The Criminal Life of Isaac M. Buzzard

This episode centers on the life and legend of Ike Buzzard, one of the most infamous members of the Buzzard Gang, a band of brothers who operated out of the rugged Welsh Mountains from the late 19th into the early 20th century. While the gang’s name became synonymous with outlaw folklore, Ike’s story reveals a far more complicated—and often violent—reality.

Rising from deep poverty, Ike graduated from petty theft to safe-cracking, armed robbery, and bloody confrontations with local posses. His criminal career included repeated arrests and stints in prison, including time at Eastern State Penitentiary. Among the most legendary chapters of his life was a daring jailbreak in which a trained canary was used to pass secret messages between cells—an episode that helped cement his reputation as the so-called “Jesse James of the East Coast.” The gang’s hideouts, including the rocky refuge at Blue Rock, added to the aura of invincibility that surrounded them.

Yet this episode looks beyond the myth. It examines Ike Buzzard as a product of his environment—shaped by isolation, economic hardship, and limited opportunity—while also confronting the real violence and consequences of his actions. In the end, Ike’s notoriety faded not in glory, but through imprisonment, aging, and the slow erosion of outlaw legend into historical record. Click here to read more.

For those who want to read the full account as Ike wrote it, a carefully restored edition of his 1897 autobiography, The Criminal Life of Isaac M. Buzzard: A True and Complete History of His Life, from Boyhood to the Present Day, is now available. This volume is a faithful reproduction of the original public-domain work, reconstructed through modern digital restoration to improve readability while preserving historical integrity. Currently available on Amazon for only $9.99.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:27

All right. Welcome back everyone to the deep dive.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Great to be here.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

So I want to start with a little uh a little thought experiment. When I say the word outlaw, you know, a real American legend, what pops into your head?

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Oh, immediately it's the West. It's the Wild West.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

Right. It's always the West.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Tumbleweeds, saloons with the swinging doors, you know, dusty plains.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Exactly. You're picturing Arizona or maybe New Mexico, the bad lands of the Dakotas. Your brain just automatically pulls up that map. You're thinking of guys named Billy or Butch.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Aaron Powell It's a geography that's been so romanticized, so cemented by Hollywood that it almost feels less like history and more like, well, mythology. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

It is mythology. But today we're going to challenge that geography entirely. We're going to look at a story that suggests the Wild West wasn't just a place. It was a time. It was a mindset.

SPEAKER_00 1:18

Aaron Powell And it was happening right in the backyard of what we think of as the civilized industrial East.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

Aaron Powell Incredibly, yes. We are talking about a group of outlaws who were once so notorious that newspapers dubbed them the Jesse James of the East.

SPEAKER_00 1:32

Aaron Powell It's a fascinating title, isn't it? When you hear that, it implies a level of infamy that should rival the biggest names in American criminal history.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Aaron Powell Absolutely. And these guys, they had the New York City Police Department on high alert. They had bounties on their heads that if you adjust for inflation, it would be life-changing money today. And yet their entire operation was based out of the rugged terrain of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Which is just wild to think about.

SPEAKER_01 2:00

It's so wild to me because when I think of Lancaster County, my mind goes straight to, you know, beautiful Amish farms, horse and buggies, Shuffly Pie. Shiffly pie, quilt shops. It's it's wholesome.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

It is today, for sure. But the story we're unpacking today, it involves a very, very different Lancaster. We're going to be focusing on Isaac Ike Buzzard and the notorious Buzzard gang.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

And what I think makes this deep dive so special is that we're not just piecing this together from, you know, dusty old police blotters or sensational newspaper clippers.

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Oh, we have plenty of those too.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Oh, we do. But we are basing a huge chunk of our discussion today on a voice from the inside. We have the man himself speaking to us.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

Aaron Powell We do. We're looking at the criminal life of Isaac M. Buzzard, his memoir, which is published on Valentine's Day, February 14th, 1897.

SPEAKER_01 2:49

Aaron Ross Powell That release date is just perfect.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

Aaron Powell A rather ironic choice, wouldn't you say? A book about burglary and prison breaks.

SPEAKER_01 2:56

Aaron Powell Nothing says I love you like a detailed guide to blowing up a safe. But the context of this book, I mean, it's just incredible. When this memoir comes out, Isaac, or Ike, as everyone knew him, he's living in a poor house.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

Aaron Powell Right, the Bergs County Almshouse.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

He's blind, he's paralyzed, and he's looking back on this life that was just frantic.

SPEAKER_00 3:15

Frantic is the perfect word. It's frantic, and in many ways, it's tragic. So the mission for us today is to really unpack that reality. We want to dig into Ike's life versus the um the dime novel mythology that sprang up around him and his brothers.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

Aaron Powell Yeah. How does the Civil War orphan transform into a career criminal? And then, you know, how does that career criminal become this blind, supposedly repentant man in an almshouse?

SPEAKER_00 3:39

Aaron Ross Powell And we have to ask that big question. How did a gang, this famous, this notorious, just fade from the national memory?

