Pinkerton’s Great Detective

by Beau Riffenburgh

  By the spring of 1897, Cassidy had started recruiting men to form a gang. He was already well-known in the criminal world, and his description would have been familiar to law officers in Utah, Wyoming, and the surrounding states. He was, according to a Pinkerton’s description, five feet nine inches tall, 165 pounds, with “light complexion, blue eyes, medium build, flaxen hair . . . small red scar under left eye . . . eyes deep set.”30

  What that description did not emphasize was that he was intelligent, quick-witted, and a very careful planner. That said, he needed a good deal of luck for the next big heist, because his target—the payroll office of the Pleasant Valley Coal Company at Castle Gate, Utah—was one of the most difficult places to rob in the entire West. Castle Gate was a small company town located in a deep valley reached by a railroad spur of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, which owned the coal company. Horses, which would be needed for a getaway, were uncommon there, as the miners had no need for them, and anyone who brought them into the valley was immediately the subject of suspicion. Moreover, even knowing when to try to carry off the robbery was next to impossible because the cash and gold delivered for the company payroll were sent every two weeks on a train running on differing days and at undisclosed times. The only way the miners knew when they were going to be paid was by a special blast of the mine’s whistle: At that sound they would descend on the office for their pay, giving any robbers an extremely limited time to carry out any plan.

  In order to have horses available, Cassidy started sending a couple of men into the town at a time, under the pretense that they were training for bareback horse races in Salt Lake City. On one of these excursions, he and Lay just happened to be there when the train arrived with the payroll. While the paymaster and his clerk collected the money, Cassidy quickly moved into position. As the two men returned to their office, he confronted them on a set of stairs and ordered them to drop the bags. They did so, but the clerk then scampered off for help, and as a miner approached, having heard the disturbance, Lay, who was already mounted, pointed his pistol at him and growled, “Get back in there, you son-of-a-bitch, or I’ll fill your belly full of hot lead!”31

  Meanwhile, Cassidy grabbed the bags and tossed them to Lay, who caught them but dropped the reins to Butch’s horse. Frightened, the horse bolted down the road, only just to be headed off by Lay, allowing Cassidy to leap in the saddle and the two men to gallop off. The paymaster ran to the telegraph office and tried to contact the sheriff but found the lines had been cut. He immediately commandeered the train and headed to Price, the county seat, to form a posse. Yet again, however, the stashing of fresh horses allowed the outlaws to make excellent time to Robbers Roost, after which they split their time hiding out between there and Brown’s Park.

  Even before the Castle Gate robbery, Cassidy’s criminal circle had been increasing, and he hoped to form a gang that he wanted to call the “Train Robbers Syndicate.”32 The name didn’t stick, but the gang did, and one man who joined early on was a fellow who, like Cassidy, had a special talent with and affection for horses—Harry Alonzo Longabaugh.33 Born of devout Baptist parents in 1867 in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, he had received only intermittent schooling but could still read and write, and at a surprisingly early age he had joined a local literary society. Longabaugh left home at the age of fifteen and moved with the family of his cousin to a ranch near Durango, Colorado. A couple years later, they headed to Cortez, and Longabaugh began working as a wrangler and horsebreaker. It is possible that at this stage he met Bob Parker.

  By 1887, having fallen on hard times, Longabaugh stole a horse, a saddle, and a pistol from cowhands in Crook County, Wyoming. He was caught, escaped, and was recaptured. Found guilty at trial, he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison, but spent the time instead in the Crook County jail in Sundance, from which he most likely adopted his nickname of the Sundance Kid. After his release, he drifted, working at ranches near Calgary, Alberta, and in Montana. Then, in 1892, Longabaugh, Bill Madden, and Harry Bass held up a passenger train of the Great Northern Railroad. Madden and Bass were caught soon thereafter and sent to prison, but Longabaugh disappeared into Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains.

