The Wrong Town
The McCarty Clan at Delta
“Murder!” screamed the headline of the Delta, Colorado, Independent. “Three Robbers Commit a Horrible Deed.” The Independent, a little weekly, devoted the whole front page and two columns of three more pages to the details of this local excitement. The sensation scarcely left space for the usual advertisements, among which was some hype for a medication called Ripans Tabules, which apparently cured everything, or for Gale Bros., sort of a one-stop shopping center. The Gale boys were purveyors of furniture and carpets, did some contracting and mill work, and were undertakers and embalmers besides. They would have lots of work this day.
For dead on the floor of Delta’s little Farmer’s and Merchant’s Bank was an unarmed bank cashier, father of a large family, a bullet through his skull. Two more men, both bandits, sprawled in their own blood on a Delta street, and a grim posse was in hot pursuit of one surviving outlaw.
In the autumn of 1893, Delta was a quiet little town, very much like hundreds of other young, growing communities across the West. It had been called Uncompahgre not long before, but it was platted in the spring of 1882 as Delta, named for its nearness to the delta of the Gunnison and Uncompahgre Rivers. And Delta was vigorous and growing: In 1883, Delta had already boasted two saloons, three hardware stores, three lawyers, a couple of dozen other commercial enterprises, and two banks.
September 7 was a miserably hot day, unfit for man or beast. A Delta resident of the time called it “stifling,” the sort of day on which people move very slowly and stay in the shade if they have no pressing business out under the blazing sun. Nobody in Delta was interested in excitement on a day like that, but excitement was on the way, the sort of excitement nobody wanted, in Delta or anyplace else.
Delta’s little Farmer’s and Merchant’s Bank was about to receive an unwelcome visit. Veteran outlaw Tom McCarty had his eye on the citizens’ hard-earned savings, and with him were his brother Bill and Bill’s seventeen-year-old son Fred. The three had been watching the little town and its bank for several days, and on this oppressive seventh of September they were at last ready to move.
Tom McCarty was a professional hoodlum. His father may have been William, once a surgeon with Tennessee Confederate troops, or maybe one Alexander, nicknamed “Doc.” Whoever he was, he brought his large family west to Montana and then to Utah, where they settled for a while close to Circleville, home of one Leroy Parker, better known as Butch Cassidy.
The family kept moving, on to Nevada, then back to Utah in 1877. Tom and Bill ranched together for a while, and they did well enough to sell out at a good profit in 1884. One story says Tom managed to gamble away his share, whereat he betook himself to a new career in outlawry, rustling, robbing, and shooting at least one man.
Bill is said to have gone off to Missouri, where, an unlikely legend has it, he rode either with Jesse James or with Cole Younger. A neat trick that, since by 1884 Jesse was permanently dead and Cole was doing hard time in Minnesota’s Stillwater Prison. Whatever nefarious doings he may or may not have been up to in Missouri, Bill married (for the second time, without benefit of a divorce) and shot a man “over robbery loot,” which peccadillo got him a term in prison.
Tom rode with Butch Cassidy and Matt Warner, among others, and had been part of the famous 1893 robbery of the San Miguel bank of Telluride, Colorado. That raid, which netted more than twenty thousand dollars, was reputed to be Cassidy’s first venture into bank robbery. Tom is also a central figure in the celebrated robbery of the First National Bank of Denver in the spring of 1889.
The story goes that McCarty made an appointment with bank president David Moffat and showed the banker a bottle of clear liquid. “It’s nitroglycerine,” said McCarty, and he demanded the banker write him a check for twenty-one thousand dollars and cash it. McCarty slipped his loot to a confederate outside the bank and returned to his hotel, where he disposed of his bottle of water.
McCarty and career-outlaw Matt Warner robbed a gambling hall in Butte, Montana, and sought shelter at a hardscrabble “ranch” in Baker, Oregon, owned by McCarty’s brother Bill, now out of prison. Things were tough in the ranching business for Bill and his son Fred, and both joined Tom to follow the apparently easy money of the owlhoot trail. It would prove to be an exceedingly poor decision in the long run, however short the grass was at Baker.
For a while, however, the outlaw business went fairly smoothly. The four men robbed a placer camp called Sparta, in Oregon, coming away with a haul of currency and gold nuggets. They rode into Moscow, Idaho, to rob, of all things, a circus, and then returned to Enterprise, Oregon, to rob a bank. More holdups followed, including a bank in Roslyn, Washington.
The Roslyn job went bad: Tom shot a man in the stomach and the gang had to run for it, with a posse hot on their heels. Warner was eventually captured and spent some time in jail awaiting trial. Acquitted and released, he was smart enough to quit once he got out of jail. McCarty wasn’t that bright.