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Aaron Powell It's a great question. So before we get to Ike himself, let's set the scene. You mentioned this wasn't the Lancaster County of tourism brochures. We're talking specifically about a place called the Welsh Mountains.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Aaron Powell Yes. And a geography is absolute crucial here. The Welsh Mountains aren't, you know, massive like the Rockies, it's a ridge in Lancaster County. But historically it was a world apart.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

Aaron Ross Powell What do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Aaron Ross Powell Well, you have to understand that in the 19th century, this area was essentially a society on the Mullerhinds. The land is rugged, it's rocky, it's really difficult to farm. So the question becomes who ends up living there?

SPEAKER_01 4:23

Aaron Ross Powell The people who don't fit in anywhere else.

SPEAKER_00 4:25

Precisely. It became a refuge, a sanctuary of sorts. You had remnants of Native American tribes who'd been pushed off all the prime agricultural land in the valleys. You had escaped enslaved people crossing the Mason-Dixon line. And you have to remember, Pennsylvania is right there on the border of the South. They found safety in that rough, inaccessible terrain.

SPEAKER_01 4:44

Aaron Powell And then you had poor European settlers mixed in as well.

SPEAKER_00 4:48

Exactly. Scots, Irish, Welsh. People who just couldn't afford the rich, fertile soil that the Pennsylvania Dutch farmers had. So it becomes this unique melting pot.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

But not in a like a celebrated melting pot of America kind of way.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

No, not at all. It was a multiracial but overwhelmingly poverty-stricken community. And because it was so isolated and so poor, it developed a reputation.

SPEAKER_01 5:12

A bad one, I'm guessing.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

A very bad one. The wealthy farmers down in the valleys looked up at the Welsh Mountains with this mix of fear and frankly disdain. The local newspapers in Lancaster were not kind. They called it a slum, a haven for outlaws, a place of no good people.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

Which is the perfect breeding ground for an outlaw legend, isn't it? If society is already pointing a finger at you, telling you you're bad, that you don't belong, that the rules don't apply to your community.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

Well, eventually you might start to believe it. And that is the psychological crucible that Isaac Buzzard is born into. He enters the world in 1854. His parents are John and Marianne Buzzard. And his story, like so many stories from that era, really begins in the long shadow of the Civil War.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

We talk about the Civil War so often in terms of, you know, battles and generals and grand strategies. We don't always focus on the economic crater, it just blew into individual families.

SPEAKER_00 6:07

And that's the real story here. The father, John, he enlists. He joins the 79th Pennsylvania Volunteers, marches off to save the Union, but he never makes it back. He dies of disease down in Kentucky in 1862.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

So Ike is just a kid. He's what, eight years old?

SPEAKER_00 6:21

He's eight. And in an instant, Marianne is a widow, living in this impoverished, marginalized region, and she's trying to feed eight children, all by herself.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

Eight kids.

SPEAKER_00 6:30

Six boys and two girls. There's no social safety net. There's no GoFundMe for a war widow in the Welsh Mountains. There's just hunger.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

And this is where the story takes a turn that I found really, really heartbreaking. We call them the Buzzard Gang, which implies the brothers were the masterminds from the start. But the school of crime, as some have called it, was really opened by their mother.

SPEAKER_00 6:51

That's a harsh way to put it, but it's absolutely true. The first buzzard to be arrested isn't Ike or Abe. It's Marianne. She was working as a domestic for a man named El Maker, and she was caught stealing food.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

And we are not talking about like stealing the family's silver or jewels.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

No, absolutely not. The court records list what she stole. It was apple butter, lard, sausage. Basic staples. Just basic staples to feed her family. She wasn't stealing for profit. She was stealing to keep her children from starving. And for that, she got six months in prison.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

Six months for stealing lard.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

And there's one report, it's just astonishing, that at one point Marianne and all six of her sons were in the Lancaster County prison at the very same time.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

That is a family reunion you do not want to attend.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

Not at all.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

Wow. It just highlights the criminalization of poverty in such a stark way. The father's dead, serving his country. The mother is in jail for trying to feed her kids. Ike is basically cast adrift. And that's when the state steps in, right? He gets sent to these soldiers' orphan school.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

That's right. Because his father was a union soldier, he was eligible. He was sent to a school in Paradise first, then to the Mountjoy Soldiers Orphan School. Now, on the surface, you might think, oh, good. Structure, education, three meals a day.

SPEAKER_01 8:12

A better option than starving, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

But these places were often incredibly rigid, almost military-like environments. And this is where we see Ike's core personality really start to emerge. He describes himself in his own memoir as having an inclination for the sensational. I love that phrase. And a fearless and daring disposition.

SPEAKER_01 8:31

Which is a very polite nineteenth-century way of saying he was a handful.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

He was a huge handful. He hated the confinement, he chafed under the rules, he just wasn't built for that kind of authority.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

And he proves it in a very teenage way. He writes about being imprisoned in his room at the orphanage for two full days. And his crime.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

A great scandal of the age.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

Kissing a girl through the fence.

SPEAKER_00 8:52

Unbelievable. But locking a kid up for two days for that, it seems so excessive. And it clearly backfired. Yeah. Because instead of sitting in his room and repenting his, you know, scandalous behavior.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

He decides he's done. He's had enough.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

He is checking out. And it's December of 1869. There's a blizzard raging outside a classic Pennsylvania blizzard. And Ike decides this is the night.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

And the way he does it is just it's straight out of a movie. It really sets the tone for his entire life, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00 9:19

It's the prototype for all his future escapes. He tears his bid clues into strips, makes a rope.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

Standard procedure.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

Right. He climbs out the second story window. And you have to remember the detail he includes. He's wearing scanty asylum clothing. This is thin cotton.

