On the morning of September 4th, 1902, a man named Albert Alvord slipped away from a camp sixty miles south of the Arizona border and quietly told the other man there, a stranger to the third member of the party, that his part was done and he was heading out. He also said something odd before he left: do not trust Billy Styles. And with that, Alvord walked over to the notorious Mexican bandit Augustine Chacon, told him he was going out for water and would be back shortly, and disappeared into the desert. Chacon had no reason yet to be alarmed.

As far as he knew, he was sitting at breakfast with two crooked gringos planning the theft of a herd of thoroughbreds from a ranch in the San Rafael Valley. He did not know that the stranger he had shared a campfire with for days was Burt Mossman, captain of the Arizona Rangers, and that the entire scheme had been built to deliver him into Ranger hands. But Chacon was a suspicious man. For over three years he had outrun every lawman who came for him, and he had escaped a hangman’s noose through a jailbreak so audacious that it still seemed impossible.

As the three men ate, his eyes narrowed, and he wondered aloud what was taking Alvord so long to return with the water. He would never get an answer. Chacon reached into his pocket, pulled out some corn husk cigarettes, and offered them to Styles and Mossman. As the three men hunkered down around the fire having a smoke, Mossman let his cigarette go out, then reached into the fire with his right hand, picked up a burning stick, and relit his cigarette.

As he tossed the stick back into the flames, his hand slid past his holster. Quick as a flash, the Ranger drew his revolver and got the drop on the surprised bandit. It was the end of a long road that had begun, bizarrely, with the same Albert Alvord serving as a lawman in the very territory he had helped terrorize. Albert W.

Alvord was born on September 11th, 1867, near Susanville, California. His father Charles had come west from New York like so many others, chasing the next strike, and he moved his family from one boom town to the next before putting down roots in Tombstone around 1880. Young Burt—everyone called him Burt—once had a job sweeping out horse stalls at the OK Corral. He never received much of a formal education; most of his learning was done on the streets.

By the time he was nineteen, he was already working as a deputy under Cochise County Sheriff John Slaughter. Slaughter was a former Texas Ranger turned prominent Arizona cattleman. Not large in stature, he had a reputation for being quick with a gun, slow to talk, and absolutely fearless. He had killed several men before being elected sheriff in November 1886, and over the next four years he ran the rustlers out of the county with a cold efficiency still talked about to this day.

He and Alvord made a solid team. They had a special method of dealing with outlaws: they would track them down, wait for them to fall asleep, sneak into their camp quiet as church mice, and wake them at the point of a gun. It usually went off without a hitch, but on the night of June 7th, 1888, the bandits jumped out of their bedrolls guns blazing. Alvord and Slaughter managed to kill two of the outlaws and wound a third.

Alvord had finally proven he could handle himself in a fight, at least out in the desert. His battle with the bottle was an entirely different story. By the late 1880s, Alvord was spending more time bellied up to a bar than chasing outlaws, and he began making friends with the same type of criminals he was supposed to be apprehending. When Sheriff Slaughter told him to straighten up and turn in his badge, Alvord chose the latter.

He quit and began working on nearby ranches. He married a young woman named Delores Ochoa, and the happy couple moved to the nearby town of Pearce, where they purchased a house on Main Street and a ranch on the outskirts of town. Alvord planned on raising horses. Things were going so well that he went back to wearing a badge, this time as a deputy under Constable George Bravin.

For a moment it looked as if he might settle down and make something of himself. But he was cut loose from Bravin’s employ after just a few short months. Less than a year later, Albert was elected constable in Willcox. Tombstone gets most of the attention for being wild, but Willcox was just as bad, if not worse.

It was a shipping hub for cattle, full of cowboys, drifters, and gamblers, along with all the saloons, gambling joints, and brothels that catered to them. It was there in Willcox that Albert allegedly killed at least two men. The first was a man whose only crime was locking Burt in a basement as a practical joke. Albert evidently did not find it funny; he shot the man to death as soon as he got out.

The second was a Hispanic gentleman who made the grave mistake of badmouthing the United States, which Burt apparently also considered a killing offense. Whether these shootings actually occurred is uncertain due to a lack of evidence, but either way, by January 1899, Albert had taken on additional duties as a deputy under the new Cochise County Sheriff, Scott White, alongside his constable’s badge in Willcox. Around the same time, he deputized a few of his personal friends: Matt Burts, Bill Downing, and Billy Styles. It was with these friends that Albert planned to rob a train.

The plan was simple in theory. Burt and the boys would be posted up in the back room of a Willcox saloon playing poker. As soon as the train arrived, two of them would slip out a back window, gallop some eleven miles southwest to Cochise Station, and spring into action when the train pulled in. Meanwhile, Albert had bribed one of the saloon employees to bring a fresh round of drinks every few minutes.