  Within a few years, the Sundance Kid, also using the alias Harry Alonzo, had joined Cassidy’s gang. By all accounts he had a certain style and class unusual for a desperado. Standing about five feet nine inches tall and weighing around 170 pounds, Pinkerton’s described him as: “Complexion medium dark, black hair, blue or gray eyes, combs his hair pompadour, bow legged, walks with feet far apart, mustache or beard, if any, black, nose rather long, slim build, features Grecian type, marks his clothes ‘H.L.’ with worsted thread.”34

  At about this time, the band began to be known popularly as the Wild Bunch, a name “probably derived from the gang’s antics in riding into towns for a little fun and excitement” and short for “that wild bunch from Brown’s Park.”35 There was little formality in its membership, as the men were caught, left to carry out their own robberies, and drifted back when they felt like it. But there were usually about eight or nine at a time, including a number of villains who had been engaged in lives of crime long before meeting Cassidy. One was Harvey Logan, a rough cowboy and cattle thief originally from Iowa, but who had lived in Missouri, Texas, Colorado, and numerous other parts of the West. In 1895 Logan fled to Wyoming from Landusky, Montana, after killing the man for whom the town had been named. One story was that Pike Landusky had started a brawl over Logan’s attentions to his daughter—only for her to acknowledge after her father’s death that she was pregnant by Logan’s brother Lonnie. Also known by the alias Kid Curry, Logan was the smallest of the bunch—at five feet seven and a half inches and about 145 to 150 pounds36—but he was also the most violent, and before he joined up with the Wild Bunch he and Lonnie had ridden with the feared train robber and murderer Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum.

  Other well-known members of Cassidy’s crew included: Lonnie Logan; George “Flat Nose” Currie, who had probably met Cassidy in the Blue Creek area years before; the slow-talking, round-faced Texan David Atkins; Will “News” Carver, another Texan who had also ridden in Ketchum’s gang; Ben “the Tall Texan” Kilpatrick; Bob Lee, the Logans’ cousin; and Tom O’Day, listed on a Pinkerton’s wanted poster as “smelling like a polecat.”37

  Only a few months after the robbery at Castle Gate, the Wild Bunch tried to rob the Butte County Bank at Belle Fourche, South Dakota. Although Cassidy might have planned the robbery, he was not there on the day, as he was allegedly trying to find his friend Bub Meeks. What he didn’t realize was that Meeks had been arrested in Fort Bridger, Wyoming, a couple of weeks before for robbing a general store and post office of $123. While Meeks was in custody, a cashier who had been serving at the bank in Montpelier when it was robbed, identified him as the man who had held the horses. Eventually, Meeks was tried and found guilty of bank robbery and sentenced to thirty-five years in the Idaho State Penitentiary in Boise.

  Meanwhile, on June 28, 1897, five or six members of the Wild Bunch rode into Belle Fourche, expecting that the bank would be holding more cash than usual, as the town had just hosted a reunion of Civil War veterans.38 Four dismounted outside the bank, and three or four—thought to be “Flat Nose” Currie, Harvey and Lonnie Logan, and perhaps Walt Punteney39—stormed inside and ordered everyone to raise their hands. The head cashier pulled out a pistol, pointed it at Harvey Logan, and pulled the trigger. But when it misfired, he meekly laid it down and followed the gunmen’s instructions.

  Currie ordered the bank’s patrons to put their money in a sack, but before more than one man could do so, the owner of a hardware store across the street, having seen everyone inside the bank raising their hands, yelled that a bank robbery was in progress. Realizing that the town would mobilize within moments, the robbers raced out to their horses, and all but one mounted and rode away. The horse of the last man, Tom O’Day, bolted, leaving the bandit on his own. He ran of
f, trying to lose himself in the crowd, but was quickly caught and put in jail. The others rode hard into Wyoming, where they split up, having gained only ninety-seven dollars, the amount dropped in Currie’s bag.

