PROLOGUE
The train station in Wilcox that served the Union Pacific line was in the southern half of Wyoming, ninety-five miles west of Cheyenne. Early in the morning on June 2, 1899, a gang that newspaper accounts had christened the Wild Bunch planned to rob the Overland Flyer No. 1 as it approached the station.
And that was what happened—but not exactly as the perpetrators planned.
It was 2:18 A.M. when W. R. Jones, the train’s engineer, spotted a man standing beside the tracks waving a red lantern. For a moment, Jones, who had earned the nickname “Grindstone” because of his serious work ethic, hesitated. Bandits were known to do this as a trick to get a train to stop unnecessarily. But if there was a legitimate reason to stop, such as track damage ahead, and the engineer did not, the result could be catastrophic. Jones was not one to take chances.
He ordered the train to halt. For the right reason, he made the wrong decision. But it turned out not to matter. He would have stopped the train anyway when he caught sight of the man crawling over the coal tender and into the engine compartment. He held a pistol pointed at Grindstone. This was infinitely more persuasive than a lantern of any color.
To emphasize that, the man said, “Do what I say, you son of a bitch, or I will put light through you.” Grindstone would later learn that the bandit was Butch Cassidy.
Immediately after the train stopped, four other men appeared trackside. One was George “Flatnose” Currie, a kick from a horse having earned him that nickname. The other three were related: Bob Lee, and his cousins, the brothers Lonie and Harvey Logan. The latter was more familiar to lawmen as Kid Curry. The man who had been swinging the lantern would be identified as Harry Longabaugh, who also had a juvenile nickname—the Sundance Kid. All six men, Grindstone noted, his dismay deepening, had long masks covering their faces, and each carried a Winchester rifle in addition to a Colt pistol.1
The plan, so far, was working perfectly. It would soon dawn on the passengers that the train stopping short of the Wilcox station might mean a robbery was in progress, and to be on the safe side, they would stay glued to their seats. The wild card in the Wild Bunch was always Kid Curry. He had a hair-trigger temper and could be unpredictable. Cassidy had to keep him on a short rein, and usually, the Kid followed the plan.
As Cassidy had rehearsed with his crew, Grindstone Jones and his fireman were hauled down from the engine compartment and escorted along the tracks to the mail car. This was where the first deviation from the plan occurred: the men inside refused to open up. The mail car door remained fixed and locked even after Cassidy shouted that they had two hostages and the gang fired bullets into the car.
The second deviation caused even more consternation to Cassidy: the lights of another Overland Limited train came into view, traveling in the same direction. Now what?
Cassidy was not keen on giving up just yet. He ordered his men to hop back on the train, and Grindstone Jones and the fireman were pushed back up into the engine compartment. Cassidy knew this section of track and that about a mile ahead was a gully over which a bridge had recently been built. He had the train travel to the other side of it. Then, as the engine idled, billowing smoke disappearing into the dark sky, Cassidy ran back to the bridge. A minute later, an explosion of ten pounds of gunpowder turned the bridge into a precarious structure that no train should risk crossing.
Thus far, Butch Cassidy had been such a cool customer that no one would have guessed this was his very first train robbery.
Cassidy told Jones to get the train rolling again. This Jones did, but the engine struggled a bit on an upgrade. As he nervously adjusted the controls, the engineer heard one of the men say, “I’ll fix you!” With that, Kid Curry clunked Jones on the head with his Colt pistol. He went to strike again, but this time, Jones deflected the blow with his hand. There would not be a third time—Cassidy told the Kid, “Calm down or you’ll kill someone.” So far in his criminal career, Cassidy had avoided doing that, and he did not want to start now.
Several miles later, the train stopped. With the entire event taking too long, Cassidy and his crew had to forget the mail car and get into the express car, which contained two safes. They could not know that the plan would go awry in another way, one that would result in a death. Worse, the dead man would be Josiah Hazen, the sheriff of Converse County. He would receive one of the largest funerals the area had ever seen, presided over by J. DeForest Richards, the governor of Wyoming.
News of the sheriff’s murder and burial in the Pioneer Cemetery made headlines across America, which in turn inspired a push by lawmen to once and for all round up the gangs who called Bandit Heaven home. The famous Pinkerton National Detective Agency was part of that effort. It assigned the best man it had, Charlie Siringo, to track down Butch Cassidy, Kid Curry, the Sundance Kid, and the others.
For now, though, the thieves had no idea what lay in store. They had a train to rob. Cassidy ordered the man inside the express car to open up—and received another refusal. There was no time for persuasion. Instead, it was time for more dynamite. The explosion sounded especially loud in the dark night. Maybe the darkness combined with smoke explained why, when the dazed messenger was pulled out of the express car covered in soot and debris, it looked like he was covered in blood.
1MAVERICKS
Many people might view the “creation” of the pre–Civil War American West—though to the Indigenous residents, of course, it had been created a long time ago—as the steady and relentless migration of people looking for land west of the Missouri River on which to settle and raise crops and livestock. However, this was not true for most of the first half of the nineteenth century.
The Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery expedition that set off from St. Charles, Missouri, in 1804 was, as its name indicates, about finding what was in the 828,000 square miles that President Thomas Jefferson and the U.S. government had purchased from France the year before. For decades, there had been tales that the land beyond the Missouri River was inhabited by fantastic creatures, such as woolly mammoths and giant sloths, and some maps labeled much of the vast, uncharted territory the Great American Desert. Some people believed that it was all one big, lush garden, a utopia to be enjoyed. In any case, when Lewis and Clark returned to “civilization” in 1806, their extraordinary tales only intensified curiosity.