SPEAKER_01 9:33

In a blizzard.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

In a blizzard. He drops into the snow and he walks. Without food, without proper clothes, for 27 miles back to the Walsh Mountains.

SPEAKER_01 9:43

That is just it's pure grit or stubbornness. Probably a mix of both.

SPEAKER_00 9:48

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 9:49

But think about the physical resilience required for a teenager to do that. It's astonishing. He gets back, he finds work on a farm, and he actually sticks with it for three years. But then he says something in the memoir that I think is the key to his entire life.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

I know exactly the line you're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 10:05

He says that farm life was irksome and quiet.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

Irksome, quiet.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

And that he longed for the sensational.

SPEAKER_00 10:12

That's the pivotal moment. That's the fork in the road. He could have stayed a farmhand, it was honest work, it was stable, but he was bored out of his mind. He craved excitement, drama, adrenaline. And in the Walsh Mountains, excitement usually meant one thing breaking the law. Yep. So around 1872, 1873, he makes the leap from, you know, teenage mischief to actual felony.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

And his first big score, or what was supposed to be a big score, was stealing wheat from a guy named Samuel Buckwalter. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 10:41

Not exactly a train robbery, is it? But it's the start of 15 bushels of wheat. And you have to remember this is heavy manual labor. Stealing wheat isn't easy.

SPEAKER_01 10:50

No, you're working up a sweat.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

They loaded it all up, and his accomplice took it to the town of Paradise to sell it. The plan was simple. Sell the wheat, split the proceeds.

SPEAKER_01 11:01

But as so often happens in these stories, the plan goes sideways.

SPEAKER_00 11:05

The accomplice gets caught.

SPEAKER_01 11:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:07

And he immediately, without hesitation, turns state's evidence and points the finger directly at Ike.

SPEAKER_01 11:13

Of course he does.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

So Ike gets arrested and he's sentenced to 15 months in the Lancaster County jail.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

And this is where the entire theory of the correctional system just completely backfires on them. Because the idea is you put a young man in jail, he gets scared straight, he learns his lesson, and he comes out a model citizen.

SPEAKER_00 11:31

Ike writes in his memoir that the exact opposite happened. He said that after the first few weeks, prison had no more terrors for him. Once that fear of the unknown was gone, once he realized, okay, I can survive this, it lost its power over him.

SPEAKER_01 11:45

So instead of scaring him straight, it just hardened him.

SPEAKER_00 11:47

It hardened him and it gave him 15 months of uninterrupted time to plan larger, more ambitious crimes.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

It was basically a criminal university. He's networking.

SPEAKER_00 11:55

Exactly. He met other thieves, he learned the tricks of the trade, he made connections. So when he finally gets out in April of 1874, he isn't rehabilitated. He's a graduate.

SPEAKER_01 12:04

And he hits the ground running.

SPEAKER_00 12:06

He immediately meets up with some friends who need help moving a load of stolen clothing. And that kicks off a spree that is just it's relentless for the next decade.

SPEAKER_01 12:16

So let's talk about that. Let's get into the modus operandi of the buzzard gang. Because reading Oak's memoir, he has this tone. He sounds almost like a craftsman. He takes a lot of pride in the technical details of how they operated.

SPEAKER_00 12:30

He really does. He doesn't see himself as just a smash and grab thug. He viewed himself as a professional, a technician.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

And he uses very specific language in the book to describe their methods. For example, he talks about boring a panel in a door.

SPEAKER_00 12:44

Right. So what does that actually mean?

SPEAKER_01 12:46

Lock us through it.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

Okay, so it involves using a tool called a brace and bit. It's basically a hand drill. You would use it to bore a series of small holes in a circular pattern on one of the wooden panels of a door.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

Until the wood is weak enough to break.

SPEAKER_00 13:00

Exactly. You weaken it enough that you can just pop that section of the panel out. Then you just reach your hand through the hole you've made and unlock the door from the inside.

SPEAKER_01 13:08

It's quiet, it's subtle, it's not just kicking a door down. It shows a certain level of finesse.

SPEAKER_00 13:14

It does. And then he talks about using nippers.

SPEAKER_01 13:16

I mean nippers. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 13:17

This is a really clever trick for when a homeowner is home and has left the key in the lock on the inside of their door.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

Which a lot of people did, right? For, you know, convenience.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

They did. But that means you can't pick the lock from the outside because the key is physically blocking the mechanism. So Ike would use what he called nippers, which are basically a pair of long, thin pliers to slide into the keyhole from the outside.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

No way.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

Yep. He'd grip the end of the key that's sticking out, turn it, and then often just push it out of the lock onto the floor inside, doors open.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

That is ingenious. It's like something out of a spy novel, but with, you know, 19th century tools.

SPEAKER_00 13:56

And then of course there was a high-tech crime of the era, safe blowing.

SPEAKER_01 13:59

The big one. But as we're going to see, their success rate with safes was say variable.

SPEAKER_00 14:08

That's a very diplomatic way of putting it.

