I’ve been interested in the history of America’s Old West since I was a little boy. One of my favorite modern historians in that field is Tom Clavin. I’ve just finished his latest book, “Bandit Heaven: the Hole-in-the-Wall Gangs and the Final Chapter of the Wild West.” It taught me some things I didn’t know, and reminded me of some I did.
“Gangs,” plural, in the subtitle is not a misprint. More than one gang operated out of more than one “hole in the wall,” locations where law enforcement posses couldn’t approach without being seen in time for fugitives to either escape or set an ambush.
You’ve probably heard of the famous incidents in Coffeeville, Kansas and Northfield, Minnesota in which armed citizens shot it out with, and defeated, the Dalton Gang and the James-Younger Gang respectively. Clavin gives us another: in October of 1896 in Meeker, Colorado another bandit gang was wiped out by armed citizens, who killed all three. Two innocent citizens and a deputy were wounded by the thugs, but survived.
Clavin gives us interesting factoids like this: “The death of Henry Love, of the Colfax County Sheriff’s Department in New Mexico, proved that when your time was up, your time was up. During (a) shootout a bullet struck a knife that was in his pocket, causing the knife to cut him. He had used the knife to treat sick cattle with a form of anthrax and was thus infected with the disease. He succumbed to it four days later.”
I found “Bandit Heaven” an informative read, and if you’re into Old West history, I think you will too.
I have actually been to Hole in the Wall (the one in WY). Bit of a trek on dirt roads but interesting. Not sure how you would escape from there but it is ambush country. Or just fort up until the posse gave up.
Also Circleville, Coffeeville, Brown’s Park, Robbers Roost. Lots of interesting stuff along the Rio Grande which has been lawless since the Spanish and probably the Aztecs. There is a Judge Roy Bean museum there ignores the movie and tries to focus on the real guy which is interesting enough. I have also been to every town described as the “toughest town in the West” (that I can identify). Only the ones in Kansas were cattle towns. The rest were mining towns. Pioche NV is a sleeper but they claim that Boot Hill had 67? graves before the first death from natural causes. Bodie, CA is a ghost town but the rest are still populated more or less.
Generally, the east slop of the Big Horn Mountains is a good concentration of Western Americana. You have the Little Big Horn, the Battle of the Rosebud, the Fetterman Fight, the Johnson County War and one of the Holes in the Wall.
Histories like “Bandit Heaven” are priceless accounts of epidemics. Deaths by lead poisoning seem to be plumb contagious. I have friends from Northfield, MN, who celebrate every year the end of the celebration of the Jesse James/Younger robbery event, often held after another Great Flood by the Cannon (once the Canoe) river. I knew a fellow whose father worked on the Alaska-Yukon White Pass Railroad in 1902, in the days when another Dalton was prominent regarding the Dalton Trail Up North, and which Dalton was greatly feared as a killer in his own right. I lived once just down the road in Spokane, WA, from where Butch Cassidy is said to have survived for a long time, postmortem, as it were. Tombstone is not likely far enough from where I live now for me to escape happily revisiting. The Bird Cage Saloon there is too fascinating. I don’t know why these historical neighborhoods keep following me around, though.
I should mention that I was speaking above of the Bird Cage Theater in Tombstone, rather than exactly a saloon. Some rare birds were indeed held captive there above and around the main floor. Rest assured, though, that alcohol, as well as flying lead, were served indoors there. I have also spent a little time in the historic silver bonanza town of Pioche, NV. Brigham Young is famously reported to have sent well-armed missionaries to successfully evangelize the town, or else. Those were the days, for sure. A lot of Old West flavor, and some coveted water, are found there.
“…proved that when your time was up, your time was up.”
I also believe this to be true. Here is another example:
I had a distant relative who lived in a rural area in East Tennessee. Some years ago, this area received an unusually heavy snowfall. After the storm had passed, my relative decided to walk outside and view the resulting winter wonderland.
He had an old barn on his property. As he was walking around, he decided to walk up to the barn and see that everything was OK there. He walked into the barn to look around.
At that exact moment, the weight of the snow on the roof of the barn caused it to collapse. His wife heard a distant crash and went out also to investigate. She saw that the barn had caved in.
Sadly, my relative was killed by falling debris from the collapse of the roof.
That barn had stood for decades. The storm was over. However, the structure waited until my relative was inside before it decided to fail.
His time was up. That is all you could say!
Yes. When the Lord calls, there is no saying “wait a minute”.
Driving across the southern highway in BC from Vancouver into Alberta one early spring, we came across the “Frank Slide”. Steep alpine sort of counry, a huge steep mountain slope was to our south/right. A massive talus slope was bare of any form of life. We noticed a largish sign at a turnout, and decided to stretch our legs. It wold the sory. In he wee hours of the morning the little mining town of Frank as fas asleep at the base of a large talus slope. the Canadian Pacific racks were just on the north edge of the town. At some point during the night, that slope reached is point of no return, and a couple cubic miles of rock slid downslope, lifted the town up, flung i across the CP tracks and kept going after burying the town under many feet of rock. .In the morning the eastbound train had to stop… the tracks were buried. The telegraph was also knocked out. (if memory serves, this happened in the nineteen oughts). The crew decided to explore bit to see if they could find any survivors. Just as they were about to turn back round and head back to their locomotive, they found a small baby wrapped up in bedclothes, fast asleep and lying on the rocks. They picked him up, he woke up and stared back a these strangers. As I recall he was well under a year old. hey could find no sign of any harm or injury. they brought him back to the warm locomotive. That child was the ONLY survivor from what used to be he town of Frank. If I recall, they named him Frank… but no one knew hi family name. I believe some family took him in and raised him. Never did learn whose child he was, as everyone else had died and he whole town was under many feet of rock. HOW he managed to come out on top of those millions of tonnes of rock, unharmed, on the surface, not a scratch on him, as if he had somehow floated back to ground after it all We stood there in awe of the place, and the account of little Frank.
Tionico, what a great story above, frankly! The answer to the baby’s miraculous survival is a tossup.
One of my favorite investigative histories of Butch Cassidy is Larry Pointer’s “In Search of Butch Cassidy”, c. 1977. It’s a fascinating read and seems to really pin down that Cassidy survived the shootout that ended in the Sundance Kid’s death in Bolivia, with Cassidy’s return to the US where he lived quietly in Spokane, Washington, as William T. Phillips.
Unfortunately, it appears that all the people Pointer interviewed for his book lied to him about Cassidy outliving the Bolivian gun battle and assuming the Phillips identity. Years later, new evidence appeared, revealing that “Phillips” was really William T. Willcox, who was probably another member of Cassidy’s ad hoc bandit gang.
To his credit, Pointer admitted he was wrong about his Cassidy/Phillips theory, though he had based it on the then-available information. As far as I know, the search for what really happened to Butch Cassidy continues.
By the way, I should add that Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch gang were frequent visitors to Hole-in-the-Wall, Wyoming, and other parts of the Outlaw Trail during the turn of the 19th Century.