The Mammoth Book of the West

by Jon E. Lewis

  Yet, ultimately, the saga of the settling of the plains is not one of women or men, but of families. Children eased the isolation and provided more hands for the unceasing work. Western children joined the family labour force at an early age. By the age of seven a frontier boy would be expected to herd cattle, pick potatoes and plant corn. When he was older, his strapping muscles might be hired out to a neighbour to bring in some money to the family coffer.

  Westerners were clannish by nature. They did things as a family – bad things as well as good. Much of the history of outlawry can be told in families: the James brothers, the Youngers, the Clantons, the Renos, the Doolins, and the Daltons.

  And also the Logan brothers, who would organize the Hole in the Wall gang, and then join up with the Wild Bunch to produce the most effective bandit gang ever to roam the West.

  The Wild Bunch

  The operations of the Wild Bunch were at one time so bold that during his term of office, former Governor Wells of Utah suggested that the governors of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah unite in concentrated action to wipe out this gang. The operations of the freebooters extended from the Montana lines outward to the conjoining of Sweetwater, Wyoming, Utah and Routt County, Colorado.

  Denver Daily News, 1903

  The Hole in the Wall was a desolate valley at the top of Wyoming, and took its name from the gash in the cliff which was its main entrance. Isolated, easy to defend, with good grazing nearby, the Hole in the Wall was a natural paradise for rustlers and wanted men. And it became one.

  Among the first to ride into the Hole in the Wall were Harvey Logan, and his brothers Lonie and Johnny. Orphaned in Missouri at an early age, the brothers wandered west, accompanied by a cousin, Bob Lee. When the four reached Wyoming they joined a rustling gang led by Flat Nose George Curry. In admiration of Curry, the teenage Harvey Logan began to call himself “Kid Curry”. Under Flat Nose Curry’s patronage, the Logans started up a ranch with a stolen herd of cattle. During the Johnson County range war of the early 1890s, they hired themselves as gunmen to the rustling Red Sash Gang, but after Nate Champion was killed withdrew from the fray.

  On Christmas Eve 1894, a drunken Harvey Logan killed prospector Pike Landusky, founder of the town of that name. Landusky’s stepdaughter was the mother of Harvey Logan’s illegitimate child. Logan attacked without provocation, hitting the prospector’s head against the floor; when Landusky tried to pull a gun, Logan was quicker, shooting the battered miner while he was on his knees.

  After the shooting of Landusky, the Logan brothers fled inevitably to the Hole in the Wall, where they rejoined the rustling gang of Flat Nose Curry.

  A year later, the Logans were involved in a shoot-out with a rancher called Jim Winters, in which Johnny Logan was killed. Though Harvey Logan entertained thoughts of revenge, his interest was more taken by the proposal of Robert LeRoy Parker, a rustler and outlaw who occasionally stayed at the Hole in the Wall. Parker, who used the alias “Cassidy”, was organizing a gang to rob banks and trains. Logan joined him.

  Parker was the descendant of Mormons who had emigrated to Utah with the second handcart procession, and had left home at 16 to become a rustler in the gang of a ruffian called Mike Cassidy (like Logan, Parker borrowed his pseudonym from the man who introduced him to crime). Parker had since robbed banks in Colorado’s Denver and Telluride with the bandit gang of Tom and Bill McCarty, and spent two years in Wyoming State Penitentiary for cattle stealing. (The man who swore out the warrant leading to Parker’s arrest, rancher Otto Franc, was later mysteriously shot to death.) Friends called Parker “Butch”, because he once worked in a Rock Springs butcher shop, while his Pinkerton file described him as having the “looks of a quarter breed Indian”.

  It was on his release from the Wyoming Penitentiary in January 1896 that the affable Parker drifted to Brown’s Hole, a desperado haven at the junction of Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming, and on to the Hole in the Wall and began to form the notorious “Wild Bunch” of outlaws. Aside from Harvey Logan as “Kid Curry”, the gang included – at various times, for riders came and went – Ben “The Tall Texan” Kilpatrick, Harry Tracy, Lonie Logan, Tom Ketchum and his brother “Black Jack” Ketchum (who also led a celebrated band of his own), Bill Carver, Elza Lay, and Tom O’Day. A prominent member of the gang, and Parker’s closest associate, was Harry (“Sundance Kid”) Longbaugh, a Pennsylvanian who had migrated to Wyoming as a teenager, and served a jail sentence in the Sundance Penitentiary for horse theft. He was recruited to the Wild Bunch while cowboying on the Bar FS ranch in Wyoming.