SPEAKER_01 14:09

But he was determined to learn. I mean, he recounts stealing a safe from the Burden Hand Railroad Station, not for what was in it, but just to drag it into the woods and practice breaking it open.

SPEAKER_00 14:18

It's RD. He's doing research and development on safes.

SPEAKER_01 14:22

He wanted to know the anatomy of a safe so he'd know exactly where to drill the holes for the gunpowder in the future.

SPEAKER_00 14:28

He's reverse engineering the technology.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

But there's another aspect of their supposed code that Ike is very, very insistent on in his book. He claims repeatedly that he never stole a horse to sell it.

SPEAKER_00 14:41

This is a fascinating bit of self-marketing, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 14:43

It really is. He says he only borrowed them to, quote, hasten an escape, and then he would just turn them loose to find their own way back to their owners.

SPEAKER_00 14:51

And you have to understand the context here. In the 19th century, horse theft was a major, major crime. In many places, it was a hanging offense. Or at the very least, it was the kind of thing that would get you lynched by an angry mob.

SPEAKER_01 15:05

Right. Burglary was bad, but stealing a man's horse was stealing his entire livelihood.

SPEAKER_00 15:10

So do we buy his claim? Is he telling the truth? Or is he just trying to retroactively soften his image to avoid being labeled a common horse thief?

SPEAKER_01 15:20

It sounds a little bit like he's trying to be Robin Hood. You know, I'm not a horse thief, I'm just a a commuter with a deadline.

SPEAKER_00 15:25

It's definitely a bit of branding. Now, the historian Michael Zimmerman, who's studied this gang for decades, he points out that while they often did abandon horses after a chase, they were absolutely involved in organized horse thefts. But Ike, in his telling, he frames it as a necessity of the job, not malice against the farmers. He wants the reader to think, well, okay, he wasn't that bad.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Well, let's talk about some of these jobs because for every moment of master criminal finesse where he's boring panels and using nippers, there seems to be a corresponding Keystone Cops moment.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

The memoir is surprisingly honest about their failures. That's what makes it so readable and frankly so believable. He doesn't just brag about the successes. Take the Lebanon County Ironworks heist. They travel all the way up there, they break in, they blow the safe.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

And they get $900 in paper money, which for the time is a huge haul.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

It's a great score. But Ike admits, with some bitterness, that he found out later there was a false bottom in that safe. And in that false bottom was $1,000 in gold that they completely missed.

SPEAKER_01 16:33

Oh, that has to hurt. You're out celebrating the $900, and then you find out you left the real treasure behind.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

It has to be infuriating.

SPEAKER_01 16:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

But maybe not as infuriating as the Oxford coal office job.

SPEAKER_01 16:44

Oh, this one's a classic.

SPEAKER_00 16:45

They blow a safe, they spend an hour working on it, drilling the holes, carefully packing the gunpowder. Boom. And what do they get for their efforts?

SPEAKER_01 16:53

Tell me. 50 cents.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

50 cents. That barely covers the cost of the gunpowder.

SPEAKER_01 16:57

They almost certainly lost money on that job. It's a net loss. But that's not even the most embarrassing one. We have to talk about the left-footed shoe incident. Now, this one isn't in Ike's memoir quite so explicitly, but historical records and Zimmerman's research really highlight it.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

It's just comedy gold. They rob a cargo of shoes. They think they've hit the absolute jackpot. Shoes were valuable commodities. Sure. So they get the crates back to their hideout or wherever they're checking the loot. They pry them open. And they realize that every single shoe in every single crate is for the left foot.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

Wait, why? How does that even happen?

SPEAKER_00 17:35

It was likely a sample shipment, or more likely it was a manufacturing transport where they shipped the left and the rights separately.

SPEAKER_01 17:41

To prevent theft?

SPEAKER_00 17:42

To prevent this exact kind of theft, ironically.

SPEAKER_01 17:45

Oh, the irony is just beautiful. Can you imagine the scene? You're an outlaw, you've risked your life, you finally get the crate open, and it's just a mountain of left shoes. You can't even sell them. Who is gonna buy a single left shoe?

SPEAKER_00 17:57

It really, really undercuts the genius criminal narrative that Ike sometimes tries to build. And then there's the slang party holdup.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

This one is just chaotic.

SPEAKER_00 18:06

They're robbing a store in Musser County, Ohio, because they traveled all over the place, and they find only three copper pennies in the safe. Just three pennies.

SPEAKER_01 18:15

Who are already frustrated?

SPEAKER_00 18:16

They're furious. And just as they're about to leave, empty-handed, a sleigh pulls up outside the store.

SPEAKER_01 18:22

A slang party, just you know, people up for a nice winter ride, singing carols, probably.

SPEAKER_00 18:27

Exactly. And Ike says they fired a shot in the air to scare them, ran outside, held up the entire party, about a dozen men and women, and got some watches and maybe $25.

SPEAKER_01 18:37

It's so improvised. It's not the smooth operation of a mastermind gang. It's just desperate men scrambling for whatever cash they can find.

SPEAKER_00 18:46

And it was physically dangerous. We tend to romanticize this lifestyle, but Ike took a lot of physical damage over the years. The Sheenig Hotel robbery is a prime example. This is a pivotal moment for his later life.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

It really is. What happened there?

