In nineteenth-century Indiana, the road decided who reached the canal, who paid the toll, and which horse thief got away. A century later the same problem of movement ran through railroads, asphalt plants, bicycle patents, telegraph lines, federal detectives and aircraft.
The Latta story gets much larger once the road itself is treated as evidence. In nineteenth-century Indiana, a road determined which farmer could reach the canal, which merchant had to pass a toll gate, which horse thief could disappear before his description caught up with him, and which counterfeiter could move bad paper into a market where nobody recognized the issuing bank. By the early twentieth century that same problem of movement had spread into railroads, asphalt plants, bicycles, automobiles, patented machinery, telegraph lines, federal detectives and, eventually, aircraft.
That’s why “Latta Roads” isn’t really a story about one family or one gang. It’s about how mobility itself was converted. At the start, the horse is engine, property, freight carrier and getaway vehicle all at once. By the end, horsepower has been redistributed into steam engines, locomotives, farm machinery, bicycles, automobiles and airplanes, and the loosely organized posse has become an investigative network that can follow a crime across state lines. None of these technologies replaced the one before it cleanly. They piled up on top of each other.
Before the Highway, Indiana Had Two Road Systems
Indiana went heavily into plank roads in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Roads that turned nearly impassable in wet weather could, in theory, be rescued by laying timber planks over the roadbed. Private companies took charters, built or improved routes, put up toll gates and charged for passage. Wabash County joined in directly. The Wabash and Ashland Pike became a tolled plank turnpike, and county histories record plank-road projects linking La Gro, North Manchester, Marion, Wabash, Mount Vernon and other commercial points.
The improvement could be dramatic. One Wabash County history recalled that hauling twenty bushels of wheat from North Manchester to La Gro had once taken a hard day’s work, and that on the plank road one team could do roughly what four had managed before. La Gro’s plank connections funneled enormous traffic to the Wabash & Erie Canal. One account remembered a hundred teams waiting by sunrise, wagons backed out into the countryside while farmers waited to unload grain and livestock.
All that legitimate traffic created a contrast. The official road was increasingly surveyed, improved, tolled and watched. A traveler on it passed taverns, merchants, toll keepers, bridges, warehouses and plenty of people who might remember who had gone by. Beside it lay another geography of creeks, old paths, farm tracks, river bottoms, fords, wooded corridors and informal crossings that never showed up neatly on the commercial map. That is where the horse-thief story belongs.
The Horse Thief Knew the Other Map
The Wabash County record preserves a revealing example at Pony Creek near North Manchester. The county history describes large herds of Miami ponies grazing in the Wind Brake country and says horse thieves built a funnel-shaped enclosure along the animals’ usual path. Once the ponies were trapped, the thieves drove them into the creek and followed the stream bed for about a mile and a half, specifically to break the trail. They hid the animals in a second enclosure near the county line before eventually moving them to a distant market.
That is road history seen from the other side. The thieves weren’t just getting from one point to another; they were deliberately managing how traceable their movement was. They used the creek bed instead of the road, concealment instead of the toll gate, the county line instead of the market town. The county’s later description of Chester Township still remembered the area as good horse country, notorious for both Miami horse culture and white horse thieves.
The local Witt tradition fits this landscape, but the name is harder to document than the activity. Rather than invent a precise “Witt Road,” the firmer point is that the upper Wabash really did have a horse-theft system that ran on secondary geography and deliberate trail-breaking, which is exactly the setting in which a Witt-type gang tradition becomes plausible.
Farther down the Wabash, the George High organization shows the same principle on a bigger scale. An early Wabash Valley history says stolen horses coming from Ohio, Kentucky and elsewhere were brought toward Redwood in Warren County, crossed the Wabash near Hanging Rock and vanished into heavy cover, to be routed west or north through further rendezvous points. When Horse Thief Detective Association members finally caught High, he escaped custody, mounted a fast horse a confederate had waiting, crossed into Illinois and supposedly reached the Mississippi five hours ahead of his pursuers. The story probably carries the embellishment typical of local outlaw histories, but the geography is the point: the river, the state line, wooded refuges, back roads and exceptionally good horses formed a transportation system outside the regulated one.