  The Wild Bunch in Action

  In April 1897 the Wild Bunch made their first raid, holding up the mining camp at Castle Gate, Utah, and taking $8,000 from the paymaster. This was followed by a number of other moderate hold-ups, among them a hold-up of the First National Bank in Winnemucca, Nevada, in 1900, before the gang pulled off a sequence of spectacular train robberies.

  The Union Pacific was a favourite target. On the night of 2 June 1899 the Overland Flyer was stopped at Wilcox Siding, Wyoming, by a red lantern placed on the track. The Wild Bunch climbed aboard. Their endeavours were unhappily witnessed by one Robert Lawson, a mail clerk on the Flyer:

  As soon as we came to a standstill, Conductor Storey went forward to see what was the matter and saw several men with guns, one of whom shouted that they were going to blow up the train with dynamite. The conductor understood the situation at once and, before meeting the bandits, turned and started back to warn the second section. The robbers mounted the engine and at the point of their guns forced the engineer and fireman to dismount, after beating the engineer over the head with their guns, claiming that he didn’t move fast enough, and marched them back over to our car.

  In a few moments we heard voices outside our car calling for Sherman and looking out saw Engineer Jones and his fireman accompanied by three masked men with guns.

  They evidently thought Clerk Sherman was aboard and were calling him to come out with the crew. Burt Bruce, clerk in charge, refused to open the door, and ordered all lights extinguished. There was much loud talk and threats to blow up the car were made, but the doors were kept shut. In about 15 minutes two shots were fired into the car, one of the balls passing through the water tank and on through the stanchions.

  Following close behind the shooting came a terrific explosion, and one of the doors was completely wrecked and most of the car windows broken. The bandits then threatened to blow up the whole car if we didn’t get out, so Bruce gave the word and we jumped down, and were immediately lined up and searched for weapons. They said it would not do us no good to make trouble, that they didn’t want the mail – that they wanted what was in the express car and was going to have it, and that they had powder enough to blow the whole train off the track.

  After searching us they started us back and we saw up the track the headlight of the second section. They asked what was on the train, and somebody said there were two cars of soldiers on the train. This scared them and they hastened back to the engine, driving us ahead. They forced us on the engine, and as Dietrick moved too slowly they assisted him with a few kicks. While on the engine, Dietrick, in the act of closing the furnace door, brushed a mask off one of the men, endeavoring to catch a glimpse of his face. The man quickly grasped his mask and threatened to “plug” Dietrick.

  They then ran the train ahead across a gully and stopped. There were two extra cars on the train. They were uncoupled. Others of the gang went to the bridge, attempting to destroy it with their giant powder, or dynamite, which they placed on the timbers. After the explosion at the bridge they boarded the engine with the baggage, express, and mail cars, went for about 2 miles, leaving the extra cars.

  Upon arriving at the stopping place they proceeded to business again and went to the express car and ordered the messenger, E. C. Woodcock, to open. He refused, and the outlaws proceeded to batter down the doors and blew a big hole in the side of the car. The explosion was so terrific that the messenger was s
tunned and had to be taken from the car. They then proceeded to the other mail car, occupied by Clerks O’Brian and Skidmore and threatened to blow it up, but the boys were advised to come out which they did.

  The robbers then went after the safes in the express car with dynamite and soon succeeded in getting into them, but not before the car was torn to pieces by the force of the charges. They took everything from the safes and what they didn’t carry away they destroyed. After finishing their work they started out in a northerly direction on foot.

  The men all wore masks reaching below their necks and of the three I observed, one looked to be 6 foot tall, the others being about ordinary sized men. The leader appeared to be about 50 years old and spoke with a squeaky voice, pitched very high.