SPEAKER_00 18:59

It was a simple job. They robbed a hotel bar, tapped the till for about six dollars, and a demijon of whiskey. As they're leaving, a neighbor across the street sees them, opens a window, and just opens fire with a shotgun.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

Just a citizen taking the law into his own hands.

SPEAKER_00 19:16

Yep. And Ike gets shot in the back and in the head. His accomplice gets shot in the eye and is blinded in that eye for life.

SPEAKER_01 19:22

Hank survives, obviously, but he claims in the memoir that this injury, the buckshot to his head, is what eventually caused his total blindness later in life.

SPEAKER_00 19:31

Which is medically plausible, or at least he certainly believes it was. It just shows you the cumulative toll of this life. They were constantly getting shot at, chased, injured. There were no antibiotics, there were no trauma centers, they were in the woods digging buckshot out of each other with a knife.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

And speaking of the woods, we have to talk about their hideout. The blue rocks, this place sounds like something straight out of a fantasy novel.

SPEAKER_00 19:53

It really does. The Welsh Mountains have this geologic anomaly. It's this field of huge boulders just piled on top of each other. And Ike and his brother Aid describe it as a natural fortress.

SPEAKER_01 20:05

So it was defensible.

SPEAKER_00 20:06

Absolutely. Massive boulders, narrow passageways only one person could get through at a time. And they claimed there was a cave underneath the largest of these stones. They called it the Blue Cave, where they could store their loop and sleep, completely hidden.

SPEAKER_01 20:21

And the strategic advantage of that location must have been huge.

SPEAKER_00 20:24

Oh, it was perfect. A buzzard bragged that from the top of the blue rocks they could see the electric lights of Lancaster City, which were a new thing at the time. They could spot a posse's lanterns coming for them from miles away.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

Which gave them plenty of time to disappear.

SPEAKER_00 20:38

Plenty of time. The legend says they had a massive boulder that they could roll over the entrance to the caves, making it completely invisible to anyone who didn't know exactly where to look.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

Isn't the cave still there? Can you go visit the buzzard bat cave?

SPEAKER_00 20:52

Unfortunately, no. Zimmerman, the historian, he notes that the cave most likely collapsed or was deliberately dynamited in the 1930s.

SPEAKER_01 21:00

Why would they do that?

SPEAKER_00 21:01

Probably the state did it to stop people or, you know, adventurous kids from getting hurt trying to find it or playing outlaw. But the rock formation itself is still there. You can go and see the fortress, even if the secret layer is gone.

SPEAKER_01 21:14

So they have the skills, sort of. They have the hideout, they have the attitude. But eventually the law catches up. And this leads us to what is arguably the most famous, most legendary story associated with the Buzzard game.

SPEAKER_00 21:28

The Canary Break.

SPEAKER_01 21:29

October 10th, 1883.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

This is the story that cemented their legend. If you only remember one thing about Ike Buzzard, this is usually it.

SPEAKER_01 21:38

Okay, so set the scene for us. Ike and his brother Abe are both locked up in Lancaster County prison.

SPEAKER_00 21:43

Right. Now Ike has been in for a little while, and because prisons were run a bit differently back then, it's actually made his cell quite comfortable. I mentioned he put down carpet. And crucially, he's been allowed to raise canaries.

SPEAKER_01 21:54

Which in itself is just wild. No, you're a career criminal who keeps escaping from our facilities. Sure, here, have some fragile little birds to keep you company.

SPEAKER_00 22:02

It's a different time, different rules. So Ike has a mother canary and some chicks. His brother Abe is in a cell just across the corridor. And over time, Ike painstakingly trains the mother bird to fly between his cell and Abe's cell.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

How do you even train a canary to do that? I can't even get my dog to sit consistently.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

I have no idea. Patience, I assume. Maybe he moved the chicks back and forth so the mother would follow her instinct? But whatever the method, he gets it to work. And he starts using this bird to pass notes to Abe. He ties tiny little scraps of paper to the bird's leg.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

That is incredible. It's literally tweet messaging a century before Twitter.

SPEAKER_00 22:40

It is. And this tiny bird is the secret courier for the entire escape plan. The timing was also perfect. Ike knew that on that specific night there was a huge prize fight happening in Lancaster City.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

John L. Sullivan versus Slade.

SPEAKER_00 22:54

The heavyweight championship bout. This was the Super Bowl of 1883. The whole country was obsessed with John L. Sullivan.

SPEAKER_01 23:00

And Ike knew that meant the guards would be distracted.

SPEAKER_00 23:03

Distracted is an understatement. The warden of the prison, a man in Burke Holder, actually went to the fight himself.

SPEAKER_01 23:09

He just left the prison understaffed.

SPEAKER_00 23:10

Severely understaffed. One guard, Edward Sample, was actually inside a cell getting a haircut from one of the inmates. The other guard on duty, Amos Lutz, was making the rounds.

SPEAKER_01 23:21

The stage is set, so how does Ike trigger the escape?

SPEAKER_00 23:24

He uses the bird as the bait. He calls the guard, Amos Lutz, over to his cell, and he holds up the birdcage. He asks Lutz if he would mind transferring the birdcage over to Abe's cell for the night.

