The Mammoth Book of the West (55 page)

On the tortuous road to their claim, they encountered mosquitoes.

With all the pain I ever suffered, I never endured such agony as I did that night. The mosquitoes numbered millions. The coulies were full of them. I wore a broad brimmed hat with the lower part tucked in the ulster, but it seemed hardly the least protection. I was bitten over my whole body not only through my gloves but through three thicknesses, ulster, dress, and wrapper sleeves; the miserable insects even found a small hole in the side of my shoes . . . But what I endured was nothing in comparison to what Frank went through, he having neither gloves, netting or any protection. Every few minutes he would jump out of the wagon, slapping the mosquitoes off from the mules, whose sides were so covered with them that their color could not have been told . . . Could we have driven fast, the little breeze thus produced would have made away with some of them . . . At last we reached our home . . . Frank had borrowed a tent, and as we entered it I sunk to the ground in
exhaustion and immediately fell into a heavy sleep. Tired as Frank was he made a fire, boiled the tea kettle and steeped a strong cup of tea. He awakened me and after drinking a cup of tea, I again sunk into a heavy sleep, and there I lay until morning, with hat, dress, gloves &c all on.

To her dismay, Julia Gage Carpenter found that the nearest town, Edgeley, was a flimsy wooden affair, apparently only six weeks old. She came to hate the plains and the privations of pioneer life. By January 1884, during weather that reached 48 degrees below zero at noon, Carpenter was writing in her diary “I am
frantically
lonely. Can hardly endure it.” Her diary continued in the same grim vein for years.

Unlike men, who occasionally went to town, women were confined to the sod house. Distance and the scarcity of population made companionship rare. When Ohio-born Sedda Hemry moved to Wyoming to marry a sheepherder she did not see another White woman for six months. Madness on the windswept plains was much higher amongst women than amongst men. “Pray for me,” wrote Sarah Sim from Nebraska to her parents, “that I may overcome my present fear.” Sim was severely melancholic, and for eight months bit herself and her children, smashed everything in sight and acted demented. When she tried to commit suicide her husband was obliged to tie her to the bed. She recovered.

Not all women were helpmates to men. Around 15 per cent of homesteaders in some states were lone women; and in some areas, women proved up on claims – that is, fulfilled the conditions for ownership under the Homestead Act – more often than men.

The shortage of women on the plains gave them a peculiar power. If a man wanted a wife, he often had
to agree to her demands not to drink or to smoke. As the female population of the plains grew, so did the temperance movement. Carry Nation from Kansas went on hatchet-wielding forays which left a trail of smashed-up saloons behind her.

Temperance was not the only movement Western women were involved with. In Wyoming Territory in December 1869, for the first time on the continent, women were “invested with all the political rights, duties, franchises, and responsibilities of male citizens.” Women thus had the vote in Wyoming 50 years before female suffrage was added to the US Constitution, this largely due to campaigning by the “Wyoming Tea Party” led by Esther McQuigg Morris, plus some astute politics by male legislators, who hoped to attract responsible woman settlers to the state, so offsetting the influence of the lawless (male) elements who had arrived to work on the railroads.

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 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.

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.

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 stunned 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.