The porter would emerge with a tray of empty glasses, giving the illusion that Albert and his compadres were still fully immersed in the card game. The two who slipped out the window, Billy Styles and Matt Burts, took the train down without a hitch. They stashed the loot, hauled ass back to Willcox, climbed back in through the window, and started playing poker like nothing had happened. Albert then organized a posse comprised of the men who had literally just robbed the train, and they rode out in pursuit.

Surprise, surprise, they were unable to find themselves. They rode back to town the next morning empty-handed, claiming they had lost the trail. By all appearances, they got away with it. But you can never stop with just one, especially when it comes to easy money.

Just five months later, the boys decided to take down another train at the little station of Fairbank. This time things would not go as planned. Apparently, Burt and Styles were the brains of the outfit, and they stayed behind while five others did the dirty work, including the notorious Three-Fingered Jack Dunlop. He and his accomplices lounged around the station pretending to be drunken cowboys when they noticed a very capable Wells Fargo Express agent by the name of Jeff Milton.

Milton had gotten his start riding with the Texas Rangers, then worked as a deputy US Marshal in New Mexico, deputy sheriff in Arizona, and even chief of police of El Paso. So dangerous was his reputation that when Dunlop and the others saw him standing in the open doorway of the express car, they initially thought about calling off the entire robbery. But Milton appeared unarmed, so they figured they’d take a chance. It was a big mistake.

Without warning, they drew their guns and started shooting, striking Milton in the left arm and severing an artery. The wounded Milton still managed to grab a ten-gauge from inside the car. He tossed the keys to the strongbox into the corner where nobody could find them, then dropped behind a trunk to conceal himself. Thinking Milton was dead, the bandits rushed toward the open door.

As they drew near, he arose from behind the trunk and opened up with both barrels. Three-Finger Jack was in the lead and caught a load of buckshot in the belly. Bravo Juan had just enough time to turn around and caught a load in the seat of his pants—not a good place to be shot when one was going to make his getaway on horseback. The remaining outlaws decided they had enough and took off, mostly empty-handed, though one source claimed they escaped with around $42.

Old Three-Finger Jack made it only a few miles before his so-called buddies left him to die on the side of the trail. Jack did not appreciate being abandoned, so when the posse arrived, he told them everything, including the fact that Burt Alvord was the ringleader. Burt and the others were soon rounded up and tossed in jail in Tombstone. To make matters worse, Billy Styles turned snitch and agreed to testify in exchange for his freedom.

But this turned out to be a ruse. Styles remained in town living the high life until the day of the trial, then walked over to the jail with a pistol and demanded that the guard release Alvord. The guard was Constable George Bravin, the same man who had cut Alvord loose back in Pearce. Bravin initially refused, so Billy Styles shot him in the foot, taking off two of his toes.

Styles then grabbed the keys and opened Burt’s cell. It wasn’t until about a week later that the sheriff received an envelope containing the keys along with a message written by Alvord: “Tell the boys we are all well and eating regular. ”

Burt and Billy spent the next couple of years roaming back and forth across the border with Mexico. At one point, the Tombstone Epitaph reported that Alvord was seen at his old ranch near Pearce.

Another reporter spotted him playing cards at the Sonora Club, sitting out in the open like he didn’t have a care in the world. Meanwhile, the newly formed Arizona Rangers had their hands full trying to capture a Mexican bandit named Augustine Chacon. According to some, Chacon had over thirty notches to his credit, almost certainly an exaggeration, but the point still stood: the man was not to be trifled with. He lived down in Sonora but did most of his mischief up in Arizona, leading his gang on far-flung raids and then hightailing it back across the border to his fortress-like ranch.

It wasn’t until 1896 that he was finally captured and sentenced to hang for killing a deputy sheriff. As fate would have it, Chacon was sharing a jail cell with a full mariachi band. Each night as Chacon sawed through the bars with a saw that a señorita had smuggled in for him, the band let loose with music loud enough to drown out the noise. On the night of the actual jailbreak, that same señorita returned and batted her pretty little eyelashes at the guard, luring him outside for a midnight stroll.

With the jailer thus occupied, Chacon slipped through the severed bars to freedom and went right back to stealing and killing. The Rangers wanted him badly, and their captain, Burt Mossman, came up with a plan to bring him to heel. Mossman was familiar with both Albert and Styles, and he had heard through the grapevine that they were looking to come back home—Burt especially, on account of his wife Lola threatening to divorce him. Mossman offered an olive branch: if the boys would help him capture Chacon, he’d not only put them on the Ranger payroll but also see what he could do regarding 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 it was Burt’s job to cozy up to Chacon and deliver him to Mossman. It took over three months, but eventually Albert located Chacon.

