Hell's Half Acre: The Life and Legend of a Red-Light District

Chapter Eight - The End of the Line

_. EIGHT __.. The End of the Line IF, AS THEY SAY, ONE PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND words, it is not surprising that it took just one photograph to bring about the downfall of the West's most successful outlaw gang. The gang was Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch, and the picture was taken in John Swartz' studio on the edge of Hell's Half Acre in 1900. How Cassidy's Wild Bunch and John Swartz got together makes for one of the most interesting and hotly debated episodes in the history of the West. It also provides a fitting climax to the first era of Hell's Half Acre. The Wild Bunch was legendary both before and after their historic date with John Swartz in Fort Worth. They were the last of the great nineteenth-century outlaw gangs, the inheritors of the JamesYounger and Dalton legends among western badmen. Compared to those earlier gangs, the Wild Bunch came to a less bloody and less spectacular end, but their hauls from a series of successful robberies were bigger. The Wild Bunch's status among outlaws reached mythical proportions, assuring them a place in history even before pulp fiction writers and Hollywood filmmakers got hold of them. I It just added to the legend that the Wild Bunch were singularly successful at what they did - robbing banks and trains and getting away scot-free. Formed sometime in 1896 in the triangle where Wyoming, Utah and Colorado meet, the gang acquired their nickname not from their criminal activities but from their hell-raising escapades in an area known as "the Strip," just south of Fort Duchesne, Wyoming. 2 They • 243 • 244 • Hell'5 Half Acre • liked to make regular forays into the Strip for a little drinking and dancing, "and no one dared to stand in their way."3 When the boys were not raising hell in town, they were stealing horses, rustling cattle or robbing banks and trains and managing to stay one jump ahead of the law by crossing back and forth between Wyoming and Colorado. Soon every unsolved crime in the area was laid at their doorstep. By the time they robbed the Montpelier, Idaho, bank on August 13, 1896, Robert Leroy Parker - a.k.a. George Parker, a.k.a. Butch Cassidy - had the nucleus of the gang in place. After the Montpelier job, his leadership was never challenged. In popular legend, Cassidy's right-hand man was Harry Longabaugh , also known as the Sundance Kid. In the beginning, however, that position belonged to William Ellsworth "Elzy" Lay, according to Lula Parker Betenson, Butch's sister.4 Lay might have remained Cassidy 's top lieute~ant had his outlaw career not been cut short following the attempted holdup of a train at Folsom, New Mexico, in 1898. He was captured and sent to the New Mexico state prison. Longabaugh inherited the job. Harvey Logan, or Kid Curry, another outlaw notorious even before hooking up with Cassidy, was also a member of the Wild Bunch nucleus. What is more intriguing though is that he may have been Cassidy's most trusted lieutenant, not Longabaugh as legend has it. s Logan and Lay are stories unto themselves. Logan has been called the "wildest and toughest member of the Wild Bunch," and also "the executioner of the Wild Bunch.,,6 Either way, he had a deadly reputation with a six-gun. He also had a nasty temper, a contempt for all laws, and a fondness for the soiled doves he picked up in sporting houses in every town the gang visited. Elzy Lay was a more shadowy character who seems not to have made much of a name for himself apart from the Wild Bunch. His reputation says he was "the educated outlaw," and some chroniclers credit him with being the true brains behind the gang. 7 Depending on the job and their availability, a number of parttimers , including Ben Kilpatrick, Tom O'Day, Will Carver, Robert Lee, Walt Puntency, Joe Walker, Flatnose George Curry, and others of no particular distinction, dropped in and out of the gang. All were identified at the scene of one or more Wild Bunch robberies. In fact, up to fifty different men have been mentioned by various sources as being associated with the Wild Bunch at one time or another. • The End of the Line • Undoubtedly, the two most famous members of...