SPEAKER_01 23:35

Such an innocent request.

SPEAKER_00 23:37

Totally innocent. So Lutz, completely unsuspecting, unlocks Ike's cell door to take the cage. The second the door is open, Ike bursts out, overpowers him, shoves him into the cell, and locks the door.

SPEAKER_01 23:49

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 23:50

Then he runs over to the cell where the other guard is still in the barber's chair getting his hair cut. He slams that door shut and locks it. Just like that, he has the keys, and the only two guards on duty are locked in cells. He releases Abe and then about ten other long-term prisoners.

SPEAKER_01 24:04

It's brilliant. It's so clean, but there's one obstacle left, isn't there?

SPEAKER_00 24:08

The dog.

SPEAKER_01 24:09

Bruno.

SPEAKER_00 24:09

The prison dog. Bruno, the prison dog. Now, up until this point, Ike has this image, right? He's the gentle birdman, the guy who lovingly trains canaries.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

But what happens to Bruno is not gentle at all.

SPEAKER_00 24:21

No. They get to the back gate and Bruno confronts them. The dog is just doing its job. Ike writes in the memoir that he had a key in his hand, probably the main gate key that weighed about 10 pounds. A massive piece of iron. And he strikes the dog over the head with it.

SPEAKER_01 24:37

Oh man.

SPEAKER_00 24:38

Bruno was knocked senseless. He lingered for a few weeks, but he eventually died from the injury.

SPEAKER_01 24:43

That's a brutal detail. It really is.

SPEAKER_00 24:45

It is. And it's such a sharp contrast to the clever, gentle trickster image. It's a reminder that these were violent, desperate men. They killed the dog to get away.

SPEAKER_01 24:55

Yeah. It's easy to laugh about the left-footed shoes and the fifty cent safes, but they beat a dog to death with a key. That's the reality check.

SPEAKER_00 25:02

Exactly. So in the end, twelve men escape. To this day, it remains one of the largest jailbreaks in the history of Lancaster County.

SPEAKER_01 25:09

And they just scatter to the winds?

SPEAKER_00 25:10

They scatter. Ike and Abe. They immediately cut the telephone wires so no one in Lancaster can call ahead to other towns. Then they head for the safety of the Welsh Mountains.

SPEAKER_01 25:21

And what's funny is their brother, Joe Buzzard, was also in on the plan, right? But he backed out.

SPEAKER_00 25:26

He did. He was also in the prison, but he decided to just stay in his cell because his sentence was almost up. He figured it wasn't worth ruining his upcoming release date.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

He did the math, maybe the smartest buzzard of the bunch.

SPEAKER_00 25:39

Perhaps. But this escape, it made national news. The New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, everyone covered the Buzzard Gang. This is the moment they really hit the peak of their notoriety.

SPEAKER_01 25:50

Aaron Powell, so this seems like a good time to talk about the dynamic between the brothers. We focused a lot on Ike, and his memoir is our main source. But Abe Buzzard, he seems to be the one who really captured the public's imagination.

SPEAKER_00 26:01

Aaron Powell Abe was the front man.

SPEAKER_01 26:03

He was the one they called the Jesse James of the East.

SPEAKER_00 26:05

Aaron Ross Powell Right. If Ike was the quiet mechanic, the planner, the technician, Abe was the charismatic ringleader. He was the face of the operation. He had the highest bounties on his head. At one point, $1,000, later raised to $5,000. That's an astronomical sum for the 1880s.

SPEAKER_01 26:22

Aaron Powell And Abe had a very specific con, a very unique persona that he used. He liked to play the preacher.

SPEAKER_00 26:27

The preacher con. It's like something out of a movie.

SPEAKER_01 26:30

Tell us about this because it's just so audacious.

SPEAKER_00 26:33

It is. Abe would get out of prison, or sometimes even while he was on the run, and he would suddenly claim he had found religion. He'd been saved. A redemption story. Right. And he would hold revivals. He would preach these fiery sermons to huge crowds of people. He would even sign Bibles, which by the way were usually stolen Bibles, and he'd give them away to his adoring fans.

SPEAKER_01 26:55

And people bought this. They believed him.

SPEAKER_00 26:57

People love a redemption story. They wanted to believe that the bad man had finally turned good. But the hypocrisy of it was just staggering. Because while he was preaching, there are multiple reports that while Abe was up on the pulpit preaching a sermon about the evils of sin, his gang, or maybe even Abe himself later that night would be robbing the homes of the very people who are in the audience.

SPEAKER_01 27:19

That is just diabolical.

SPEAKER_00 27:21

He knew they weren't home. They were all sitting there listening to him preach about salvation. It's a level of cynicism that is just hard to wrap your head around.

SPEAKER_01 27:29

It really is. And unlike Ike, who seemed to have this sort of workmanlike approach to crime, Abe clearly loved the spotlight, the performance. But there was a much darker, more violent edge to the family, too. We have to talk about Martin Buzzers.

SPEAKER_00 27:44

Marty, yes. He is the one who really strips away any romantic myth of the nonviolent gentleman thief.

SPEAKER_01 27:50

This is the Isaiah Schaefer home invasion, right? In 1893.

SPEAKER_00 27:53

Yes. Martin breaks into the home of an 85-year-old farmer named Isaiah Schaefer. The old man actually fights back. He grabs a fire poker to defend himself.