  Later that summer, Longabaugh, Harvey Logan, and Punteney ventured into Montana, planning on robbing the bank in Red Lodge. But after unsuccessfully soliciting the aid of a local marshal they thought to be corrupt, they decided they’d better make themselves scarce and headed north toward Lavina. Near there they were caught by a posse, and Logan was wounded. When Longabaugh and Logan were identified as two of the men involved in the bank robbery at Belle Fourche, the three were taken to jail in Deadwood, where O’Day was still awaiting trial. On October 31, the four were broken out of jail, and Longabaugh and Logan—whose identities had not been established with certainty because they both claimed to be named Jones—made good their escape. The other two were recaptured, but O’Day was eventually acquitted, and the charges against Punteney were dropped.40

  By the end of 1897 a great deal of the crime in the region—whether bank robbery, highway robbery, or cattle or horse theft—was being blamed on mysterious gangs that emerged from the great emptiness of places such as Robbers Roost or Brown’s Park and then simply melted away, disappearing back into those areas. The Robbers Roost Gang, they were called, or the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, or, most often, the Wild Bunch.

  Just when cattlemen, banks, and other large business owners began demanding that something be done, an event occurred that changed everything.41 In February 1898, a ruffian called Patrick Johnson killed teenager Willie Strang in Brown’s Park. When Johnson and two escaped desperados he had fallen in with—Harry Tracy and David Lant—were cornered, Tracy killed Valentine Hoy, a rancher who had joined a posse. The case became a cause célèbre and quickly pushed the governors of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming to issue a joint edict about breaking up the region’s bands of outlaws. In the face of the growing pressure, some of the Wild Bunch left the area. Cassidy and Lay made their way to New Mexico. Enough of the gang stayed together, however, to pull off their most notorious robbery and killing yet, in the aftermath of which they would find themselves pursued by the most relentless hunters they had yet encountered: the operatives of the Western Division of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency.

  CHAPTER 17

  ON THE TRAIL OF THE WILD BUNCH

  Early in the morning on June 2, 1899, the Union Pacific Railroad’s Overland Limited No. 1—which had left Omaha the day before carrying unsigned bank notes, gold, and silver—made an unscheduled stop a few miles west of Wilcox, Wyoming.1 Reports gave conflicting information about why the train halted. One indicated that up to four men had boarded at Wilcox, one of whom crawled over the locomotive’s coaling car and forced the engineer to stop at gunpoint. Another claimed men had flagged it down with emergency lamps. Whatever the cause, just beyond an old bridge about six outlaws took control of the train and then forced the engineer and fireman to accompany them back to the two mail cars. When the clerks inside refused to open up, the robbers first put a couple of bullets through the wall and then set off explosives that jolted the entire car. Convinced that the next blast would destroy them along with the car, the clerks opened the doors.

  Shortly after the mail car had been opened, a light was seen approaching from the east. It was section No. 2 of the Overland, officially part of the same train but actually a second one pulled by its own locomotive, although always traveling in close conjunction with No 1. Having been told that there might be soldiers aboard, the robbers ordered the engineer to move the train forward, but not before the fireman made a clumsy effort to pull down one of the gunmen’s masks. He was quickly told that another such effort would result in him being shot.

  Once clear of the vicinity of the bridge, dynamite was lit beneath the structure. Although the explosion did not bring it down, it was enough to prevent No. 2 from crossing. The back cars were then unfastened, and the train moved ahead two miles, pulling only the baggage, express, and mail cars. Perhaps concerned about a lack of time for a thorough search, the robbers ignored the other cars and ordered the express agent, C. E. Woodcock, to open his door. When he refused, they blew it open and promptly blasted open the safes, using so much explosive that damaged bank notes and other financial documents were strewn far and wide. Grabbing the unsigned bank notes, cash, gold, and other valuables, they escaped on their waiting horses with an estimated fifty thousand dollars.

  The next day the robbers were joined by another man—usually assumed to be Cassidy, receiving a share for the planning—and the money was split up. The parties then headed in different directions, one going north and another evidently riding west. There is little certainty exactly who was in which group, but three of them hid out in a quiet cabin on Casper Creek in Natrona County. They might not have been so relaxed if they knew what was behind them.