  Flat Nose Curry and the Sundance Kid made camp near the Powder River. While eating supper, they were attacked by a posse led by Sheriff Joe Hazen of Converse County. In a running gunfight, Logan shot Sheriff Hazen, fatally wounding him with a rifle bullet through the stomach. Though the Powder was swollen and turbulent, the bandits swam it, losing the posse, and picking up horses from a friendly rancher on the north fork.

  The Bunch’s escapades were often followed by gang vacations, to such retreats as New Orleans, Denver and Fort Worth. The Wild Bunch liked to pose for photographs, jauntily wearing derby hats and smiles, gold watch chains tucked into vest pockets. Between hold-ups, Parker sometimes hid out in the respectable, ordinary ranks of society; he worked as a cowboy, Great Lakes sailor, and as a waiter on the steamer from Seattle to Los Angeles.

  Late in the evening of 29 August 1900, the Wild Bunch struck No. 3 Train of the Union Pacific just as it passed the station at Tipton, Wyoming. The driver was ordered at gunpoint to halt the train, and when it had ceased motion, the express and mail cars were uncoupled. By coincidence, the messenger inside the express car was Woodcock, the same messenger the Wild Bunch had dynamited at Wilcox Siding. Again Woodcock refused to open the car. Finally he was persuaded to do so, and the safe was blown with three charges of dynamite (“Kepauno Chemical Co., Giant Powder”). The bandits secured $5,014 in cash.

  After the Tipton hold-up, the Union Pacific organized a special mobile posse under its Chief Special Agent T. T. Kelliher, which was also given use of its own train, outfitted with stalls and a loading ramp for horses. The train was held in permanent readiness, to be sent wherever and whenever the Wild Bunch next struck.

  They did so at 2.30 p.m. on the summer’s afternoon of 3 July 1901, robbing a Great Northern Railroad train in Montana. According to the later Pinkerton report:

  One man [of the Wild Bunch] boarded the blind baggage car as the train was leaving Malta, Montana, and shortly before reaching the place of robbery, crawled over the engine tender and “covered” the engineer and fireman with a revolver and compelled them to stop the train near a bridge from under which two men came, armed with Winchester rifles. Two men, one on each side of the train, with rifles prevented passengers and others from interfering with the other man who marched the engine men ahead of him to the express car, which was entered and the safe opened by the use of dynamite.

  After robbing the express car, the bandits mounted horses and rode away.

  The haul was large: $40,000 in notes from the Bank of Montana.

  A hundred-man posse chased after the Wild Bunch, who now included a new female member, Laura Bullion (“Della Rose”), who had formed a relationship with Ben Kilpatrick. By the time they reached Texas, the Wild Bunch had thrown off the posse and celebrated with a drinking spree in Fort Worth and San Antonio. A bicycle-riding craze was sweeping the West in 1901, and Parker endlessly rode up and down the red light district of Fort Worth.

  But Parker also had more serious matters on his mind. With the detectives of the Union Pacific, Pinkertons and the law closing in, he understood that his days as a Wild West outlaw were numbered. In 1902 he parted company with the Wild Bunch and fled to South America, via an extended vacation in New York. Joining him in Uruguay were Harry Longbaugh, and Longbaugh’s mistress, Texan prostitute Etta Place.

  The trio moved to Argentina, where they operated a cattle and sheep ranch at Chibut, trailing their herds to the meat-hungry miners of neighbouring Chile. This idyll lasted for four years, before the outside world began to close in again. Also, Etta Place began to suffer from attacks of appendicitis, and in 1907 Longbaugh escorted her to Denver for an operation. A bartender who tried to stop him shooting up a saloon was himself shot by Longbaugh, although not mortally. After this they returned to South America, but relocated to Bolivia, where Longbaugh and Parker began to rob payroll shipments and banks, working at the Concordia Tin Mine in between times. Their crimes in South America amounted to a mere handful.