SPEAKER_01 28:00

Good for him.

SPEAKER_00 28:01

But Martin just pulls out a gun and shoots him in the head.

SPEAKER_01 28:03

An 85-year-old man. Over what? How much money did they get?

SPEAKER_00 28:06

$60.

SPEAKER_01 28:08

$60. He shoots a senior citizen in the head for $60.

SPEAKER_00 28:12

Miraculously, Schaefer survived.

SPEAKER_01 28:15

Right.

SPEAKER_00 28:15

The bullet didn't kill him. But this event, it caused a massive rift in the family. Martin was caught, and to save his own skin, he tried to blame Abe for the whole thing. He told the police Aid was the one who pulled the trigger.

SPEAKER_01 28:28

So the brothers became estranged after that.

SPEAKER_00 28:31

Completely. It really shows you that for all the talk of a gang, there was no real honor among thieves when the heat was truly on.

SPEAKER_01 28:38

And we also have to talk about the shootouts. Because for a gang that has this reputation for not killing anyone, they sure fired a lot of bullets at people. The Lincoln gunfight sounds like a scene straight out of a Western movie.

SPEAKER_00 28:50

It does. This was after the canary break. Abe and an accomplice, they rob a store in the town of Lincoln. A posse forms, headed by the store owner himself. They catch up to them in a field, and it just turns into this two-mile running gun battle.

SPEAKER_01 29:04

So they're running, stopping to reload, firing back at the posse.

SPEAKER_00 29:07

Exactly. And at one point, Abe turns around and shoots a banker named Ellis Bard right in the face.

SPEAKER_01 29:12

In the face.

SPEAKER_00 29:13

Bard survives. He loses some teeth. He also takes a bullet to the chest, but he survives. And this is the recurring theme with them. They shot people constantly. People shot them constantly, but rarely did anyone actually die in the moment.

SPEAKER_01 29:26

So it's pure luck, basically.

SPEAKER_00 29:28

It's just luck. And it contributed to this weird, undeserved, non-lethal reputation.

SPEAKER_01 29:34

Right. It's basically a long string of attempted murder charges, but because they often failed at the murder part, they get remembered as chicken thieves.

SPEAKER_00 29:42

Aaron Powell That's the point Zimmerman argues so passionately. They're often remembered as these petty, almost comical thieves. But they were dangerous felons who absolutely terrorized the community. People in Lancaster County slept with loaded guns under their pillows because of the buzzard gang.

SPEAKER_01 29:58

So Ike is part of all this chaos. He's on the run, he's escaping from other prisons. He apparently tunneled under a furnace once, tried to use nitric acid to melt the bars on another occasion.

SPEAKER_00 30:08

He was relentless.

SPEAKER_01 30:09

He's getting shot at. A dinner knife?

SPEAKER_00 30:25

That's the story. He makes his way to Chicago. And where does he go? The man who longs for the sensational. He goes to a circus. Four paws circus.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

He just can't help himself. He loves a spectacle.

SPEAKER_00 30:38

He does. And that is his undoing. He's standing there in the crowd, watching the show, and a man taps him on the shoulder. It's a former inmate named Patrick Doyle, who had served time with Ike back in Lancaster.

SPEAKER_01 30:50

The one person in the entire city of Chicago who knows his face.

SPEAKER_00 30:54

What are the odds? And Doyle, seeing a chance to get some reward money, betrays him. He turns him into the police.

SPEAKER_01 30:59

Does Doyle get the reward?

SPEAKER_00 31:01

This is the one small moment of victory Ike allows himself in the book. He writes with great satisfaction that Patrick Doyle got absolutely nothing.

SPEAKER_01 31:08

Ah.

SPEAKER_00 31:09

Because Ike denied his identity. He swore up and down he wasn't Isaac Buzzard. It took a week for the sheriff from Lancaster to get to Chicago to formally identify him, and by then the Chicago police had just stiffed Doyle on the reward. Ike was hauled back to Pennsylvania, but his betrayer didn't get a dime.

SPEAKER_01 31:28

Spite is a powerful, powerful thing. So Ike goes back to prison, and this time they send him to Eastern State Penitentiary.

SPEAKER_00 31:35

The big house. This is a serious, serious prison. It was built on the principle of solitary confinement, total silence. It was designed to break men.

SPEAKER_01 31:43

But Ike survives it. He even works as a nurse and a hospital steward in the prison, which is an interesting detail. He learned some medical skills, and he's finally released in 1892.

SPEAKER_00 31:53

But then tragedy strikes. Or maybe you just have to call it consequences.

SPEAKER_01 31:57

Right. He gets out and he returns to what he himself calls a life of dissipation. He's drinking heavily, partying, and his eyesight begins to fail rapidly.

SPEAKER_00 32:06

He goes blind. And he's convinced it was a direct result of that old gunshot wound to the head, accelerated by his hard living. By 1897, he is completely destitute. He's blind. He's paralyzed. And he's living in the Berks County Almshouse.

SPEAKER_01 32:21

And this is where he writes the book. Or more accurately, he dictates it to someone. And the tone of the ending, of the epilogue, is so interesting because he claims to be the happiest man alive.

