The Wild West was a lawless land. As the US settlers pushed west from the original territories of the United States towards the Pacific coast they encountered many dangers. The countryside was a dangerous place, the terrain often broken especially in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Outside of the safety of the towns there were bandit outlaws and raiding parties, aside from all the natural hazards. Travel between settlements could be extremely risky. In these times a saloon or inn would be a welcome sight indeed to a traveler seeking shelter and a hot meal. Such houses would have seemed so much safer than sleeping by the roadside, and in truth they almost always were. But they could also have their own dangers. Sometimes the owners of said establishment could be downright murderous. One such was Polly Bartlett, a Wyoming murderess from before Wyoming was even a state. Who was this lady, whose story survives only from anecdote and rumor? Did she ever truly exist? And what happened to Wyoming’s first serial killer in the end? A Poisonous Trap South Pass City in 1868 was a boom town. Located in Fremont County, Wyoming, it saw a huge amount of out-of-town visitors drawn to the area by the Gold Rush. And as with all such places the rapid growth attracted its fair share of criminals looking for their gold too. In August of that year a young man named Theodore Fountain came to town. He was not a stranger, but the son of a mine owner. That meant that, when he walked into town one evening and was never seen again, there were people who would likely come asking questions. One of those people was his father Bernard Fountain, who went so far as to hire Pinkerton investigators to find his son. Theodore was tracked to a guest house to the east of South Pass City and its two owners: Polly Bartlett and her father Jim. Polly and Jim told the investigators that they knew nothing of Theodore Fountain’s whereabouts, but they must have known the game was up. The pair disappeared shortly thereafter, all but confirming their guilt. The Investigators and local law enforcement returned and searched the property. The stories tell of some 22 bodies found in shallow graves all around the inn, all customers of the pair and all murdered by them. The press seized on the story and its lurid details. Polly in particular was selected for notoriety, a female serial killer being a rare thing both then and now. The papers took to calling her the Murderess of Slaughterhouse Gulch, a suitably macabre title. The police put a price on the head of the two fugitives. This attracted the attention of one Ed Ford, a local who had a personal interest in tracking down the murderers. Ford had himself narrowly avoided becoming a victim of Polly, and his brother Sam was one of the bodies found on the property. Ed Ford tracked them down and on October 7, after two months on the run, he confronted them. Ed shot Jim dead and arrested Polly, turning her in to the authorities. It is from Polly that we get the rest of the story. Jim and Polly had started out running a saloon in Ohio. Polly would target men and lure them to have sex with her, and while they were so occupied Jim would rob them. This turned out to be a highly lucrative business. Polly and Jim’s first victim, a man named Lewis Nichols, coughed up some $4,000, a fortune at the time. It was this money that led to the pair travelling to South Pass City, and this was the money that financed their lodge, built by Jim specifically to trap travelers. Visitors to their inn were often carrying valuable gold, as only the affluent could really afford to stay in a public house such as this one. While they were there Polly would serve a hot meal and whisky to the grateful visitor, both laced with arsenic and either deadly on its own. Once captured Polly was held in jail awaiting trial: if found guilty the sentence would almost certainly be hanging. However this was not to be the ultimate fate of the Murderess of Slaughterhouse Gulch. Instead Polly was to die in an entirely different fashion. The evening of her arrest she was shot through the window of her cell by Otto Kalkhorst, one of the miners who worked in Bernard Fountain’s mine. The local justice of the peace declined to charge Kalkhorst for this and the story ends there. Just another cautionary tale about the dangers of Gold Rush towns? Or was Polly Bartlett ever truly real? Sadly we cannot say for sure. Her lodge surrounded by graves is unknown today. Slaughterhouse Gulch is not just a lurid title but a real place in Colorado, not Wyoming. Other stories have her murderous inn situated in Vermont, and her father’s name keeps changing, from Jim to John, or Stephen. All that really seems to remain consistent through the stories is that there was a innkeeper called Polly Bartlett who, along with her father, poisoned visitors for their riches. Only the tales survive, and there is nothing contemporary to confirm she ever existed. Not much remains of South Pass City today. The former boom town is now ghost town, half frozen in time by the petrifying weather. What locals remain know of the story of Polly Bartlett, but here she is remembered as a folk hero, a legend rather than a real person. It would seem that the extent of the truth of her story, if indeed any of it is true, will remain a mystery forever. Header Image: Polly Bartlett is said to have killed 22 people, Wyoming’s first serial killer. That is, if she ever existed. Source: soliozuz / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.
Bezoar Stones, the Universal Antidote: More Than a Mistake?
