The Criminal Life of Isaac M. Buzzard

It begins in a blizzard.

A fifteen-year-old boy sits confined in his room at the Mount Joy Soldier’s Orphan School, punished for kissing a girl through the fence. Outside, the wind drives snow into every nook and corner, the kind of storm Pennsylvanians know well, the kind that makes even the stubborn hurry. As midnight approaches, the boy tears his bedclothes into strips and braids them into a rope. He lowers himself from a second-story window wearing little more than the clothes on his back. Then he walks.

He travels through the night and into the next day without food. By the time he reaches the Welsh Mountains, twenty-seven miles from Mount Joy, he is not a runaway boy so much as a creature powered by determination. He finds work on a farm and stays for three years.

That boy is Isaac M. Buzzard.

He tells you this himself, in the opening pages 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.

Buzzard was born in 1854, one of eight children. His father died when he was eight. His mother struggled to keep the family afloat. When he was twelve, he was sent to the Soldiers’ Orphan School at Paradise, and when that school disbanded, he was transferred to Mount Joy. He escaped from Mount Joy three times and was punished each time. In the book, he frames those early years with a blunt self-awareness, writing that he had “an inclination for the sensational,” that he was fearless and daring, and that he took to “the crooked life as a fish to the water.”

It is tempting to treat that line as swagger, but his narrative has the rhythm of someone who believes the record matters. He promises a “condensed but true account” of his criminal life, in prison and out. He insists he will not name names, except for those who received stolen goods and a few who were caught. He also pauses to defend himself on one point that must have followed him like a shadow. He was often accused of stealing horses, he says, but he claims he stole them only to speed escape, then turned them loose to return home. He never stole a horse to sell or trade.

When he leaves the farm life behind, it is not because he is starving. It is because he is restless. Farm work is “irksome and quiet,” he writes, and he longs for something exciting. He decides, deliberately, to become a criminal.

His first “business” move is almost small-town ordinary. He and an accomplice steal fifteen bushels of wheat valued at thirty dollars from Samuel Buckwalter. It is not the theft that destroys him. It is the stupidity of trust. His accomplice sells the wheat at Paradise, gets arrested, and turns state’s evidence. Buzzard is sentenced to fifteen months in the Lancaster County jail in January 1873.

This is one of the clearest themes in his book. The first weeks of imprisonment are hard, he admits, but by the time he serves the full term, the jail “had no more terrors” for him. Prison does not scare him straight. Prison teaches him how to think bigger. By the time he is released in April 1874, he is already planning the next scale-up.

That next step takes him into the Welsh Mountains and into the kind of crime that would define his name for decades: burglary and safe work. He describes boring a panel in the front door of William Bond’s store near Cambridge to gain entry and passing out clothing he claims was worth four hundred dollars. Daylight forces his accomplices to hide the plunder in a barn near Lemon Place. The farmer discovers it. Suspicion swirls. The pattern continues.

In one vivid stretch, Buzzard describes stealing a keg of wine to supply a party, drinking heavily, and then wandering into church with the kind of chaos that reads like a warning flare. He rides into a store on horseback, fires a revolver through the lights, rides on, knocks a man down at the church steps “without any provocation,” disrupts the meeting, and throws a member of the congregation through pews. He is arrested again, tried, and eventually released in January 1875. It is not a heroic sequence. It is a portrait of a man who cannot stop himself.

Then the story widens. He is no longer just the Welsh Mountains fugitive. He begins moving county to county, learning tradecraft, targeting safes, and slipping back into the mountains when the heat rises. He tells of stealing the safe from the Bird-in-Hand railroad station, hauling it down a country road, breaking it open with an ax and crowbar, and studying its lock and combination so he will know where to bore a safe in the future. They take forty dollars. They steal a horse and buggy, drive back to the Welsh Mountains, and send the team home.

He and two companions later travel to Lebanon County, near the Blue Mountains, to hit a safe at the foot of the mountain near an iron works. They get nine hundred dollars in paper money, and only later realize there was a false bottom containing one thousand dollars in gold that they did not discover. That detail is classic Buzzard: success, but not enough, and the regret that the best prize was sitting just under his hands.

He describes another run to Georgetown where a safe is dragged out, nearly stolen whole, and abandoned when a buggy rounds a corner and alarms the town. He and his partner steal horses and race for the Welsh Mountains with a constable and forty horsemen pursuing them. There is gunfire, a fall, and a two-mile running fight to reach the cover of the hills. He writes of reaching Blue Rock, his hiding place on the mountain, and looking down to see hundreds of horsemen gathered at the foot of the ridge. In the daylight, with a field glass, he watches them like a man watching weather.