John Comstock Built the Road, Then Had to Police It
John Comstock sits almost exactly where those two worlds meet. A Wabash County history says he tried to organize a plank road from La Gro toward Liberty Mills and North Manchester. When that failed for lack of cooperation, he took a plan for a Huntington–Liberty Mills plank road to Huntington businessmen, who accepted it in 1851; the road was finished in 1854. He was also briefly vice-president of the Eel River Valley Railroad before withdrawing and accusing some of its managers of corruption.
At almost the same moment, he ran into a different kind of network. The same history says that in 1851 an organization of horse thieves, burglars and counterfeiters stretched from Ohio across northern Indiana into Illinois. After Comstock’s store was robbed, he, William and Isaac Thorne, John J. Shaubert and the Shaubert sons formed what the source explicitly calls a private detective service. In less than a year the group had reportedly collected the names of more than two hundred suspected members of the wider network and helped win several convictions.
That’s more than a colorful story about a merchant with his own detective squad. Comstock was working on two problems at once: improving physical transportation and improving information about the people using it. A better road let commerce travel farther, but it also enlarged the territory open to thieves and counterfeiters. The answer to that wasn’t another road. It was a network of names, associates, reports and cooperating men. Once a transportation system outgrows the reach of a single town, the intelligence that watches it has to grow too.
The Canal Ran on Horses, and Carried the Railroad In
The Wabash & Erie Canal looks at first like a break from the horse-centered world, but it was one of that world’s greatest expressions. Indiana transportation records describe canal boats pulled by one or two horses or mules on a towpath, with fresh teams sometimes posted every fifteen or twenty miles, and the canal itself was dug largely with animal-drawn equipment. A horse that could drag a modest wagon over a muddy road could, from a towpath, move a boat carrying far more through water. The canal didn’t take the corridor off muscle power; it concentrated that power. Horses brought wheat and pork into La Gro, horses pulled the boats out, and other animals moved the freight on at the far end.
One of the best moments in the whole story comes in 1854, when the Wabash Weekly Gazette reported four boatloads of railroad iron arriving from Toledo for the Wabash Valley Railroad, to be distributed along the line between Wabash and Peru. On January 20, 1856, the first train reached Wabash over the Lake Erie, Wabash & St. Louis line. Regular service to Toledo began three days later and soon ran on through Peru, Logansport, Delphi and Lafayette. The canal physically delivered the railroad that would take most of its business.
That’s the pattern to keep in mind through everything that follows. New transportation systems don’t land in empty space; they get assembled through the systems already there. Canal boats carry railroad iron. Railroads later carry paving stone. Bicycle makers campaign for smooth roads that automobiles inherit. Bicycle shops become aviation workshops. Federal detectives ride the same rails and use the same telegraph lines as the fugitives they’re chasing.
Steam Didn’t Kill the Horse
Even after the railroads reached the Wabash Valley, the horse stayed essential, and the railroad made the horse business bigger. The clearest example is the Wabash Importing Company, formed in 1884 by Harmon Wolf, Nathan Meyer and Abraham Strauss to import Belgian draft horses. According to its National Register documentation, the company regularly bought horses in Belgium, shipped them across the Atlantic and moved them by rail to its stables in Wabash, which stood beside the tracks. Its Teague Barn became part of the breeding operation. Lafayette belonged to the same economy. The Tippecanoe County Historical Association holds a photograph from about 1915 of the Lafayette Stock Farm, which it describes as once the country’s largest importer of Percheron, Belgian, Shire, German Coach and Hackney horses.
Rail and horse weren’t enemies. The railroads made it possible to import, breed, sell and redistribute improved draft stock over long distances. The train handled the trunk route while the horse stayed vital for farming, drayage, construction and the last stretch between depot and destination. Industrialization produced better horses before it produced machines that could replace them.
