by David Fisher
By the turn of the twentieth century, it was becoming difficult to make a decent living cattle rustling or horse thieving, but it was a good time to be a bank or train robber. The West was being tamed. New towns were springing up all over the prairie; most of them had banks, while few of them could afford sufficient law enforcement. The iron horse was replacing the stagecoach, carrying money and mail vast distances, often with very little security on board.
Only outlaws on the run were welcomed at the easily defended Hole-in-the-Wall in Wyoming and at Brown’s Park, or Brown’s Hole, in Colorado (inset).
Butch Cassidy was a new kind of bank robber. He treated robbing as his profession rather than as a dangerous hobby. Instead of just bursting into a place and waving guns around, he spent considerable time planning his jobs. Before proceeding, he gathered intelligence: By the time he was ready to move forward, he knew how he intended to get into and out of the town, how many lawmen might be on the job, and, most important, how much money was in the safe.
Even more crucial, he planned his escapes. For example, his men would climb poles and cut the town’s telegraph lines to prevent the sheriff from contacting nearby law enforcement for help. They would leave horses waiting a good distance from a town, and if they were pursued by a posse of lawmen, they would ride hard to that place and change mounts, so that they would be riding fresh horses while the posse’s would be wearing out. Sometimes all that planning wasn’t really necessary. In 1896, Cassidy, recently released after serving eighteen months of a two-year sentence for stealing a horse, learned along with Elzy Lay and Bob Meeks that the town of Montpelier, Idaho, had only a part-time deputy who was paid a paltry ten dollars a month—and that he had neither a horse nor a gun.
But the town did have a bank.
They rode out of Montpelier with $7,165 in cash, gold, and silver—a fortune at the time—pursued by part-time deputy sheriff Fred Cruikshank, frantically pedaling his bicycle. When the word of that job spread, seasoned bandits began offering to ride with Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch.
Sundance probably joined him right around that time. In April 1897, after cutting the telegraph wires in Castle Gate, Utah, the gang got away with the Pleasant Valley Coal Company’s $9,860 payroll. In response, the company paymaster handed out checks to miners, informing them, “Paymaster Cassidy of Robbers Roost will honor the paper.” As in almost all of Cassidy’s heists, no shots had been fired. Butch Cassidy wasn’t exactly nonviolent, but he definitely was averse to unnecessary bloodshed. He and his gang weren’t in the robbing business to hurt people, just the banks, the railroads, and the large cattle owners who were putting up fences across the once-open ranges. The most dangerous member of the gang was Kid Curry, who was described by the Anaconda Standard as being “fond of dress and his taste in that direction is rather flashy. He is absolutely reckless and careless, and since he has been an outlaw has been known to take the most desperate chances…. A dead shot with a revolver and rifle, he will be a hard man to capture.”
The “wildest of the Wild Bunch” was Harvey Logan, known as Kid Curry, who was credited with killing eleven men. He is shown here with his girlfriend, prostitute Annie Rogers, also known as Della Moore.
With each successful Wild Bunch robbery, Butch Cassidy’s reputation spread. In 1898, a Chicago newspaper declared him “King of the Bandits,” reporting that he was “the worst man” in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho. The article claimed that he had five hundred outlaws working for him, “subdivided into five gangs.” The daring exploits and well-planned heists of the Wild Bunch made headlines and sold newspapers throughout the country. The gang did give newspapermen plenty to write about: They were committing crimes in five states, the named four plus South Dakota, in robberies that netted as much as seventy thousand dollars.
Although the size of the gang was obviously exaggerated, the “King of the Bandits” story was accurate on one important point: Butch did run the operation. He was known for teaching the other outlaws the proper way to plan and carry out a job and was the acknowledged mastermind behind many of the robberies—even if he didn’t personally participate in them. Occasionally, something would go wrong. In July 1899, Elzy Lay was riding with a group of train robbers known as the Ketchum Gang. They held up the Colorado & Southern number 1 train outside Folsom, New Mexico, getting away with fifty thousand dollars. They didn’t get far, though; the railroads had gotten a lot smarter and were hiring their own guns for protection. The Ketchum Gang was surprised by a determined posse, which lit out after it. They tracked it for several days, and in the running gun battles, two members of the posse were killed, including sheriff Edward Farr, and one man was wounded. One of the bandits died of his wounds, another man escaped, and Elzy Lay was wounded and captured. He recovered well enough to spend the rest of his life in prison.
