BIGGEST BREAKOUT, BAR NONE
California’s San Quentin State Prison held some of the most notorious outlaws of the Old West—highwaymen Tom Bell and “Rattlesnake Dick” Barter; gang leader Henry Plummer, later lynched by Montana vigilantes; gunfighter “Longhair Sam” Brown of the California and Nevada boomtowns; poetry-minded stage robber Charles “Black Bart” Boles; gentlemanly stagecoach and train robber Bill Miner, alias the “Gray Fox”; and members of the bandido gangs led by Joaquín Murrieta and Tiburcio Vásquez. The 1848–53 California Gold Rush lured west myriad desperadoes from the East Coast, the Midwest and the Deep South, as well as from Europe, Australia, Mexico and South America. Many fell afoul of the law and ended up in San Quentin, then California’s only state penitentiary.
The prison, which opened in 1854 and remains in operation, sits on Point San Quentin at the upper end of San Francisco Bay, just outside the mouth of Corte Madera Creek. In 1862 it held about 600 convicts. Watching the prisoners were scarcely two dozen guards known as “freemen.” Most were inexperienced political appointees, some of whom regularly showed up for duty drunk. Their wards were crammed into three long cellblocks ringed by an outer wall 20 feet high and 500 feet to a side. Atop the wall were small guardhouses manned by freemen armed with the .54-caliber Model 1841 percussion rifle, aka “Mississippi Yager.” Outside the wall stood five guard towers built of prison-made brick. Four were mounted with cannons loaded with grape and canister shot. Three more guards on horseback patrolled the outside perimeter.
In that era of low taxes and minimal government San Quentin was expected to support itself. Many of the prisoners worked in the brickyard, just outside the west wall, while others labored in workshops inside the prison. Prisoners made bricks, cut firewood for use in brick ovens in the surrounding forests and
