Edward Bonney Frontier Thief Turned Detective

Edward Bonney at Mother Long's (unfortunately Bonney
never posed for a portrait. This image is from his book.)

Edward Bonney came to Nauvoo in the spring of 1844 with a half-smile and a forged past. He’d been a miller, a hotel keeper, and a counterfeiter. Now he was playing saint among saints. The city was busy building heaven on earth, but under the hymns and handshakes was a different congregation—men who printed money at night and buried bodies by day. Bonney recognized the smell. He’d once reeked of it himself.

 The Hodges were the first cracks in the holy façade. William and Stephen—farm-boy faces, dead eyes. They’d killed a man during a robbery gone wrong, then tried to hide behind the good name of the Saints. Iowa wanted blood. Burlington got it. 

 

The gallows went up behind the courthouse. The crowd pressed close, hungry for justice or entertainment—it was hard to tell. One brother prayed aloud; the other cursed the sheriff. When the trap fell, the sound was short and heavy, like a door slamming on the frontier’s soul. 

 Bonney watched, silent. He understood what came next. The prairie was full of men like them—bold, desperate, and stupid enough to think they could outrun judgment.

 

He’d been in trouble himself once, down in Ohio, caught with counterfeit silver half-dollars. He’d talked his way out of jail, headed west, and promised himself he’d go straight. But the straight path was narrow, and the crooked road was familiar. 

 

Bonney was a member of the Mormon Council of Fifty, and served 
as an aide-de-camp to Joseph Smith in the Nauvoo Legion

When Colonel George Davenport was murdered in his Rock Island home the following year, Bonney didn’t hesitate. He read about it in the Davenport papers—“Foul Murder on the Fourth of July!”—and felt the old heat rise in his blood. The Banditti of the Prairie, they called the gang. Robbers, horse thieves, counterfeiters, killers. They hid in the same shadows he used to live in. If anyone could find them, it was him.

 

He slipped back into his old skin—the counterfeiter, the outlaw, the liar. It fit too easily. He knew how to talk to the banditti. He knew their greed, their jokes, their cowardice. He carried forged bills, rode cheap horses, and asked the right wrong questions. In taverns, he listened. A man bragged about Rock Island. Another mentioned a safe. Another whispered the name Birch.

 

Robert Birch—“Three-Fingered Birch”—wore a preacher’s coat and a thief’s grin. He’d lost part of a hand in some half-remembered crime. Bonney bought him whiskey, nodded through the stories. Birch talked about an old man who wouldn’t open his safe. “We made him tell us,” he said, laughing into the glass. Bonney smiled, too, and memorized every word.

 

He followed Birch across the state line, pretending to be a partner in crime. They slept in barns, traded lies for trust. Bonney wrote nothing down. Paper could hang a man. He kept it all in his head—the names, the towns, the horses, the sound of Birch’s voice when he talked about blood.

 

Then came the Long brothers. John and Aaron. One quiet, one full of rage. They’d helped Birch with the Davenport job, then scattered. Bonney tracked them through back roads and brothels. He pretended to have stolen goods to sell, and waited until they bit. When the time came, he slipped away in the dark and sent word to the law.

 

The bandits terrorized Colonel George Davenport
in his home on Rock Island

Then he started reeling them in. He dangled bait—the promise of a grander scheme. He told them he had counterfeit plates stashed in a river town, and a contact who’d lined up a real prize: a bank job big enough to make Davenport’s loot look like pocket change.

 

“I want men who aren’t afraid of the rope,” he said, just loud enough to be heard. It worked. The outlaws came sniffing. Bonney played them like fish. He let them see the edges of the plan, never the hook. They bragged about their past jobs, about Rock Island, about the colonel who “wouldn’t tell us where the good stuff was till he felt the fire.” Bonney nodded, poured another round, and thought, Got you.

 

In his book, he said, “They thought me one of their own. I let them. It was a hard part to play, the serpent among serpents.” Another passage captured the tension perfectly: “It was a cold game, and I played it close. I slept with men who would have slit my throat for a dime and thought it a good night’s work.”

 

A drunken Birch invited him to join the next raid. “We’ll take your man in Iowa first,” he said. “Then we’ll get the bank. Davenport was nothing compared to what’s coming.” Bonney agreed, knowing the noose was already waiting for them.

 

He tipped off the authorities quietly, through coded notes left in the care of a friendly innkeeper in Montrose. Within days, the Long brothers were in irons. Birch ran but couldn’t run far. Granville Young was caught in a cornfield outside Galena, pistol empty, boots half off. The trial drew crowds. Farmers hitched their wagons in rows outside the courthouse. The Burlington Hawkeye described them as “a collection of rogues who met justice with blank stares and trembling knees.”

 

The hangings came fast. The Longs and Young were tried, convicted, and sentenced within weeks. Birch turned state’s evidence and disappeared. On execution day, the crowd packed tight under a gray sky. The condemned men stood pale and trembling. Someone sang a hymn off-key. One rope snapped when the trap fell, and the crowd gasped. The hangman reset it. The second drop held. Bonney turned away before their legs stopped moving.

 

He went home and wrote it all down. The Banditti of the Prairies. He didn’t pretty it up. “I entered their dens,” he wrote. “I heard their oaths. I counted their dollars. I saw the fire in their eyes.” He described the chase like a fever dream—mud, whiskey, gunmetal, and guilt. He wrote about Birch’s smirk, the Longs’ shaking hands, the smell of Davenport’s house. He wrote about what it felt like to be one of them, even as he hunted them down.

 

When the book came out, people read it by candlelight, wide-eyed. The Davenport Gazette said it was “a grim mirror held to our own frontier,” and the Burlington Hawkeye called it “the truest tale of villainy ever printed west of the Mississippi.” Bonney didn’t bask in the praise. He’d seen the other side of the frontier—what law looked like when it had to fight dirty.

 

He drifted again after that. Tried his hand at business, failed. Took a wife, lost her. When the war came, he enlisted with a bad leg and a worse conscience. At Vicksburg, he was shot through the hip and dragged from the field half-dead. The army sent him home, but he never really left the fight. He died in Chicago in 1864, poor, broken, and mostly forgotten.

 

He left behind no fortune, no portrait, only that book—a confession disguised as justice. “The law,” he wrote near the end, “is only as strong as the man who dares to carry it into the dark.” Edward Bonney did just that. He went where the lawmen wouldn’t go, told lies to catch killers, and stared straight into the mean heart of the prairie until it blinked first.