The loss of his best friend left an empty saddle next to Butch Cassidy, and the Sundance Kid stepped up to fill it. For a time after Lay’s incarceration, Butch Cassidy softened and considered leaving the profession. There are reports that he tried to make a deal with the railroads: If they agreed to let him be, he would leave their safes alone. He might even agree to consult for them as a security specialist—preventing train robberies. Any possibility of that deal ended near Wilcox, Wyoming, when the Wild Bunch took an estimated thirty thousand dollars in gold, cash, jewelry, and banknotes from the Union Pacific Overland Flyer number 1 train. According to a message sent by Union Pacific executives to the Laramie County sheriff, “[A] party of six masked robbers held up the first section of train number one … and after dynamiting bridges, mail and express cars and robbing the latter, disappeared.” There is some evidence that this robbery served as the inspiration for the famous 1903 silent moving picture, The Great Train Robbery, and later for a memorable scene in the 1969 classic film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Blowing things up proved to be a bit of a problem for the gang. It turned out that the use of dynamite wasn’t one of their areas of expertise. Because no crew member aboard this train was given the combination to the safe carried in the baggage car, the outlaws reacted by attempting to blow it open. Apparently they used considerably more dynamite than was necessary, blowing up the entire railway car, down to the frame. Some of the money was scorched in the explosion or stained by raspberries, also being transported in that car. Thus, the Wilcox robbery might be considered a failed experiment. As the Rawlins Semi-Weekly Republican reported, the robbers “wrecked the car, blowing the roof off and sides out, portions of the car being blown 150 yards.” The safe, according to the Laramie Daily Boomerang, was blown “out of all semblance to the original self.”
After the robbery, members of the train crew complimented the manners of the thieves, one of them telling reporters that he had asked for a chew of tobacco, which was given to him by one of the robbers. Another crew member said the bandits had reassured him, “Now boys, don’t get scared. You’re just as safe here as you would be in Cheyenne.”
The robbers split up to make their getaway. Posses eventually including several hundred men, some of them using bloodhounds brought in all the way from Beatrice, Nebraska, for the task, pursued the bandits for several weeks. Converse County sheriff Josiah Hazen’s posse eventually caught up to Sundance, Kid Curry Logan, and Flat Nose Currie near Castle Creek, Wyoming, and in a gunfight, Kid Curry shot and killed the sheriff. As the Boomerang related, “It was rough and broken country, and the outlaws had the advantage of knowing every inch of it. From behind boulder and brushwood they held off the posse—five men against two hundred. Hazen exposed himself and the next moment reeled back with a bullet through his heart. Darkness fell …” Eventually the bandits escaped into Hole-in-the-Wall territory.
A classic scene from the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid recreated the 1899 robbery of the Union Pacific Overland Flyer near Wilcox, Wyoming: Attempting to blow open the safe, the gang mistakenly used enough dynamite to blow up the entire railroad car.
In an
attempt to catch the Wild Bunch, the Union Pacific created a special car for mounted rangers and their horses, enabling them to instantly pursue the robbers.
The New York Herald reported, “They were lawless men who have lived long in the crags and become like eagles.” Although in fact these were killers and robbers, people had already begun romanticizing the Wild Bunch. But this robbery put a quick stop to that.