It is fair to say that the history of medicine has been something of a hit and miss affair. Without modern technology to aid in our understanding of the root causes of ailments, there was a lot of guesswork and outright quackery in the mix for much of the time. This is not to say that it was anyone’s fault in particular. Our understanding of anatomy and biology was limited by technology: we did not conceive of germs, viruses or bacterial infections, for example, because we lacked the ability to find them. We might as well have believed in foul smelling swamp gases carrying disease, as indeed we did. In fact, we had only one proper process for the development of medicine, and that was trial and error. Much of our history of medicine is based on finding out what worked and using that, and as you might expect this was an imperfect science at best. It is true that we sometimes hit the nail on the head, often elevating our greatest discoveries almost to the status of religious doctrine. Our understanding of general hygiene, for instance, found itself intermingled with dogma, with illness resulting from careless hygiene being seen as god’s punishment. As an example. consider the wisdom of a Jewish or Islamic diet in a desert environment without refrigeration where pork and shellfish would be quick to spoil and germs could be easily passed from utensil to utensil. Seen through this lens the dietary restrictions were entirely prudent for the time, and although perhaps less essential in the modern world they survive as relics of ancient necessity. However, amidst these successes there were plenty of misidentifications, which largely came about through misunderstanding or even outright fakery. Sometimes however a mistake endures despite such errors, and sometimes it takes a signal moment or act to finally dispel these myths. So it was with bezoar stones, perhaps the grossest of all antidotes. Delicious! Bezoar stones are not the most appealing dietary supplement. These hard masses form in the intestines of humans and animals. In their simplest form they are accreted collections of undigested foods, but they can be formed by multiple processes, some harmless, some highly harmful. The word “bezoar” gives a hint as to how they were originally perceived. It comes from the Persian word pād-zahr (پادزهر), which literally translates to “antidote” and indeed such stones were seen as medicinal from at least the 11th century in the Middle East. The famous physician Ibn Zuhr considered them to have highly valuable medical properties, and the book of magic known as the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm also mentions them on several occasions. Both sources passed their knowledge to Europe in the 12th century, and it was through these that the west came to hear of these uses of bezoar stones. Bezoars recovered from various animals were used as prophylactics, placed into the bottom of drinking vessels. It was thought that any poison introduced into the drink would be neutralized by the bezoar, rendering the drink safe. The stones naturally became highly prized, and it was several centuries before the idea of them as a universal antidote faced any significant challenge. It only be in the late 16th century that the idea was finally quashed and it took a Frenchman and a practical demonstration to do so. The French surgeon Ambroise Paré, a forward thinking man aided by a more modern medical understanding than the 11th century Persians, had become convinced through his research that bezoar stones could not function as had been described. However to convince a skeptical public he needed something more concrete. Happily, he had a volunteer on which to experiment. A cook in the court of the French King Charles IX had been found guilty of a crime and sentenced to death. At Paré’s request he was permitted to avoid his sentence of hanging provided instead he submitted to drinking poison from a cup containing a bezoar stone. The cook may have expected to survive the poison cup but, if that were true, he was out of luck. After drinking from the cup with the bezoar stone he endured seven hours of gastrointestinal agony before finally perishing. The bezoar had done nothing to save him. In truth by this time there had been much doubt about the efficacy of bezoar stones. Certainly nobody in 16th century France would think to entirely rely on their supposed medicinal properties, but it took this final demonstration to, largely, consign them to history. But the question remains: why? Why had anyone assumed that a gastrointestinal blockage would have the power to render poisons harmless? Why had such a concept endured for so long, and so far into the modern age? Sometimes an old wives’ tale is just that, easily disproved. But sometimes at the heart of a myth there is a kernel of truth, a demonstrable core which survives even the microscopic examination of modern science. And so it is, or at least might be, with bezoar stones. In 2013, Gustaf Arrhenius and Andrew A. Benson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography revisited the idea of bezoar stones as an antidote to poison, and the conclusions they drew were surprising to say the least. Could bezoar stones neutralize poison? Amazingly, while ineffective against most poisons, they seemed to work when introduced to a liquid containing that most invisible and deadly poison of all: arsenic. Bezoar stones which had been immersed in a solution containing arsenic were found to react chemically with the lethal element in the liquid. The two actively toxic compounds in the drink: arsenite and arsenate, were both rendered harmless by the bezoar. Bezoars commonly contain undigested hair which work as nucleation sites for the stones, and the proteins which make up the hair contain compounds of sulfur. Arsenite in the solution will bind itself to these compounds, removing the toxic compound from the liquid. Bezoar stones also often contain something called “brushite”, a crystalline compound containing phosphor. The arsenate