  And then, as legend has it, there was a gunbattle between the bandido yanquis, who had just hijacked a money-laden mule train, and Bolivian soldiers in the town of San Vincente. Longbaugh then shot the capitan out of his saddle; Parker – who had never killed anyone before – shot another soldier. They quickly retreated inside a restaurant, piling up tables and chairs before them. They ran short of ammunition, and when darkness fell Longbaugh made a dash across the plaza to their mules, and grabbed their Winchesters and cartridge belts. As Longbaugh ran back he was shot. Parker managed to pull him inside, suffering a wound himself. Parker held out for a while, but at about 10 p.m. he shot the badly wounded Longbaugh in the head, donned the uniform of a slain soldier and escaped into the night. After facial surgery, he returned to the USA as William Thadeus Phillips, a mechanical engineer from Des Moines, Iowa. He married, his Phillips Manufacturing Company prospered, he became an Elk and a Freemason. In the 1920s and 1930s he made nostalgic trips back to the Hole in the Wall country, even renewing an acquaintanceship with former mistress Mary Boyd Rhodes. During the Great Depression, his business went under. Robert LeRoy Parker, alias “Butch Cassidy” and “William T. Phillips”, died of cancer at the county poor farm at Spangle, near Spokane, in 1937.

  That is one version of what befell Parker and Longbaugh in South America. Another, as described in a manuscript William T. Phillips wrote entitled “The Bandit Invincible”, has Parker, Longbaugh and two accomplices attacking a mule train on a track outside La Paz, and then being ambushed by Bolivian cavalry. There was a sharp fight, during which the accomplices and Longbaugh were shot. Before he died, Longbaugh told Parker that he had legally married Etta Place, and asked him to give her his money belt. When darkness fell, Parker shot at a noise in the brush, killing another soldier, and crawled away to safety, and eventually to America.

  In other accounts of Parker and Longbaugh’s Latin American exile, both escape back to the USA to live under assumed names and identities. Or both die in the little square at San Vincente.

  The truth of what happened to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid may never be known. There was a battle in San Vincente in November 1908 in which two North Americans were killed. Probably they were not Parker and Longbaugh. Parker, at least, seems to have made it back to the USA, to live under an assumed name, William T. Phillips. His sister certainly thought so. Not least because he paid her a surprise visit in 1929.

  Business (Almost) as Usual

  After Parker and Longbaugh left for South America, most of their old Wild Bunch confederates carried on with business as usual. Or, at least, as far as they were able in a world of telegraphs, telephones, spreading settlements, growing railroads and the combustion engine.

  Harvey “Kid Curry” Logan–after returning to Wyoming to kill rancher Jim Winters, who had shot his brother Johnny five years earlier – wounded three deputies in a gunfight at Knoxville, Tennessee, in December 1901, but was captured by a posse with dogs. He made a daring escape from the “escape-proof” prison at Columbus, Ohio, and tried to join Parker and Longbaugh in South America, but was unable to get out of the country. Logan was by now one of the most wanted men in America. In June 1904, he held up the Denver & Rio Grande railroad at Parachute, Colorado, but the safe yielded only a
few dollars. Pursued by a posse, Logan and his accomplices were cornered in a small canyon near Glenwood Springs. Wounded by a bullet as he tried to take cover, Logan was asked, “Are you hit?”

  “Yes,” gasped Logan, “and I’m going to end it here.” He committed suicide by a shot to the head. Rumours persisted for years that he managed to escape to South America.

  Tom O’Day was captured by Sheriff Frank Webb in Casper, Wyoming, with a herd of stolen horses in 1903, and sentenced to jail.

  Harry Tracy shot his brother-in-law in an argument in July 1902, and a month later battled it out with a posse at Davenport, near Washington. Badly injured, he jammed a revolver to his head and committed suicide.

  Ben Kilpatrick (“The Tall Texan”) was still holding up trains as late as 1912. On the afternoon of 14 March in that year, Kilpatrick and accomplice Nick Grider stopped the Southern Pacific just outside Dryden, Texas. Everything seemed to be going in the traditional manner. The mail and express car were detached and run a mile up the track. Kilpatrick, however, allowed himself to be distracted by the messenger, David Trousdale, who battered him over the head with an ice pick. He died moments later.

  And so ended the last old-style train robbery in the history of the West.

  The Saga of Tom Horn

  I can never believe that the jolly, jovial, honorable and whole-souled Tom Horn I knew was a low-down miserable murderer.