Buzzard’s autobiography is filled with those scenes. Private houses entered through cellar doors. Pocketbooks lifted from pants hanging at bedposts. Desks burst open in panicked seconds. Freight trains used like moving roads. Teams stolen, used, and abandoned. He moves between Lancaster, Lebanon, Chester, Cumberland, Berks, and beyond, shifting identities and slipping from jurisdiction to jurisdiction in an era when communication moved at the pace of telegraph and rumor.

In May 1876, he was arrested on suspicion of a robbery in Churchtown. He claims innocence and says he is acquitted, but he includes one of the most chilling episodes in the entire book from that moment. A vigilant committee, four hundred strong, searches the Welsh Mountains on horseback. He meets them on a mountain path and, not understanding why they ride, tells them he has “just passed” Buzzard’s place, and they should hurry if they want to see him. When they gallop away, he slips to Blue Rock. Days later, when he is captured by another posse, he says a rope is put around his neck, and some men begin drawing him toward a limb, intending to hang him, until cooler heads intervene. Whatever you think of Buzzard, that scene tells you something about the violence and fear that rural crime could summon, and how thin the line was between arrest and lynching.

By 1880, he is still running. He is sentenced again, released on April 3, 1880, and almost immediately pulled into a new robbery by information learned in jail. His cellmate, Isaac Seldonridge, tells him how to find cash at the home of his wealthy brother George, described as an old Dunkard. Buzzard says he intended to lead a different life, but still “pumped” Seldonridge for details. Then he goes.

The Seldonridge robbery is the kind of episode that makes this memoir feel like a primary source. He describes effecting an entrance through the cellar, yanking George Seldonridge into the kitchen as he comes down to investigate, wrestling with the wife on the stairs, confronting a farmhand named Lac Lafferty, and forcing the old man to open the desk. He claims they take $380 in one hour. He returns to Lancaster and deliberately shakes hands with a township constable at the Leopard Hotel to throw off suspicion. The constable casually tells him Seldonridge was robbed the night before, and Buzzard will be suspected. Buzzard replies, “that was usual.”

The most famous part of Buzzard’s story comes the next year.

In April 1881, he is sentenced to ten years in the Lancaster County jail. While awaiting trial, he attempts an escape by tunneling down toward the furnaces beneath his cell. A mistake gives him away. He is moved, restrained, punished, and then returned to cell 31. He describes slipping a note to a lady friend during Sunday religious services, using dissolved alum to conceal instructions, asking for nitric acid and a drill bit hidden inside a resealed can of peaches. He uses the acid to eat bolt heads, passes it from cell to cell by broom through windows, fills bolt holes with soap and whitewash, and nearly succeeds until another prisoner moves too soon and the watchman catches sight of him.

Even after that, he tries again. A separate building is erected where long-term prisoners work in the day and sleep in their cells at night. Buzzard organizes another escape, using a torn-off water pipe fashioned into a hook to get over the outside wall. Ten men crawl through a hole near the ground and make their escape at noon. Buzzard runs, hides in a rye field, steals food, steals clothing, steals a horse. He sprains his ankle, loses a boot in the mud and water when he and the horse go off a bridge, and later rides with boots too large to fit the stirrups, toes bent up to keep them from slipping off. He collapses in a barn loft on straw while men work below him. By night, he steals a suit, shoes, another horse, a harness, and a buggy, and drives toward the Ephrata Hills.

This is the kind of narrative that makes you forget you are reading a local Pennsylvania outlaw. It reads like a frontier escape story, except the landmarks are familiar: Ephrata, Reamstown, Reading, the Neversink Mountain, Sinking Springs, Lancaster, Columbia.

It is after this escape that the buried treasure enters the record.

Buzzard regains the jail’s confidence, works at cigar making, furnishes his cell, and begins raising canaries in the fall of 1883. When his brother Abe is recaptured and placed across the corridor, Buzzard uses a mother canary as a courier, tying a note around her neck and sending her into Abe’s cell when she hears the young bird chirp. Abe’s response comes back the same way: “All right, do it quick, and write no more.” Buzzard then locks a watchman into Abe’s cell, locks the other watchman into a barber’s cell, unlocks long-term prisoners, cuts telephone wires, breaks open the desk to seize firearms, and escapes out the back gate. In total, 12 men escaped. Six of them head off on foot to the Ephrata Mountains around 11:30 p.m.

