Thunderbolt and lightfoot

There was a movie a number of years back about two Western cowboys, called Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Wasn't that originally a New England legend?

The movie departed from history and New England legend a split second after the title flashed on the screen. The real story goes back to 1818, when a Dr. John Wilson arrived in Dummerston, Vermont, and began practicing medicine. No one knew Dr. Wilson's background. He always wore a scarf around his neck, and then and now, he enjoyed the company of ladies, and he often fell flat on his face at the town contradances. However, there were those who trusted Dr. Wilson drunk more than any other doctor sober. He eventually moved to Newfane, then to Brattleboro, married, had a son, was either separated or divorced, and then, in 1847, contracted an unrecorded disease and died.

Just before he died, he summoned several friends and said he had a last request. He wanted to be buried with all his clothes on. Even the neck scarf. They agreed, but as soon as he'd passed away, they whipped them off. Well, actually the undertaker removed them, prior to washing and embalming the body, while the friends observed. On Dr. Wilson's neck was a long, ugly scar, apparently from a sword or knife. In the calf of one leg was what appeared to be an old bullet wound. That leg was withered and shorter than the other, a fact he'd covered up by inserting a thick wedge of cork in his shoe and refusing to limp. (So, perhaps it was more than the toddies that sometimes influenced his equilibrium.)

All this got around rapidly, including to the sheriff's office. The sheriff studied his list of wanted men and found that one John Doherty, who had escaped the law in Ireland in 1818 and was known to be living somewhere in America, exactly fit Dr. Wilson's description, even to the scars and the cork heel.

So it would appear that Doc Wilson practiced medicine in Vermont for twenty-nine years without a license and under an alias. He was actually John Doherty, one of the most feared highwaymen in Britain during the early nineteenth century. Because of his lightning raids, in which he was always courteous, never robbed women, and so on, he became known as Captain Thunderbolt. He liked the name and usually told his victims that they had the distinction of being robbed "by none other than Captain Thunderbolt."

When he teamed up with a Michael Martin, a young thug from Kilkenny, he named him Captain Lightfoot. Martin escaped to America at about the same time as "Doc Wilson" did, but one version of the legend says they never got together in this country. Another says they both taught school in the Round Schoolhouse in Brookline, Vermont. Carl Hardwood of Baldwinville, Massachusetts, wrote in 1965 that his mother remembered "two men teachers who taught at the Round Schoolhouse who came over to the United States from England to escape prosecution for some crimes." He went on to say that one had the nickname "Thunderbolt" and the other stayed only a few weeks.

At any rate, Martin returned to a life of crime, was arrested in Springfield, Massachusetts, was tried, convicted, and hanged about 1821. It was Martin who, just before his execution, gave the full description of his former partner, Captain Thunderbolt, who by then was a simple, kindly, somewhat overdressed country doctor quietly practicing his medicine in Dummerston and falling down on his face at the Saturday night dances.

Source: Judson Hale, Inside New England, New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1982.