Now without the redoubtable Warner, and just a few weeks after his trial, the McCarty brothers and young Fred were determined to empty the coffers of the Farmer’s and Merchant’s, one of Delta’s two banks. The story of what happened when they tried to do so varies depending on who is telling it. A couple of versions of the raid don’t even agree on the date: While it is clear that the holdup took place on September 7, other accounts have it happening on September 3 or 27.
The three outlaws apparently arrived at Delta about the first of the month and took some time casing the town. They seem to have spent considerable time in the Steve Bailey Saloon, otherwise known as the Palace Sampling Rooms, conveniently placed right across the street from the bank. They camped outside the town prior to the raid, perhaps in nearby Escalante Canyon—at least they are thought to have stopped there for a meal at the John Musser cattle ranch. They brought with them a string of spare mounts, and they took their time about sizing up the bank and the town.
When in town, the outlaws stabled their horses at Fadely’s corral on the north side of Delta, and they spent some time yarning with one George Smith, keeper of the steam engine that drove the municipal water pump. The three hoodlums were chatty types, asking what were later called “innocent-sounding questions” over a friendly drink in one of the town’s watering holes.
In the afternoons they rode out of town, letting it be known that they were shopping around for a ranch site. One source says young Fred was used as a scout for the gang, and he even got involved in a marble game with some of the Delta boys. The outlaws ate a meal at a restaurant called “Bricktop’s” on Main Street, and at least two more at Central House. In between a drink or two and some card playing at Steve Bailey’s, they shopped for shoes and a bottle of whiskey.
On the seventh of September, they were ready. Tom probably performed his usual role: He liked to be the outside man, watching the street and holding the horses for the other two robbers. A local citizen watched Tom down at least one slug of Dutch courage just before he entered the alley behind the bank with all three men’s horses. At about quarter after ten, Bill and his son walked into the bank. It probably did not occur to any of the outlaws that this broiling day was the anniversary of the James-Younger gang’s disaster at Northfield in 1876.
Inside the bank were two men: cashier A. T. Blachley, as the local paper named him (or Blachly or Blachey, depending on which other sources you read), and H. H. Wolbert, teller and assistant cashier. One book on the Wild Bunch puts a third employee in the bank, a bookkeeper called John Trew, but no other authority does. At the back of the bank, in a sort of lean-to he used as an office, sat attorney W. R. Robinson.
Across the street, in Simpson and Corbin’s Hardware store—or Simpson and Son’s, again depending on the source—sat William Ray Simpson. Simpson—people in Delta called him Ray—was Kentucky born and raised and had moved west with his parents for his health. He settled in Delta but took time out to return to Kentucky for his light of love, Mary Ann Hays.
The pair eloped, the story goes, since Mary Ann’s father insisted that his family was superior to any other. Apparently the attraction between the two young people was of some years’ standing, for the story goes that Simpson had seen young Mary Ann jumping horses at the county fair back in Kentucky. “There’s a pair of thoroughbreds if I’ve ever seen one,” he said, “and I’m going to marry that girl when she grows up.”
It’s a nice story, maybe even true, and it is certain that Simpson and the lady married—probably on the way west in Decatur, Texas. They settled in Delta and produced three daughters. Simpson was a solid citizen, a respected merchant; he was about to become the town’s hero.
To this day there is no certainty about everything that happened inside the bank. Blachley, one of the founders of the bank, was typing; Wolbert was working nearby, and the bank’s safe stood wide open. Two men walked into the bank and Blachley got up to wait on them. He found himself looking into the business end of two guns. The bandits demanded the bank’s assets forthwith, and one of the robbers, probably young Fred, jumped up on the bank’s counter.
Wolbert made a motion toward a pistol but gave it up when one of the bandits warned him against such a rash move. Cashier Blachley, with more courage than discretion, seems to have shouted for help, and one of the outlaws told him to shut up or get his head blown off. Nothing daunted, the gutty cashier shouted again.
This time he got two bullets at close range: The slugs entered his neck and tore out through the top of his head, or maybe—in other versions—he was killed by a single round through the top of the skull. In either case, Blachley’s gallant defiance had cost him his life. The Grand Junction News also reported, probably erroneously, that the robbers had shot at Wolbert but missed him. At least by now, even if nobody had heard the cashier’s call for help, the gunfire told everybody in town there was big trouble at the bank.
Tom McCarty’s “autobiography” simply says that two men entered the bank and a third waited outside with the horses, without naming who did what. He also says that the cashier “reached for a pistol” and was shot down. This version is unsupported by any other rendition of the raid, and it sounds very like an after-the-fact attempt to justify cold-blooded murder.