He even ran stolen horses with him down to the Yaqui River, then sent word to Styles and Mossman to meet him at a certain spring some sixty miles south of the border. Chacon had no idea that Mossman was an Arizona Ranger. As far as he knew, he was just another crooked gringo looking to make an easy score. Still, he was on edge.

He was heavily armed and flat out refused to let his guard down. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that Mossman finally got the drop on him, there at that campfire with the cigarettes. And that was pretty much the end of Chacon. He had already been sentenced to hang back in 1897, so all they had to do was set a new date.

This time there would be no escape. As for Alvord, he turned himself in over in Tombstone just a few days later. Things didn’t go quite as smoothly as he had hoped. He was moved around to various jail cells for months on end until July 1903, when a grand jury indicted him on six counts of tampering with the US mail.

What they did not indict him for was robbing a train—which in Arizona at that time was punishable by death. There was a similar law on the books in New Mexico, and they too seemed reluctant to hand down such harsh judgments. Only one man in all of US history was ever executed for robbing a train: Black Jack Ketchum, whose hanging was such a botched, gruesome affair that the law was repealed not long thereafter and deemed unconstitutional. Arizona’s capital train robbery law had been on the books since 1889, and although it remained there for over a quarter of a century, it was never once used to send a man to the gallows.

Part of this was due to prosecutors knowing it was an all-or-nothing proposition: if the jury failed to convict, the defendant would walk away entirely. Jurors in those days were reluctant to hang a man over something as trivial as robbing a corporate safe, especially if nobody got hurt. They didn’t necessarily want to let him go, they just didn’t think the punishment fit the crime. So rather than indict Alvord for the train robbery and risk the jury letting him go, he was indicted for tampering with the mail.

He was found guilty and sentenced to two years at the Yuma Territorial Prison. But Alvord wasn’t quite ready for incarceration. Just nine days later, he and Billy Styles, who had also recently turned himself in, loosened a bar in their cell, dug through an adobe wall, and escaped back into Mexico. By January 1904, they robbed a large amount of gold from a mine down in Sonora.

Legend has it they may have also tried to fake their own deaths, sending a pair of dead Mexicans over to Tombstone with a note claiming they were Alvord and Styles. But the authorities weren’t as gullible as Alvord was hoping. It wasn’t long before the Arizona Rangers came calling. They found the bandits in a Mexican village across the border.

In the brief gunfight that ensued, Styles escaped and Burt was wounded. He was taken into custody and delivered to Yuma, where he began his two-year sentence. Despite his criminal proclivities, Burt was said to have been a model prisoner. He served his time quietly and was released a full two weeks early.

The only problem was that the Mexicans wanted to extradite him over the mine robbery back in 1904. Burt had just enough sense to know that if he went back across the border, he was a dead man. So rather than surrender, he lit out for his sister’s place in Los Angeles. He didn’t stay long.

He changed his name to Tom Wright, caught a ship down to Central America, and spent the next few years helping to build the Panama Canal. He then drifted further south to Brazil and got a job building a railroad along the Amazon River. It was probably the hardest he had ever worked in his entire life, and ironically, it was this honest labor that ultimately put him under. Somewhere down in Brazil, Burt came down with a severe case of yellow fever.

He and several other patients were sent to the island of Barbados, presumably to receive medical care, but Burt was just too far gone. He succumbed to the illness on November 24th, 1909, at just 42 years of age. Maybe. There was an obituary of sorts printed in a couple of Arizona papers in late July 1910, claiming he had died around April of that year instead.

What everyone agrees on is that Burt died down in Barbados under an assumed name, and whatever money he had was sent to his sister. As for Billy Styles, his story ended almost as strangely. After escaping that last gunfight in Mexico, Billy disappeared. Rumors put him everywhere from California to the Philippines and even China.

But he had simply traveled to Nevada and settled in Winnemucca—and believe it or not, he became a deputy sheriff. It was in that capacity, on December 8th, 1908, that Stiles was killed in the line of duty. He even has his own memorial page on the Officer Down Memorial website, which oddly enough fails to mention his time as a criminal. “Deputy Sheriff William Stiles was shot and killed while serving civil papers to the owner of a ranch 90 miles northwest of Winnemucca.

The man opened fire on Deputy Stiles, striking him three times as he walked from the ranch house to the barn. ” A suspect was charged with Deputy Stiles’ murder but acquitted at trial. Deputy Stiles had been a former member of the Arizona Rangers and had been deputized by the sheriff to serve the court papers. He is reportedly buried in an unmarked, unknown grave in the old Pioneer Cemetery in Winnemucca, Humboldt County.

And Lola Ochoa—Dolores—Alvord’s wife, the one who threatened to divorce him, finally got her wish. She remarried at least twice more and passed away in Tucson in 1948. She went from being married to a legitimate Old West train robber to seeing the passing of both World Wars and the invention of television.

The Old West really wasn’t all that long ago.