The next night, the group steals new suits near the North Mountains and heads to Womelsdorf in Lebanon County. There, they break open a store safe. Buzzard expects the payoff that makes a man on the run feel invincible. He sees four large salt bags “full of money,” plus about sixty dollars in notes. They also take food and overcoats. Then they go up on the mountains and lie low the next day.

When they examine the bags, they learn what “money” looks like when it is the wrong kind.

Three thousand five hundred pennies.

Buzzard writes that the discovery disappointed them “very much.” Thirty-five dollars in copper was not the jackpot they thought they had won. And then, in a sentence that has been hiding in plain sight for more than a century, he tells you exactly what they did next.

“We hid them under a large stone, and covered it with leaves, where they are yet, if they have not been found.”

That is not folklore. That is a confession.

Three thousand five hundred pennies weigh about twenty-four pounds, a load you can carry, but not one you want to haul for long through the mountains when you are trying to disappear. Buzzard’s crew keeps moving. They rob an “old miser” in Annville, forcing the wife to reveal money sewn into a bed bolster. They take gold and paper. They hold up travelers on the road toward Cornwall and take watches and change. They raid a cellar set for what appears to be a wedding and carry off tablecloth-wrapped cakes and bottles of wine, feasting in the hills the next day. Then they separate again, and Buzzard’s narrative spills into a wider criminal odyssey across New York, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, and back again, with arrests, escapes, fences, and finally recapture in Chicago in June 1884.

He ends where many Pennsylvania criminal stories end, behind stone and iron.

He is sent to the Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia to serve out the remainder of his sentence, plus additional time for jailbreaking. There, he admits, escape is impossible. He behaves, works at trades, and becomes a hospital steward. He is released in May 1892 and returns to Reading. Soon after, he writes, he begins “a life of dissipation,” and his eyesight fails until he becomes blind. In 1897, he publishes his autobiography, signing it “Yours Truly, IKE BUZZARD,” dated February 14, 1897.

Nothing says Happy Valentine’s Day like a detailed account of your jailbreaks and robberies. 😉

The penny hoard remains the most tantalizing loose thread in the entire account because it is so specific, so mundane, and so unresolved. Not gold. Not silver. Not a sack of bills. Just copper cents, heavy and nearly worthless to fugitives, hidden under a stone on the wooded slopes near South Mountain. The value today depends on condition and dates, and Buzzard does not specify either, but early 1880s Indian Head cents in collectible grades can sell for several dollars per coin. A cache of 3,500 in decent numismatic condition could exceed fourteen thousand dollars. Even if the coins were mixed dates and heavily worn, the sheer weight of them, and the story attached, would make them one of the strangest pieces of outlaw material culture Pennsylvania could offer.

Or perhaps the real treasure is not under the stone at all.

Perhaps it is the fact that Buzzard wrote it down.

For generations, the Buzzard Gang has lived half in records and half in rumor. People have repeated the names, pointed at boulders, and argued about caves. Buzzard’s autobiography does something rare. It pins down the outlaw voice in ink. It gives you his own version of events, unvarnished and often unsettling, and it leaves you with a final image that refuses to settle: a large stone, a cover of leaves, and pennies waiting in the dark.

The Criminal Life of Isaac M. Buzzard

If you want to read the full confession that this story comes from, The Criminal Life of Isaac M. Buzzard: A True and Complete History of His Life, from Boyhood to the Present Day, is now available in a fully annotated and indexed edition for only $9.99. This restored publication is a faithful reproduction of the 1897 public-domain work. Only a handful of original copies remain, and the text has been digitally reconstructed to improve readability while preserving the historical text, with minor typographical and spelling errors corrected where appropriate. 

Editorial footnotes and a newly prepared index have been added to help modern readers follow Buzzard’s world as it moves from the Soldiers’ Orphan Schools to the Welsh Mountains, from Lancaster County’s jail corridors to a canary’s flight across prison bars, and finally into the hills where a disappointing treasure might still be waiting. Get your copy on Amazon.

Uncharted Lancaster Podcast

Take an even deeper dive into the life of Ike Buzzard in this episode of the Uncharted Lancaster podcast that discusses in detail his life and autobiography.

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Uncharted Lancaster’s Ghosts, Monsters, and Tales of Adventure takes readers on a spine-tingling journey through Lancaster County’s haunted history, eerie legends, and hidden treasures. From ghostly apparitions to outlaw loot, these 64 true local stories blend real history with gripping folklore.