The inside men—probably Bill and Fred McCarty—grabbed a bag of gold coin, snatched handfuls of bills and stuffed them inside their shirts—something between seven hundred and a thousand dollars—then ran out through the lawyer’s lean-to at the back of the bank. One version of the story says Tom McCarty “covered the lawyer at his desk,” while the other two bandits were busy in the bank, although this seems at odds with Tom’s usual job as outside man. Still another account has Tom killing the cashier, after which “Fred rushed to the horses, quickly followed by the other two.”
In his book Desperate Men, James D. Horan names Tom as the killer, but he also has Matt Warner—who wasn’t there—holding the gang’s horses. In still another account, “Bill McCarty began scooping money in a bag, Tom leaped over the railing and pushed a six-gun into Blachey’s [sic] ribs.” Fred, in this version, is the man who covered the attorney at the rear of the bank.
Who shot the cashier is not clear, and Horan’s account loses some force by claiming erroneously that Blachley’s “assistant”—presumably Wolbert—was wounded. Still another version says flatly that young Fred murdered the cashier.
Whatever had happened inside, the robbers dashed into the alley, herding Wolbert along with them, one of the bandits calling to his confederates, “Get on your horses quick, for God’s sake.” It was good advice, for citizens were already moving toward the front of the bank. One account of the raid says the two inside men got to the alley to find their horses waiting, “but Tom had jumped on his horse and was long gone.”
Leaving behind their bag of gold, the outlaws mounted and fled. While Blachley’s shouts had apparently not been heard outside the bank because of a high wind, the shots that killed him certainly had been; among those who heard them was Ray Simpson, and he reacted immediately.
According to one version of the Delta raid, he was cleaning his rifle—most accounts call it a .44 Sharps—in the back room of the hardware store, right across Main Street from the bank. Or maybe, according to another version, he just grabbed a repeating rifle from the rack in the store: That rifle would probably have been new stock, and therefore not a Sharps, since the Sharps company had failed in 1881. Other accounts refer to Simpson’s “trusty Winchester.” The Delta Historical Society reports, however, that it has the very rifle in its museum: a single-shot .40-caliber Sharps.
Simpson himself told a fascinating story about being prepared to take on the robbers. He had, he said later, dreamed that a local bad man had vandalized his shop and he, Simpson, had to shoot the intruder. The vision so stuck in Simpson’s mind that next morning he cleaned his rifle—left uncleaned after target practice the day before—and “set it with the cartridges where I could get it quick.” In fact, he was telling his father and the town night watchman of his strange dream when two shots rang out in the bank across the street.
Although angry citizens were gathering in front of the bank, Simpson noticed that there were no horses tethered there and guessed the gang had stashed their mounts in the alley behind the bank. Simpson ran out on the street, hearing somebody yell, “get your gun; it’s a holdup.” He sprinted to the corner of Third Street and Main, loading the single-shot Sharps as he went. At the corner Simpson turned toward the alley as the three outlaws galloped past him.
As the three McCartys galloped away from the bank, Simpson raised the Sharps and pulled down on the nearest one. He hit Bill in the back of the head—“in the hatband” according to an article in the Independent—and the bullet tore off the top of Bill’s head complete with hat. One account says Bill’s few brains ended up twenty feet away from the rest of him. Fred hesitated—Horan even says Fred “returned to kneel” over his father—but this sounds a bit like journalistic embroidery, since a glance would have told Fred that the top of Bill’s head was not where it used to be.
Simpson said that Fred fired three times at him and paused only long enough to glance at his father, quickly perceiving that the older man was dead. A later article in the local paper has Fred galloping back to his fallen father, “coming to a skidding halt,” and leaning over to look at the lifeless body on the ground.
Whatever Fred did, it was the last thing he did, for Ray Simpson put the next round into the base of Fred’s skull. (One sensational account says Simpson’s bullet “split his heart.”) A citizen named John Travis reportedly fired several shots at the bandits with a revolver. He doesn’t seem to have hit any of the outlaws, but it may have been one of his bullets that in fact killed Bill’s unfortunate horse.
Simpson had done some fine shooting, for by the time he fired at Fred McCarty, Simpson may have been as much as a block away from the fleeing bandits. Fred’s corpse stayed in the saddle for another block, his horse galloping on, and there the second McCarty bit the dust. Loose currency was scattered up and down the alley. Asked about his marksmanship later, Simpson commented that where he came from, Kentucky, “Boys are taught to shoot squirrels in the head to keep from spoiling the meat.”