Taking the Horse Apart: Latta, Osborne and the Meaning of Horsepower
A second Latta line appears in Cincinnati, and the genealogy here needs care. I haven’t found a documentary family link between the inventor Alexander Bonner Latta and the northern Indiana Blackleg and counterfeiting Lattas, so they shouldn’t be presented as one proven family. Latta’s mechanical career matters to the transportation story anyway. Cincinnati’s fire department credits him, Abel Shawk and Miles Greenwood with building a practical steam fire engine in the early 1850s, and Latta patented steam-generator designs, including a circulating tubular sectional steam generator in 1857.
This is where the word “horsepower” becomes literal. The horse had bundled power and mobility into one living machine. Steam engineering pulled those functions apart: a boiler made the power, gears and wheels transmitted it, and in transitional machines horses still did the hauling while steam did the heavy mechanical work.
David Munson Osborne’s farm machinery shows the same split in the field. His papers at Syracuse University record that he met a mechanic, William Kirby, who held untried patents for agricultural machines, and brought him into the business that built combined mowers and reapers. In 1857 the company made two hundred of them, and the Kirby design placed second to McCormick’s in national trials. Early machines like these didn’t replace the horse. They let the horse do more work through gears, blades, wheels and levers; the animal supplied traction while the machine decided what that traction accomplished. When steam and then gasoline took over traction too, the horse’s job had been broken into separate mechanical functions and handed out to machines. And patents began to matter, because the question was no longer only who owned the road or the horse, but who owned the right to build the mechanism.
Emmit Latta, Albert Pope and the Road the Bicycle Demanded
The Emmit G. Latta connection is more concrete. U.S. Patent No. 324,264, granted in 1885, names Emmit G. Latta of Friendship, New York, as assignor to the Pope Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut, for improvements in bicycles.
Pope Manufacturing belonged to Albert A. Pope, the country’s leading bicycle industrialist and one of the chief national advocates of the Good Roads movement. The Smithsonian describes him as both. The Federal Highway Administration records that in 1893 Pope delivered a petition with roughly 150,000 signatures to President Grover Cleveland, asking for a federal road department devoted to better road-building. None of this means Emmit Latta started Pope’s road campaign. What it does establish is that a Latta transportation patent entered Pope’s industrial system in exactly the years when Pope was turning the needs of his machines into a political campaign for better infrastructure.
The Good Roads movement is usually remembered as part of automobile history, but cyclists were among its first organizers. Roads a wagon could struggle through were intolerable on a bicycle: ruts, mud, loose stone, warped planks and steep drainage edges made riding hard and dangerous, and cycling clubs began pressing governments for smooth, engineered roads well before most people owned a car. Pope’s interest had a plain commercial logic. A better bicycle was worth only as much as the roads its buyers could ride on, so his market depended partly on public infrastructure. That changed what a road was. Under the plank-road model, a private company improved a route and collected at the gate. Under the Good Roads model, road quality became a problem for engineers, public finance and government. Control over movement was shifting from the toll keeper to the engineer, the contractor, the patent holder and the public authority.
The Road Becomes a Product
Around 1900 the new road started showing up as a manufactured product in Wabash itself. Indiana Landmarks documents the Bridges Paving Company, whose downtown Wabash building Edward Bridges commissioned around that year; the company sold cement and rock for paving and other regional construction. A plank road could be built mostly from timber cut along the route. A paved road needed an industrial supply chain: quarrying, grading, cement, asphalt or other binders, specialized machinery, freight, engineering specifications, municipal contracts and growing pools of capital.
