Around 2 a.m. on June 2, 1899, the engineer of an eastbound train outside of Wilcox, Wyo., spotted someone waving a red lantern. As he braked, a masked man with a gun crawled into the cab from behind and said, “Now, you son of a bitch, do what I say, or I will put light through you!”
The holdup man was Butch Cassidy. His lantern-waving accomplice was Harry Longabaugh, known as the Sundance Kid. After dynamiting their way into a pair of safes, the two outlaws and four other members of the so-called Wild Bunch disappeared into the night with $50,000 in cash and jewelry.
This was the third and possibly the most lucrative of the five heists attributed to Cassidy’s gang between 1896 and 1901. It was also the beginning of their end. A Wyoming sheriff was killed in an ensuing shootout, making Cassidy (born Robert LeRoy Parker) America’s most wanted criminal. The outraged Union Pacific railroad boss, E.H. Harriman, dispatched Pinkerton detectives and bounty hunters to scour the West by horse and train.
The 1969 film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” depicted Harriman’s superposse as enforcers of a future order from which outlaws could run but not hide. Telecommunications and interstate law enforcement had, by the end of the century, improved dramatically, and for the outlaws who populate Tom Clavin’s terminally unfocused “Bandit Heaven,” the party was over.
Banditry, Clavin writes, had gone “from romantic to risky.” That’s putting it glibly, but the arm of the law was indeed shorter during the 19th century, when a so-called Outlaw Trail ran from Montana to Mexico, dotted with hide-outs with names like Hole-in-the-Wall and Robbers Roost. The most celestial of these naturally walled-off strongholds was Brown’s Park, a 13,000-acre river valley in northwest Colorado that is now a federal wildlife refuge.
The full-time residents of Brown’s Hole, as it was known, may have been more interesting than the malefactors who passed through. One was Isom Dart, a formerly enslaved man who had been an outlaw, a wrangler and a rodeo clown before settling down as a respected jack-of-all-trades. Another was Elizabeth Bassett, matriarch of a local ranching family, who gladly put wanted men to work as cowhands. Her two daughters, Josie and “Queen” Ann, lived into the Eisenhower era and later recorded their memories of young Butch and Sundance in their charming prime.
These are some of the dozens of characters who wander in and out of Clavin’s leisurely account, which often reads more like an informal Old West gossip column than a propulsive yarn. Many paragraphs begin colloquially: “Let’s return to Annie Rogers” or “Because we may not encounter him again, we can’t leave Gunplay Maxwell in the dust just yet.” Shouldn’t the author know whether we’re going to meet this marginal figure again? (As it happens, we aren’t.)
Seemingly every monikered miscreant west of Chicago gets a moment in the spotlight. Chicago itself does, too, during a lengthy account of the early career of Charlie Siringo, a notorious “cowboy detective” who went undercover in pursuit of Cassidy and others.
One problem for any chronicler of the Wild Bunch is that whereas Siringo wrote three memoirs, only three letters of Cassidy’s survive from before 1901, the year he and Sundance fled to South America with Etta Place, a woman about whom so little is known that some historians have maintained that she and Ann Bassett were the same person.
Nostalgists and charlatans have long bent the story of the Wild Bunch to their purposes, but there has been much recent work to distinguish facts from fancy. Clavin quotes liberally from two excellent biographies of Cassidy — one by Thom Hatch, the other by Charles Leerhsen — and other secondary sources, which has the unfortunate effect of highlighting the shortcomings of his own book.
Even action sequences often prove disappointing, as when an avenging posse “paused to open fire, pulling the triggers repeatedly.” This is no tale of black hats versus white hats; history rarely is. But rather than provide shades of gray, Clavin — a best-selling author of World War II and Wild West histories — renders the good, the bad and the ugly in the same monotone. Thus when Harvey Logan, the nastiest of the Wild Bunch, was finally arrested after killing two policemen, then escaped from jail, only to blow his brains out the next time the law caught up to him, it was because he “had one more adventure in him.”
By then, Butch and Sundance had retreated to South America. They had tried and failed to go straight — doomed, in part, by Cassidy’s loneliness and Sundance’s drinking.
They died in 1908 during a shootout with Bolivian soldiers and policemen. Some dreamers claim they survived — or at least went out in a cinematic hail of bullets. What really happened is that Cassidy killed his wounded companion, and then himself. Bandit heaven, indeed.
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