Killing the sheriff and stealing gold that was to be used to pay American boys fighting in the Spanish-American War proved to be the beginning of the gang’s downfall. The Union Pacific offered an eighteen-thousand-dollar bounty for the capture of the outlaws—dead or alive. It also hired armed guards, Rangers, to protect their trains, warning, “They ride on the engine. In the baggage car, on the dry coaches, or in the sleepers, being instructed not to stay always at one point of the train. Any gang of bandits attacking a Union Pacific train now will know it has to reckon on a stiff fight, for not only is each train guarded, but somewhere up or down the line is the patrol body of rangers, ready to be shipped to the danger zone as fast as steam can carry them.”
Equally significant, the railroad also hired the Pinkertons to once and for all put the gang out of the stealing business. The Pinks represented the largest and toughest private security company in America. In fact, the Pinkerton agency was the only truly national law-enforcement operation; by the 1870s, there were more Pinkerton men than there were soldiers in the American army. They were known to be relentless in their pursuit, professional and thorough in their investigations, and as tough as necessary in their enforcement methods. Without question, they brought scientific detection techniques to American law enforcement, and they were the first to employ mug shots, fingerprints, and undercover agents. But they also were well known to rely on their own interpretation of the law to accomplish their objectives—even when it required bloodshed.
Following the Wilcox robbery, the Pinkertons picked up the trail of the Wild Bunch. And once they had it, they never let it go. By tracing scorched and stained banknotes, they tracked Kid Curry’s brother, Lonnie Logan, and Bob Lee to Cripple Creek, Colorado. Lee eventually was captured and sentenced to ten years in prison. Pinkerton operatives caught up with Lonnie Logan in a rural farmhouse, and when he attempted to escape into the nearby woods, they shot him dead. Almost two years later, Pinkertons caught Kid Curry in Knoxville, Tennessee. After a trial, he was sentenced to 20 to 130 years in federal prison. He escaped less than a year later. In 1904, a posse caught up with him again after a train robbery near Parachute, Colorado. He was wounded in the shoot-out, and rather than surrender and be sent back to prison, he shouted to his companions, “I’m hit! Don’t wait for me, boys. I’m all in. Good-bye!” Then he put his gun to his head and committed suicide.
The Hole-in-the-Wall in the Bighorn Mountains of northern Wyoming, where the Wild Bunch was formed, was a full day’s ride from civilization. Although outlaws were well protected, life was hard there. Each gang was responsible for its own cabins, livestock, and provisions. There was no leader, no structure—and almost no rules. Among the few prohibited acts were murder and stealing another gang’s supplies.
Although the Pinks were successfully dismantling the Wild Bunch man by man, their real target remained the most wanted man in the West, Butch Cassidy. The reward offered for his capture or death was raised to ten thousand dollars. However, the fact that the greatest law-enforcement organization in the world was on his tail didn’t appear to worry him much. On August 29, 1900, a masked robber boarded Union Pacific’s Overland Flyer number 3 outside Tipton, Wyoming, put a pistol to the conductor’s head, and ordered him to stop the train when it reached a campfire by the side of the road. The Wild Bunch had yet to master the art of dynamite and once again blew the baggage car to smithereens, causing a rain of bills estimated at fifty-five thousand dollars. The gang was polite about it, though: After the robbery, a member of the train’s crew complimented the robbers on their courtesy, explaining that one of the holdup men told him the gang really didn’t want to hurt anyone and had made a pact that anyone who killed without reason would be executed. And the bandits said “so long” as they rode away. In a sign of the changing times, a member of the train crew used a pay phone to report the robbery. A posse pursued the Wild Bunch for more than a week, but eventually, as the Salt Lake Herald reported, “All hope of capturing the four men who held up, dynamited and robbed the overland express train at Tipton three weeks ago has been given up … the route of the robbers was well chosen and was through a wild and uninhabited country…. The crimes go on record as one of the most successful and daring robberies in the history of the west.”
Less than a month later, members of the gang were credited with looting the First National Bank in Winnemucca, Nevada, of $32,640. These robbers were not as polite, however, threatening to cut the cashier’s throat if he refused to open the safe. Announcing their presence, one robber pulled a pair of .45s and warned, “Stick ’em up, Slim, or I’ll make you look like a naval target,” adding minutes later, “Just feel how fine and soft the atmosphere is above your head, feel it with both hands at once.”