John Foster Brooks makes that shift concrete. According to Brooks Construction’s company history, Brooks, an Indiana native who had sold liquid asphalt for the Barber Asphalt Company, founded the Fort Wayne firm with Lester Ginn in 1909. Its first job was paving Forest Park Boulevard, and in 1917 it bought its first asphalt plant as automobile traffic drove up demand for better roads. In 1923 the company acquired railroad property under an agreement to move aggregate from Huntington to Fort Wayne by rail, and two spurs were laid to load and unload cement and stone. That one yard contains the whole mature system: heavy stone moves cheaply by rail, the car unloads at the paving yard, the material becomes pavement, and the finished road lets trucks and cars carry goods to places the railroad never reached. The railroad didn’t lose to the road. It fed it.
From the Bicycle Shop to the Air
The Wright brothers sit directly downstream of the bicycle boom. Library of Congress material documents Wilbur and Orville running their Dayton bicycle business in the 1890s, repairing machines and eventually building their own, and the income helped pay for their aeronautical experiments. Bearings, chains, tubular frames, machine tools, balance, steering and lightweight construction belonged to the bicycle shop before they belonged to aviation.
The later Wright–Curtiss patent fight shows yet another change in what controlling transportation meant. On the old roads, a toll gate or a bridge could physically block passage. In an industrial transportation system, a patent could block access to the machine itself. During the First World War, federal pressure produced an aircraft patent pool through the Manufacturers Aircraft Association so that American production wouldn’t stall on competing claims. Part of the right-of-way had become legal and intellectual rather than physical.
The Detective Speeds Up
While the machines were changing, American detection was changing too. The Comstock committee of 1851 could gather names, question neighbors, send men after suspects and coordinate locally, but it still lived at horse speed. A fugitive who got far enough ahead could outrun his own description.
A national currency changed the scale of the problem. The National Archives dates the Secret Service Division to July 1865 and gives its original mission as fighting counterfeiting, forgery and the alteration of currency and securities; protecting presidents came later. That origin belongs right beside the Latta and Blackleg histories. Horse thieves and counterfeiters had long since learned to exploit state lines, roads, hotels, farms and fragmented local authority. Once money itself became national, Washington needed investigators who could work across an equally large map.
James J. Brooks became chief of the Secret Service in July 1876, according to an 1880 history of American counterfeiting that credits the reorganized service with major operations against Midwestern counterfeiters. Contemporary papers reported him offering his resignation in 1885, though the service’s own list of chiefs has him in office until 1888. His tenure marks the period when detection was becoming a profession rather than an occasional job for sheriffs, posses and aggrieved businessmen. An 1879 counterfeiting publication gives a telling example: in one case, investigators sent a telegram ahead of a traveling suspect so that men were waiting for him when he arrived. For most of the century, a fugitive’s body and the news about him had traveled at roughly the same top speed. The telegraph let the description arrive first, and the horse thief’s oldest advantage disappeared.
Stealing Lincoln
In 1876 the counterfeiting world produced one of the strangest transport schemes in American history. Benjamin Boyd, a skilled engraver used by Chicago counterfeiters, was in prison. James “Big Jim” Kinealy devised a plan to take Abraham Lincoln’s body from its tomb in Springfield, carry it more than two hundred miles toward the Indiana Dunes, hide it in the shifting sand, and demand Boyd’s pardon and a large ransom. Jack Hughes and Terrence Mullen were to do the work at the tomb. The object makes it sound bizarre, but the logic is the horse thief’s: take valuable property from a known location, move it fast over distance, cross jurisdictions, hide it in ground outsiders can’t easily search, and turn possession into leverage.
The response shows how far policing had come since Comstock. Lewis Swegles infiltrated the gang as a Secret Service informant, Patrick Tyrrell ran the operation, and Allan Pinkerton’s agency supplied extra detectives. The Secret Service and Pinkerton men even rode to Springfield on the same train as the conspirators. By then the criminal network and the investigative one were sharing the railroad.
Bonaparte’s Bureau
By the end of the century the Secret Service had built up experience that no other federal office had: informants, interstate cases, criminal descriptions, suspect files and field offices spread across the country. The National Archives still holds its suspect lists, arrest books, case files and thousands of criminal photographs. Those photographs matter to the road story because identification itself had become portable. A stolen horse could be described in a newspaper; a suspect could be described in a circular; eventually his photograph could be copied and mailed to another district. Information was moving as freight.