But those who ventured forth after them were not looking for a place to live. There were mapmaking forays, the most prominent one led by the army lieutenant Zebulon Pike. And then there were the fur trappers. Adventure and discovery were inevitably part of the journeys to the Rocky Mountains and beyond, but the main impetus was money. Beaver was the prize, with prices for pelts soaring thanks to the fervor for fur hats and garments back east and in Europe. From 1822 until 1840, when a combination of falling prices and depleted stocks ended the era, the trappers scoured the plains and mountains and valleys for beaver and any other animals that would provide food or cash. For these restless men, wearing viscera-stained buckskin and toting long rifles and blood-flecked knives, the end of one expedition was an invitation to begin the next one.
Following the fur trappers were those who viewed much of the American West as not a destination but a route. The Oregon Trail and the Santa Fe Trail were ways to get from here to there. As they lumbered along, the columns of covered wagons left behind hastily dug graves, decaying buffalo carcasses, and discarded furniture and other litter. The Mormons changed that equation. When Brigham Young and his followers aimed their wagons west, it was to find a place to dig in and farm. They found it in the Salt Lake Valley. Very soon after stopping there in July 1847, they found that farming would not work, at least not on a scale to feed them all.
The dry land of the West would not sustain some of the crops grown back east. However, the land did grow grass that was good for grazing. Gone was the dream of raising an array of crops; it was replaced by the practice of raising livestock, which could be done pretty much year-round. Over the years, when a landowner prospered, it was not from farming but from having expanding herds of horses and cattle.
There were pockets of communities, such as the Mormon one, before and during the Civil War, but four years after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, there was a dramatic change in the American West. On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Point in Utah, the last spike was pounded in to complete the transcontinental railroad. The iron horse made it much easier for thousands of men and women to seek new homes a thousand miles or more away from their old ones. Some of them went to work at ranches or brought along enough capital to start their own.
There was a great demand for cattle, and Texas ranches were happy to meet it. Tens of thousands of livestock were sent by trail and rail to Wyoming, Utah, and Montana. After fattening up sufficiently on the sweet grasses, the “beeves” were pushed into railroad cars and shipped east for slaughter. There would soon be so many cattle barons that they would routinely fight over grazing land and fresh water. And like the dwindling Indian tribes had done with ponies, the ranch owners would steal stock from each other. The size of the herds bestowed wealth and power. And that is where cowboys came in.
The occupation was originally spelled “cow-boy.” The initially derisive name referred to someone who tended cattle while on horseback and was derived from the Spanish vaquero, with vaca meaning “cow.” One might think the American West created the cowboy, but the word first appeared in print in 1725, written by Jonathan Swift, the Irish essayist and author best known for Gulliver’s Travels. Cowboy was also used in the early 1800s in Great Britain to describe the youngsters who managed cattle belonging to their families or the community.
In the United States, cowboy was being used as early as 1849, and two years later, there was a reference in print to a “cowhand.” It took almost thirty years for another, similar name to be used—cowpoke. It referred specifically to the men who used long poles to persuade cows to get up into railroad cars. Other variations of the occupation were cowpuncher—mostly in Texas—and buckaroo.
As the ranches proliferated in Wyoming and its adjacent territories in the 1870s and 1880s and the population of cattle swelled, more and more cowboys were needed. There was no cowboy academy, of course, and many who filled in the ranks were raw easterners seeking adventure.2 The ones who survived did so against a lot of odds—extremes in weather, resentful fellow cowboys, stampedes, and many lonely nights—and the lifestyle offered little chance to improve oneself.
“Almost as nomadic as Indians, they moved from one big outfit to another as their fancy dictated, unhampered by family,” writes Charles Kelly in his indispensable The Outlaw Trail, first published in 1938. “If some misguided cowpuncher with a few months’ pay in his pocket planned to start a ranch of his own on a small scale, he found his efforts violently opposed by the large ranch owners, who had claimed all public domain, under the theory that it had been created and reserved for their special benefit.”
According to Kelly, “The cowboy-outlaw era began about 1875, reached its climax in 1897, and ended about 1905.”
While in the employ of the ranch owners, cowboys routinely collected and branded “mavericks”—loose cattle that had wandered off from their owners. This was a sort of rustling because, with very few cattle being born free, they had to belong to someone. And at times, the mavericks already had brands on them, ones that were altered after the beasts drifted onto the property of their new owner. As long as this did not become blatant theft, it was tolerated, and the numbers pretty much evened themselves out anyway.
But the equation began to change with the increasing number of cattle and the rising number of cowboys who wanted to make money for themselves, more than or in place of the wages doled out by the large landowners. As Kelly notes, “From branding mavericks to genuine rustling was but a short and easy step. A generation of cattle thieves sprang up within a very short time, the like of which was never seen before [and] the largest gang of outlaws the West ever saw was organized in the Utah-Wyoming-Colorado section.”
It could be difficult for the big ranchers to keep the rustling to an acceptable level. Many of the sworn lawmen in the region were poorly paid part-timers with limited jurisdictions and little motivation to risk their lives to protect the stuffed pockets of high-handed ranch owners. In turn, an owner could not completely rely on his own employees to protect the ranch’s interest because as many as half of them, or more, could be rustlers themselves.
And so, thousands of cattle (and some horses) were being stolen from ranches—a dozen here or there or sometimes a hundred or more. Early on, though, the thieves did not have what the owners did, which was a place to keep the cattle that offered enough food and water until they could be sold or shipped. A big bonus would be if the location was impervious to posses.
When one such place was found, the first “bandit heaven” was born.
Copyright © 2024 by Tom Clavin.
