Tom Bell (outlaw)
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- For other persons named Tom Bell, see Tom Bell (disambiguation).
Tom Bell (1825-October 4, 1856) was a western outlaw and physician known as the "Outlaw Doc".
Born Thomas J. Hodges in Rome, Tennessee he saw action in the Mexican-American War as a surgeon. Following the war he traveled to California during the California Gold Rush yet was unsuccessful as a prospector later drifting around California as a gambler and as a doctor at times for several years. In 1855 he was serving time in Angel Island Prison for robbery when he met Bill Gristy and successfully escaped several weeks later. With Gristy, Bell formed an outlaw gang of five men and began robbing stages for several months.
However on August 12, 1856 the gang attempted to rob a Camptonville-Maryville stage carrying $100,000 worth of gold bullion in which a woman passenger was killed and two male passengers were wounded before being driven off by the stagecoach guards. The robbery, particularly the death of a women passenger, caused a large scale manhunt for the gang including posses of lawmen and vigilantes alike in a massive search for the gang. By late September Gristy had been captured and, under threat of turning him over to the irate lynch mob outside the jail, confessed the location of Bell. The Sheriff of Stockton raced to arrest him but found Bell hanged outside Nevada City on October 4, 1856 an apparent victim of vigilante justice.
[edit] Resources
- Sinclair Drago, Road Agents and Train Robbers: Half a Century of Western Banditry, Dodd, New York, 1973
- Sifakis, Carl. Encyclopedia of American Crime, New York, Facts on File Inc., 1982