The usual moonshine surrounds the Delta robbery. Along with the “trusty Winchester” references, there is a nonsensical story that has Simpson shooting Bill McCarty “from the hip” and refers to Fred as Bill’s “nephew.” The reference to Fred and the marble game also seems a little hard to swallow, for kids grew up fast in those faraway days, and it’s hard to imagine an experienced outlaw hunkered down in the dust with a couple of the local urchins. And no experienced marksman shoots anybody “from the hip,” except in Hollywood.
Along the way Simpson—or somebody—shot one of the outlaws’ horses, an animal that a local citizen saw “sprawled in the alley against the door-sill of the store,” maybe the hardware emporium run by Simpson and his father. It was probably Bill’s horse, which may have galloped back toward the bank after its rider was killed. The horse may have been mortally wounded by the bullet that killed its rider, and so Simpson believed. Or, maybe, according to The Wild Bunch at Robber’s Roost, some unidentified “smart aleck” shot the animal. In any case, this horse trotted on down to the post office hitching rack and stood among other horses until it bled to death. Fred’s mount, dripping with its rider’s blood, was caught by a local lady.
Tom, veteran outlaw, wanted nothing more to do with that deadly rifle, even if he did leave two kinsmen dead in the street behind him. He “let it be known later, however, that the two or three bullets Simpson sent in his direction came uncomfortably close.” He realized the gang had been well and truly whipped by a single man, and he did not stay upon the order of his going.
He changed horses in the gang’s camp outside town and lit out at the high lope for southwestern Colorado. He left behind several horses and a mule, and, as it turned out, he also left the bank-robbing business for good.
A manuscript that purports to be McCarty’s autobiography was sent to his father-in-law and supposedly published by a newspaper in Manti, Utah. It is now in the possession of the Utah State Historical Society. Charles Kelly, who wrote of the Wild Bunch, believed the manuscript to be genuine. In it, McCarty tells his own story of the fight at Delta. Here he describes the story of the gang’s flight:
As we passed the first street I heard the sharp crack of a rifle, and looking for my partners, I saw one of them [Bill] fall from his horse; my other companion [Fred] being a little ahead, then partly turned his horse as though he wanted to see where the shot came from. I told him quickly to go on, but as I spoke another shot came which struck his horse and before he could get his animal in motion another shot came which struck him and he fell dead. His horse began to run back toward the place where the shots had come from . . . looking back I saw a man standing by the corner of a building, having what I supposed was a Winchester and shooting as fast as possible at me. . . . The first man he killed could not have been more than twenty-five yards from him . . .; the other about one hundred and fifty feet . . . several bullets passed so near me that I felt the force of the balls as they passed; one of his bullets struck my horse . . . near the heel, which crippled him.
[A]fter I had traveled about seventy-five miles I found some friends who told me that both of my relatives had been shot dead, both having received the bullets through the head. . . .
After the raid there was some debate about the real identity of the dead outlaws. Some said they were obviously McCartys; others disagreed. At first, it was thought that the older of the two dead bandits was Tom McCarty, not his brother. It did not take long to resolve the puzzle once men who actually knew the family saw the corpses.
Delta sheriff Giradet raised a posse—which included the redoubtable Simpson—and gave chase, but could not come up with fleeing Tom McCarty. They recovered his horse, cut up, saddle sore, and exhausted, but McCarty had changed mounts. The posse at last returned on September 12, their only reward a couple of McCarty’s other horses and an abandoned pack. They had come close enough to the outlaw to find a campfire still burning, but they never saw the man himself.
The remains of his confederates were hauled off to Gale Brothers Undertaking Parlor. There, after they had set a while, both corpses were propped up to have their picture taken, after the fashion of the times. The photographer’s son, young Ben Laycock, about ten years old according to the Delta Historical Society, had been “bathing prints” in front of his father’s shop when the fireworks began.
Now—or the next day according to an interview with Ben many years later—young Ben helped out with the arrangements to photograph the bodies. Undertaker Gale, who also dealt in lumber and furniture, helped to prop up the remains. Fred was stiff enough to stand up on his own, but Bill kept sagging inconveniently. So Gale borrowed some boards from the lumberyard and propped Bill into a suitable upright position.
They put Bill’s hat on him to decently cover the spot where Simpson’s bullet had removed part of his head, and he stayed upright long enough for young Ben’s brother to take his photo. Bill sagged and collapsed again after the picture was taken, but by then he was superfluous, and nobody cared.
In later years, Ben may have embroidered a little on the tale of the photos. “The old man,” he wrote, meaning Bill, was “limp as a wet sack,” so Ben and Gale had to hold him up for his last picture. The rest of Ben’s story is worth quoting:
Finally we put boards under his arms, and Gale and I held him until just as Henry was ready to take the picture. He looked like hell with the whole top of his head shot off, so Gale rustled around and got a hat to set on his head. We let go of him, jumped back out of the way, Henry snapped the picture, and we grabbed him before he toppled over on the ground.
