The Mammoth Book of the West (56 page)

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.

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.

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

After their failed invasion of Johnson County in 1892, the Wyoming cattle barons adopted a low-key – but deadly – approach to the problem of rustlers. They hired the talents of the gunman named Tom Horn, who would shoot rustlers for a price, leaving a trademark of two stones under the victim’s head. When Horn passed on, the long wave of Wyoming range war violence ended with him.

Like many gunfighters, Horn was born and reared on a farm. After a whipping from his father at the age of 14, he ran away to the West. He worked for the railroad, then the Overland stage company as a driver, and by 1876 he had signed on with the army as a scout. His career as a scout in Apache country was heroic, and in 1885 he succeeded the celebrated Al Sieber as civilian chief of scouts. Horn played a part in the final capture of Geronimo, and when that campaign was over he hired out his ability with a gun in the Pleasant Valley War. Later, he was sheriff of Yavapai County, Arizona, and occasionally worked a gold claim near Tombstone.

In 1890 Tom Horn joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency in Denver, and captured the outlaw Peg Leg McCoy. Two years later, Horn enlisted as a range detective with the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association, and helped recruit the gunmen who fought in the Johnson County War against the homesteaders and rustlers. He may have even been a member of the cattle baron invasion force himself.

After the Johnson County War, Horn signed on with the Swan Land and Cattle Company, at that time managed by Scotsman John Clay. According to Clay, Horn hardly spoke, and would sit for long periods silently smoking cigarettes and braiding horsehair ropes. On the company’s books, Horn was listed as a horsebreaker, but his real job was to assassinate troublesome rustlers.

For the next three years, Horn roamed the ranges for the Swan Land and Cattle Company and for other big ranches. When a rancher suspected someone of rustling, they would summon the thin-faced, balding killer and he would set about organizing an ambush. As the testimony in his later trial showed, he was a methodical and patient assassin. He would move into an area under an assumed identity, get to know the victim’s habits, and then wait for hours in the rain or cold or sun, chewing on raw bacon, waiting for the perfect shot. “Killing is my business,” Horn remarked on occasion. He always worked alone, made his kills with a high-powered rifle, was scrupulous in collecting up any evidence of his crime, and always left the two-stone signature.

Horn’s murder of Matt Rash at Cold Springs Mountain, Colorado, on 8 July 1900 was typical. Calling himself James Hicks, Horn drifted into Rash’s neighbourhood and began spying on the rustler. Early in the afternoon of 8 July, Rash finished a lunch of steak and potatoes and then stepped outside his cabin. Horn then fired from concealment, hitting Rash three times, the rustler stumbling back inside.
Horn meanwhile collected his cartridge shells, and then raced off to collect his fee, a flat $600.

After killings, Horn would go to Cheyenne or Denver to let off steam in a drinking spree. Usually reserved, Horn would become talkative and boastful when drunk.

When the Spanish–American War broke out in 1898, Horn rejoined the army and went to Cuba as master of a pack train.

By spring 1901, Horn was back in Wyoming and took a job with John Coble, who owned a large ranch north of Laramie near Iron Mountain. Coble suspected homesteaders on the fringe of his ranch of stealing stock. Employing his usual method, Horn patiently scouted the area and the people. Among those he met was Glendolene Kimmel, the Iron Mountain schoolteacher. Kimmel boarded with a family called Miller, who were conducting a feud with a neighbouring homesteader, Kels P. Nickell. Victor Miller and Kels Nickell had quarrelled over a land boundary, which had resulted in Nickell wounding Miller with a knife. For his protection, Miller had started carrying a shotgun; but this had accidentally discharged, killing one of Miller’s own sons. Miller blamed Nickell for the accident.

Meanwhile, Horn’s employer, John Coble, had informed him that he also considered Nickell a nuisance and wanted him eliminated, not least because he was a sheepman.

At about 3.30 p.m. on 18 July 1902, two shots rang out on the Powder River Road near Cheyenne, Wyoming. Lying dead was 14-year-old Willie Nickell, who had died as he tried to open a gate to the family sheep camp to get a hay wagon through. He had been wearing his father’s hat and coat.

Miller and his friend Tom Horn were immediately suspected of the crime, but Horn produced an alibi that he had been on the train between Cheyenne and Laramie at the time of the shooting. The Miller family, plus Glendolene
Kimmel, swore that Miller had been home the day Willie Nickell was killed. Kimmel had developed an affection for Horn; when she realised that her testimony placing Miller at home on the day of the murder endangered Horn, she withdrew it.

Willie Nickell’s slaying deeply shocked the Iron Mountain community. A thousand-dollar reward was posted for the capture of the perpetrator. The case remained unsolved, however, until deputy US marshal Joe Lefors appeared at Iron Mountain, questioned everybody, and was soon on the trail of Tom Horn. Lefors knew Horn and believed that he must have killed the boy by accident. Tracking Horn to Denver, Lefors discovered the hired killer on one of his periodic drunks. Lefors plied him with more drink, and extracted what sounded like a confession to Willie Nickell’s killing. The confession was overheard by eavesdropping deputies, who recorded it in shorthand.

The confession was used to arrest Horn the next morning. Coble and the other stockmen rallied to Horn’s assistance, and managed to get the trial postponed until October 1902.

Tom Horn’s trial was front-page news the West over. He denied the confession obtained under the influence of alcohol, and without this the prosecution had no real evidence. Nevertheless, Joe Lefors’s short record of Tom Horn’s conversation was enough to persuade the jury that he was guilty of murder in the first degree.

Horn did not expect to hang. He was confident that the cattle barons would obtain a new trial for him. This proved impossible. Friends did, however, pay a young cowboy to be arrested and confined in Cheyenne jail, so that Horn could give him an escape plan. The cowboy lost his nerve, and told the local newspaper of the plot.

Horn broke out anyway, jumping Deputy Sheriff Richard Proctor in the morning of 9 August 1903. Horn and another escapee, Jim McCloud, made their way outside into the
jail corral, McCloud took the only horse, leaving Horn to make a run for it on foot. He was chased by a citizen named O. M. Eldrich, alerted by the shrieks of police whistles. Eldrich fired several shots at Horn, one of them grazing him on the head. The citizen then wrestled Horn to the ground, and a gang of lawmen arrived to take him back to jail.

Tom Horn was scheduled to hang on 20 November 1903. Two days before, as he sat in his cell, alternately writing his autobiography and braiding a horse-hair rope, he chanced to look out of his cell window. Scrawled in the snow was the message: KEEP YOUR NERVE.