Reimund Holzhey was a legendary bandit who was captured in 1889 after committing what is said to be the last stagecoach robbery east of the Mississippi.
He wound up as a commercial photographer, wilderness guide, writer and intellectual.
But it was a long and winding road to get there.
Holzhey was widely known as the “Black Bart of the Northwoods,” a reference to a California bandit, who in turn adopted the nickname from a sensational 1871 newspaper serial. During a stagecoach robbery of his own in Gogebic County, Michigan, Holzhey killed one of the passengers in a close-quarters shootout.
He was captured a few days later in Marquette County, and returned to Bessemer, in the western Upper Peninsula, for trial.
The Ashland Weekly News proclaimed the arrest of Reimund Holzhay [sic] in the iron-mining town of Republic, Michigan. Image courtesy Michigan Tech archives.
Holzhey (seated) and his captors posed for a photo that was sold as a collectable souvenir. Image courtesy University of Michigan.
Holzhey was convicted of murder and armed robbery and got two life sentences.
He was sent to the state prison at Marquette, where he was a violent and unpredictable thorn in the side of warden Orison C. Tompkins. He attempted multiple escapes, went on hunger strikes, and even took a guard hostage at knifepoint in a desperate attempt to avoid interrogation by the warden. The tense standoff ended when the warden shot the knife out of Holzhey’s hand, severing all four of his fingers.
State House of Correction and Branch of the State Prison in the Upper Peninsula. Reimund Holhzey photo courtesy Jack Deo’s Superior View archives.
At some point, warden Tompkins realized that Holzhey’s bad behavior, blackouts, dizziness and seizures might be medically related. He sent Holzhey to the Michigan Asylum for the Criminal Insane in Ionia, where Holzhey underwent surgery to relieve pressure on his brain that may have been caused by a childhood skull fracture. He returned the the Marquette prison a completely changed man.
Post-op, Holzhey was a model inmate who became the prison librarian, official photographer, and editor of the prison newspaper, where he wrote philosophical treatises about the sociology of crime and punishment.
Reimund Holzhey (standing, center) in the Marquette prison library after his remarkable transformation from a violent miscreant into a placid, soft-spoken model citizen. Photo: Jack Deo’s Superior View archives.
Photography became Holzhey’s passion, along with literature and writing. His prison postcards were popular collector’s items and were sold commercially. They portrayed the Marquette prison as a peaceful rehabilitation center and studiously avoided the harsher aspects of prison life. At the time, he was using a complicated large-format view camera that demanded a high level of technical skill, patience and attention to detail.
One of Holzhey’s prison photos, in the form of a paperweight. Photo: Jack Deo’s Superior View archives.
James Russell, who succeeded Orison C. Tompkins as warden of the Marquette prison, was convinced that Holzhey was completely rehabiliated, and advocated for his release from prison. Governor Fred W. Warner commuted Holzhey’s life sentences in 1911 and Holzhey walked out of the Marquette prison on parole in 1913.
As the story goes, on his very first night as a free man, he refused to go to sleep. Instead, he spent the entire night outdoors, standing by the edge of Ives Lake in Michigan, quietly waiting to watch his first unrestricted sunrise in over two decades.
After his release, Holzhey spent the remaining 39 years of his life as a law-abiding citizen, with photography his enduring passion.
He opened a portrait studio in the city of Marquette under the name Carl Paul. It’s not clear whether the alias had any personal meaning to Holzhey, but it allowed him to avoid the stigma of his criminal past. He also worked as a landscape photographer and guide for the exclusive Huron Mountain Club, catering to wealthy vacationers. Then he moved out west, to Yellowstone National Park, where he lived for years, capturing scenic wilderness photos and selling them directly to tourists as souvenirs.
Finally, in 1932, Holzhey settled on Captiva Island, Florida, where he was a respected writer of short stories and commentaries, and a commercial photographer. He died there by suicide in 1952 after a long illness, at the age of 86.
Captiva Island sunset. Photo courtesy Doddee Johnson.
Reimund Holzhey’s distant relative, Tanja Holzhey, and Gabri van Tussenbroek, a European historian, have published a book about Holzhey (in Dutch and apparently out of print). They presented a detailed account of his life, derived from their book research, in a lecture you can watch on YouTube. My account of Holzhey’s life on Captiva Island is derived from that lecture.
Research for this article was facilitated by Google Gemini AI.