Under Theodore Roosevelt, Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte ran a Justice Department with no substantial investigative corps of its own. According to the FBI’s own history, Justice borrowed investigators from the Treasury’s Secret Service. Bonaparte objected that they answered to Treasury rather than to him, and members of Congress had their own worries about the executive branch using Secret Service men outside Treasury. Congress banned the loans in 1908. Bonaparte responded by combining Justice investigators and former Secret Service men into a permanent force of special agents, and on July 26, 1908, he ordered that investigative matters be routed through Chief Examiner Stanley W. Finch. The force was named the Bureau of Investigation in 1909 and became the FBI in 1935.
There’s no legitimate basis for calling John Comstock’s 1851 detective committee “the FBI before the FBI,” and no direct institutional line runs from the Indiana Horse Thief Detective Associations to Bonaparte’s Bureau. The real connection is more substantial when it’s stated accurately. Each of these bodies arose to answer the same recurring mismatch: whatever was being pursued could range over more territory than the authority pursuing it. The horse thief leaves the township. The Blackleg network crosses counties. The counterfeiter crosses state lines. Railroads and a national currency widen the field again, and eventually the investigator has to become national too.
What “Latta Roads” Means
This is also the safest way to read the recurring Latta name. The northern Indiana and Michigan-border Lattas belong to a documented world of horse theft, Blacklegs, counterfeiting and mobile criminal networks. Alexander Bonner Latta belongs to the documented world of Cincinnati steam engineering, and Emmit G. Latta to the documented bicycle-patent system of Pope Manufacturing. The evidence doesn’t show that these lines form one family organization, and the story doesn’t need it to. The same caution applies to the Brooks name at the end: Bonaparte’s special-agent force took shape in 1908 and John Foster Brooks’s paving company in 1909, but nothing ties James J. Brooks of the Secret Service to the Fort Wayne Brooks without genealogical evidence. The closeness of those dates simply shows how fast the modern network was assembling.
What the Latta lines light up together is a transformation. In one long lifetime, Indiana went from mud roads, plank turnpikes, canal towpaths, Miami ponies, private horse-thief detectives and wagons queued at La Gro to asphalt plants, rail-fed aggregate yards, automobiles, telegraphed manhunts, national currency enforcement, aircraft and a permanent federal detective force. At the start of the century the horse held nearly everything in one body: capital, propulsion, freight capacity, escape, farm labor and military use, which is exactly why a horse thief could have his stolen property carry him away. The canal multiplied that horse. The railroad took long-haul freight off animal muscle while creating new demand for heavy horses locally. Farm machinery mechanized the horse’s labor, steam supplied artificial muscle, the bicycle demanded a new road surface, asphalt contractors industrialized it, the automobile inherited it, and the Wrights carried the bicycle shop into the sky. Information went through the same conversion, from the local warning to the detective’s list, the telegram, the circular with a photograph, and finally a national investigative force.
Every new way of moving legitimate goods opens another way to move contraband, stolen property, bad money or wanted people. The railroad that takes a merchant to market takes the counterfeiter there too, and the telegraph that coordinates business can put a detective ahead of a suspect. John Comstock found that out in miniature in 1851: build a better road and commerce grows, and once commerce grows, the thief has a bigger market. The answer wasn’t to abandon the road. It was to build another network on top of it, made of investigators, descriptions, communications, records and cooperation.
The old shadow road never disappears. It changes form. The horse thief once dodged the toll gate and walked a creek to break his trail; his successors exploit a rail connection, a false identity, an automobile or a gap in communications. Every generation builds a better road, and every generation then has to learn to police what moves along it. That’s why the Latta trail is worth following past the Blacklegs. It starts with horses vanishing into Indiana creeks and woods, and it ends in the much larger history of how the Midwest turned horsepower into machine power and paths into networks.