  Immediately after the robbers rode away the engineer had carefully driven the damaged cars into Medicine Bow, where he telegraphed news of the event to the Union Pacific Railroad office in Omaha. Union Pacific officials immediately dispatched a specially outfitted train from Laramie to Wilcox. Aboard were company detectives and operatives from Pinkerton’s, which had a contract with the railroad. They were joined by local posses and members of the state militia, and within twenty-four hours more than one hundred men were in the field searching for the criminals.2

  The discovery of the three men at Casper Creek was essentially accidental. When a neighbor came by to see who was using the cabin, two armed men emerged from it and told him to “hit the road and hit it quick.”3 He left, but reported the incident to law officers in Casper, and a posse was quickly formed. When the posse reached the cabin, the three bandits were gone. Following their tracks in the mud, the posse soon caught up with them. But without warning, the outlaws opened fire. Josiah Hazen, the Converse County Sheriff, was badly wounded and the posse had to withdraw to take him back to Casper—it was in vain, as he died the next day.

  Sheriff Hazen was among the most respected lawmen in the state, and his death launched one of the largest manhunts ever undertaken in Wyoming.4 Nevertheless, the three outlaws managed to escape despite losing their horses in the shootout. Reaching the area near the Powder River on foot, they were given horses by a sympathetic rancher, and were able to elude any number of posses seeking them.5

  It has long been debated which members of the Wild Bunch were involved in the Wilcox train robbery. Were George Currie and Harvey and Lonnie Logan the three participants in the firefight that killed Hazen? Or were they Currie, Harvey Logan, and Longabaugh? And who were the other three—if that is even the correct number? Different reports suggested Ben Kilpatrick, Will Carver, Elzy Lay, or Bob Lee. Regardless, they were now all in the sights of law-enforcement agencies throughout the West, including that headed by James McParland.

  For more than eleven years, McParland had served as superintendent of Pinkerton’s Denver office—the last four officially as “resident superintendent”—as well as, most of that time, being the assistant general superintendent of the Western Division. Not long before the Wilcox train robbery, his longtime assistant, John C. Fraser, was promoted to resident superintendent, and Frank Murray—who had been superintendent at the Chicago office but was suffering from consumption, and so needed to move to a “healthier” location—was brought in as an assistant superintendent. This allowed McParland to focus on the broader goal of controlling Western operations instead of the day-to-day dealings of the Denver office. As he responded to Bangs after being congratulated on the job he was doing: “I have always wished to have made more comments and suggestions to the Supts of the Western Division, but I was handicapped on account of the pressure of business as Supt of this office. It was impossible for me to do justice to the Asst Genl Superintendency so long as I had to assume the Superintendency of this office. I am very highly pleased that my work is satisfactory.”6

  Not only did the
letter show McParland’s gratitude to the Pinkertons and his desire to serve them as best he could, it also illustrated what the brothers thought was one of his weak points—his verbosity. McParland’s gift—or curse—of the gab seemed to increase as time passed. He was quoted at longer and longer length in the press, and his statements in newspapers and in courtroom testimony seemed to reflect both self-satisfaction and a desire to prove himself an expert in all aspects of crime investigation and enforcement. It is apparent that at some stage he was carrying on too long in his reports, because handwritten on McParland’s letter was a brief note from Robert Pinkerton, instructing Bangs: “In replying to this, ask him not to be too voluminous in his replies, but to get right to the point and make his letters as brief as possible.”7

  There was certainly no beating around the bush in the aftermath of the Wilcox train robbery. In almost no time McParland and Fraser had men in the field, including Siringo and Sayers, the latter recently returned from South Africa. They were told to start at Salt Lake City and track down two men—presumably the robbers—who had been seen driving thirteen horses toward Brown’s Park. Before they left, however, Siringo made contact with Shores, who was then working for the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad. Shores shared with them a letter he had received from an agent in Hanksville, Utah, that said two men with thirteen horses had passed there heading south. Realizing that this was undoubtedly the same pair, Siringo convinced Shores to give them the use of a stockcar to take their supplies and horses south so that they could reach the Colorado River around the same time as the robbers. But Fraser told them to stick to their original instructions. After five days hard riding toward Brown’s Park, they found a telegram waiting for them at Fort Duchesne stating that the two men in Utah likely were the robbers, and to turn south after them. “We were not mad,” wrote Siringo, “but the cuss-words hurled over towards Denver left a sulphuric taste in our mouths for a week.”8