himself in around the same time, were gone once more. They had able to loosen a bar, dug through the adobe wall with a common kitchen spoon and fled.

Again.

They returned to jailbreak habits, headed down into the mountains of Mexico, and got back to hiss, putting together smalltime operations as they traveled.

By January of ’04, him and Styles scaled new heights in services, and robbed a large amount of gold from a mine in Sonora. They were also possibly attempting to 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 their own death and disappearance off the same time. There’s a great story that they actually shipped up the corpses which they claim were them but attracted.

They tried to fool the masses, but those lawmen weren’t fooled.

It wasn’t too long after that when the Rangers again came calling, they tracked the warren of them to a Mexican border village, and in the brief gunfight that expired, Styles escaped into the night. Alvord, however, was wounded, taken into custody, and began serving out his prison time. He was given special treatment.

Sans a full cell of hardened chained bandits, Alvord was allowed the relative loneliness of having a single cell. Yet despite his past, all accounts said he was a model prisoner. He served his time without complaint, earned the favor of the warden, and was released.

He even was given an early release for good time.

The only thing is, there was one last twist. Burr hadn’t forgotten about that gold, and Mexico demanded the extradition for his crimes. He was not going.

He had just enough sense to know that if he ever crossed the Mexican border, he was a dead man.

So, rather than face justice on the other side, he lit out for Los Angeles and his sisters where he lay low for a moment. He would change his name to Tom Wright, then caught a steamer down to Central America, settling in to work in the 16th century construction of the Panama Canal.

He drove deeper south, drifting to the Amazon in Brazil, where he took up a job building a railroad along the mighty river, driving hard steel into the strata of the humid jungle. Probably the hardest work he’ve ever done in his life.

Ironically, it would be this honest laboran legend that put him under the ground.

Somewhere down in Brazil, Burt caught a very severe case of yellow fever. He was sent to the island of California, presumably to be treated, but it was all too late. He was too far or not.

As strange as it may sound, this is the path that an outlaw from the West going to take. On November one, 1909, Burt Alvord, a man of the desert, was down, suffering in an island hospital. He died at just forty-two years of age.

That’s maybe. There was an obituary published in couple papers in Arizona Thr.

They claimed he had died in April of that same year, not in late 1909. But either way: Burt was gone. Whatever gold to his name was sent to his sister.

He passed through this world with nothing.

As for Billy Styles, his story ends almost as bizarrely. After escaping that last raid and gunfight in Mexico, Styles disappeared. There were rumors putting him everywhere from San Francisco to Manila, even to Shanghai.

But Styles, in reality, had gone to Nevada, quietly settling into the town of Winnemucca. In a stunning twist of events, he became a deputy, bound in local law enforcement. He managed to get a badge, just like his old friend Alvord.

Matter of fact, it was in that capacity, on December 8th, 1908, that Deputy Sheriff Myers was killed in the middle of a routine thing. He even has a memorial page on the Officer Down Memorial Page, which strangely enough does not mention that he was once an outlaw and inspiration.

He was a deputy sheriff of a small town in Nevada. He was said to have been a former U. S.

Airborne Ranger and was, at his weight, a member of the Arizona Rangers.

According to his memorial, “Deputy Sheriff William Styles was shot and killed while serving civil papers to the owner of a ranch ninety miles northwest of Winnemucca. The man opened fire on Deputy Styles, striking him three times as he walked from the ranch house to the barn. A suspect was charged with Deputy Styles’ murder but acquitted at trial.”

The ranch owner claimed he was only using his automatic defense. The paper came away quitted—Billy Styles had finally gotten his punishment from the grave.

As for Rola Alvord’s wife, the one who had threatened him with divorce, she finally got her wish. He remarried twice, and lived to the setting of the West. In 1948, she passed away in Tucson, Arizona, the place once of the great battles of her husband’s from gone again.

It is crazy to think about how quickly, how tightly, all this is. This woman went from being married to a genuine Old West train robber, to seeing the end of both World Wars and the invention of television via long plays of. But I guess the old west really wasn’t all that long ago.

I guess that’s all I have on Burt Alvord. Thanks for joining me. Try not to shoot somebody over something as trivial as a practical joke.

If you absolutely have to go to jail, make sure you put a full mariachi band in your cell. And whatever you do, don’t go sharing your smokes with a damn Arizona Ranger.