SPEAKER_00 32:32

It's a fascinating contradiction, isn't it? He's in a poor house, he's physically broken, his nothing. But he claims to have found spiritual redemption. He says, I shuddered at the edge of a great precipice, but now that I have thoroughly repented, I feel happy.

SPEAKER_01 32:46

He essentially argues that his blindness is a blessing in disguise.

SPEAKER_00 32:49

Yes. He says it's a blessing because it physically prevents him from ever committing another crime. His body has imprisoned him in a way no jail ever could.

SPEAKER_01 32:57

Do we believe him? Is the repentance genuine?

SPEAKER_00 33:00

It's so hard to say. On one hand, he dictates this memoir as a warning to other young men not to follow his path. On the other hand, the book is filled with these detailed, almost proud descriptions of how to crack safes and escape from prisons.

SPEAKER_01 33:14

He's selling a story. She needed the money from the book sales, or at the very least, he wanted to leave a legacy that wasn't just thug.

SPEAKER_00 33:21

It feels like he's trying to reclaim his own narrative. I wasn't just a petty criminal. I was a clever outlaw who found God in the end.

SPEAKER_01 33:28

It's a performance. Just like Abe's preaching was a performance. But it gives us this incredible window into his mind at the end of his life.

SPEAKER_00 33:36

It absolutely does.

SPEAKER_01 33:37

So let's zoom out. We have this gang, the Buzzards. They were a big deal in their time. National news. So why are they forgotten? Why isn't Ike Buzzard on a t-shirt like Billy the Kid is?

SPEAKER_00 33:47

I think there are a few key reasons. First, and maybe most importantly, is geography. They were Eastern outlaws in an era where the entire national mythology was being built around the West. The Wild West was a brand. The Wild East just sounded like, well, poverty and slums.

SPEAKER_01 34:02

That makes a lot of sense. We want our outlaws to be cowboys, not desperate guys from the Pennsylvania Hills.

SPEAKER_00 34:07

Exactly. Second, the nature of their crimes. For the most part, they didn't successfully rob banks. They didn't hold up trains in that spectacular fashion of the James Younger gang. They rob neighbors, general stores, farmers.

SPEAKER_01 34:20

So it felt less like sticking it to the man and more like stealing from your own community.

SPEAKER_00 34:25

Precisely. And the third reason, ironically, is the lack of a body count. Because they didn't kill a sheriff in a dramatic duel or die in a hail of billets and a famous last stand, their story just sort of fizzles out.

SPEAKER_01 34:39

They died in poorhouses or mental hospitals. I think Joe Buzzard died in an asylum as late as 1948.

SPEAKER_00 34:46

Right. It's a whimpering inn, not a banging one. And that doesn't make for a good legend.

SPEAKER_01 34:50

But their descendants are still around, right, in the area?

SPEAKER_00 34:53

They are. Michael Zimmerman, the historian, he mentions that many descendants still live in Lancaster County, and they're upstanding citizens, roadmasters, community members. For a long time there was a real shame associated with the name. People hid the connection.

SPEAKER_01 35:07

But now there's more of a curiosity.

SPEAKER_00 35:09

Exactly. People want to know about these wild, notorious ancestors.

SPEAKER_01 35:12

And the Welsh Mountains themselves, the place that bred this gang has changed too.

SPEAKER_00 35:16

Completely transformed. It's no longer the slum that the newspapers described. It's a regular community. The caves are gone or sealed, the shacks are gone. But the legend, the story, it still hangs in the air there if you know where to look.

SPEAKER_01 35:31

It is such a rich story. You've got the Civil War trauma, the deep poverty, the unique racial dynamics of the Welsh Mountains, the sheer ingenuity of the escapes, and then the just pathetic tragedy of the end.

SPEAKER_00 35:45

And you have the memoir. That's the artifact that keeps Ike alive. It's a time capsule. When you read it, you aren't just reading about crimes. You're reading about 19th century prison life, the ironclad cells, the bread and water diets, the sheer brutality of the justice system.

SPEAKER_01 35:59

And the canary.

SPEAKER_00 36:01

It is the defining image, isn't it? A hardened criminal holding this tiny, delicate bird and using it to trick a guard and break out of a fortress. There's something almost poetic about it.

SPEAKER_01 36:11

There really is. So as we wrap up this deep dive into the life of Isaac Buzzard, I want to leave you, the listener, with the final thought to chew on. We love our outlaw heroes in America. We love the clever escapes, the defiance of authority, but Ike's story it forces us to look at the real cost.

SPEAKER_00 36:32

The cost to the broken families, the terrorized neighbors, the banker who got shot in the face, the dead prison dog.

SPEAKER_01 36:38

And the man himself, blind and paralyzed at age 42, stuck in a poorhouse, insisting that he's finally happy because he's finally stopped running.

SPEAKER_00 36:46

So the question is does the so-called non-lethal nature of their crimes make them misunderstood folk heroes? Or does the terror they inflicted on their community make them villains that we've rightfully forgotten?

SPEAKER_01 36:58

That's something for you to mull over. It's a question of whether we value the story more than the reality.

SPEAKER_00 37:02

Deep thoughts for a deep dive.

SPEAKER_01 37:04

Thanks for listening, everyone. We'll catch you on the next one.