Although it’s impossible to even roughly estimate the total amount of money stolen by the Wild Bunch—because no one knows how many robberies they actually pulled off—without question, they got away with today’s equivalent of millions of dollars. Most of the money was spent on fast living, although stories are told about Cassidy handing out cash to people who needed it or refusing to steal money from civilians. He also was known to be meticulous about paying his debts. A man named John Kelly, who had worked with “Roy Parker” as a ranch hand, once lent him twenty-five dollars, “so he could get out of Butte, Montana.” Several years later, Kelly unexpectedly received a letter from Parker, and when he opened it, one hundred dollars fell out. The enclosed note read, “If you don’t know how I got this, you will soon learn someday.”
After Butch and Sundance stopped the Great Northern Express near Wagner, Montana, in 1901, they cut loose the express car, blew up the safe, and escaped with forty thousand dollars. In those days, different organizations offered rewards—including a percentage of the money recovered—so it’s impossible to know the total amount of the bounty on the heads of the robbers.
It is possible that some of the loot ended up in the hands of women. Butch was a handsome man; his Wanted poster in 1900 described him as five feet nine inches tall with a medium build, a light complexion, flaxen hair, and blue eyes. His face was square and young-looking, and he bore a naturally inviting, bemused smile. When he was imprisoned in Wyoming, in addition to his physical description, his record noted, “Habits of Life: Intemperate.” He appeared to enjoy the company of the ladies as much as they liked being with him, and it was said that he knew how to treat a woman properly.
Sundance was about the same height and weight, but on his Wanted posters, he was said to have “a dark complexion, black hair, black eyes” and “Grecian features.” The Pinkertons added that he was a fast draw who “drinks very little, if any, and is believed to be involved with a school m’arm known only as Etta Place.”
Little is known about Etta Place, not even her real name. Place was the maiden name of Sundance’s mother. And Etta might actually have been “Ethel.” It isn’t even known if she really was a teacher; she also has been described as a saloon girl and as a prostitute who met both Butch and Sundance while working in a brothel, possibly Fannie Porter’s Sporting Parlor in San Antonio. She was about ten years younger than Sundance and had, according to the Pinkertons, “classic good looks … and she appears to be a refined type.” Other people described her as one of the most beautiful women they had ever seen, and men who later knew her in South America said, “She was a goddess—everyone was enamored of her.” Whether Sundance and Etta were legally married isn’t known, but she wore engagement and wedding rings, and they referred to each other as husband and wife.
It does seem that the core members of the Wild Bunch truly we
re friends in addition to being business associates. Less than three months after the Tipton heist, for instance, several members of the gang found themselves living the sporting life in the cattle boomtown of Fort Worth, Texas. For reasons that will never be understood, five members of the gang—Butch and Sundance, Kid Curry, News Carver, and Tall Texan Kilpatrick—walked into the photography shop of John Swartz, dressed in the dandy-wear of bankers and railroad executives, and posed for a formal picture. This iconic photograph eventually became known as “The Ft. Worth Five,” the most famous mug shot in western history.
The proud photographer was so pleased with his work that he enlarged a copy and placed it on an easel in his front window as an advertisement. Among the people who admired the portrait was a Pinkerton agent who happened to be in town on an assignment and immediately recognized the gang. Within days, it was hanging in every post office, train station, Wells Fargo outlet, and law-enforcement office in the country.
Things were beginning to heat up in early 1901 when Cassidy and Sundance decided to make good their final escape. Although they had only done two or three jobs together, they had become close. Life on the run could wear a man down; as gang member Matt Warner once said, “You’ll never know what it means to be hunted. You can never sleep. You’ve always got to listen with one ear and keep one eye open. After awhile, you almost go crazy. No sleep! No sleep! Even when you know you’re perfectly safe, you can’t sleep. Every pissant under your pillow sounds like a posse of sheriffs coming to get you!”