Well, maybe, but considering the length of time it took to make a decent exposure in those days, it may be that Ben was exaggerating just a mite. It’s a good story, anyway.
Having done their duty for the camera, Bill and Fred were carted off to Potter’s Field and planted in a single box, apparently without ceremony. The Delta Independent says they were dug up the following Sunday—twice—to be identified, then reinterred. In the miserable heat of the time, no doubt some haste in burial—and reburial—was deemed appropriate. Another account tells us that Bill’s uncle-by-marriage came from Moab, Utah, and a police officer came from Denver, to identify the remains of the two bandits.
A vest found on one of the horses yielded an interesting insight into outlaw bookkeeping. The Delta Independent reported discovery of a notebook listing various purchases, “largely whiskey,” the prices added together and divided by three: “My part” read a notation next to the result. Other notes listed the writer’s gambling losses, presumably to his companions, showing the “grand total I owe $493.00.”
Simpson’s heroics came too late for Blachley. Wolbert, shaken but unhurt, had the miserable task of telling Mrs. Blachley that her husband had been murdered. Blachley’s funeral was attended by several hundred people, the largest crowd ever to turn out for a burying in Delta. The paper carried a fine eulogy by a local lady, which concluded,
And all who mourn their dead today
Look on the bright and changing earth
And see in shelter of decay,
The symbol of immortal birth.
The widow was left with nine sons, whom she raised on a “poor, barren, little ranch.” The gallant lady was an Oberlin College graduate—quite a rarity on the frontier in those days—and supported her family by teaching music. It is pleasant to note that her boys went on to be prominent, educated men.
After the Delta disaster Tom McCarty dropped out of sight. He is said to have “returned to his old hideout in the Blue Mountains to quiet his shattered nerves” and brood upon the repulse of his last raid. Maybe so. He had, after all, lost two kinsmen to a single rifleman, and had taken to his heels in flight. His ignominious retreat could not have fit his own image of himself. In any case, his sulking is supposed to have given rise to one of the most colorful tales in the history of American outlawry. It goes like this.
In the fall of 1896, the story goes, Tom McCarty sent word to Simpson, by then Delta’s postmaster, that he was going to kill him. Just how the message was sent not every version of the tale recounts. One source says McCarty came to Delta and sent “an emissary”—not further identified—to tell Simpson he was doomed.
The tale of Ray Simpson’s answer was classic. He sent McCarty—by emissary or otherwise—a small card punched with ten bullet holes, put there by Simpson “at 225 feet” “with his new Winchester.” Another version of the story, recounted in The Outlaw Trail, tells that after Simpson received the threat from McCarty “a government detective was sent to trap the outlaw if possible.” It continues: “To this operative Simpson presented his famous card, with instructions to deliver it to McCarty at the earliest opportunity. It consisted of a small piece of black cardboard perforated with ten holes, all within the circumference of half a dollar.”
At 225 feet? Some shooting, that, extraordinary even with a modern rifle and first-class optical sights. This version of the tale also does not explain how the detective was supposed to make delivery.
Still another account—by a Delta resident—tells the reader that Simpson received threatening letters for years after the raid, that Mrs. Simpson “suffered a complete nervous breakdown” and died when the couple’s youngest daughter was very small. Another version of the raid does not mention the famous card at all, but it does repeat the story that in later years Simpson received threatening letters, apparently from McCarty. This account says Simpson was finally forced to leave Delta and settle in California. He is said to be buried in Glendale.
The story of the perforated card appeared in the Salt Lake City Herald in January 1897. Police officers in Utah, said the paper, “are inclined to the opinion that McCarty does not possess his old-time spirit and will therefore never seek to molest the redoubtable Colorado postmaster.” That he did not, whether from native caution, the threat of the card, or because the whole thing never happened at all, we’ll never know for sure.
Considerable uncertainty surrounds Tom McCarty’s later years. Variously, he was shot to death about 1900 up in Montana’s Bitterroot country after he picked a fight with the wrong man; he was killed near Green River, Utah; he died at Skagway, Alaska, during the gold rush; or he died in California, where he lived with his son Lew. One account has him living peacefully in Wallowa County, Oregon, after the turn of the century, even becoming a justice of the peace and “road supervisor,” whatever that may be; others speculate that he fled to South America; or he settled in Oregon and raised a family there.
However Tom McCarty ended his days, he must have been forever haunted by that hot day in Colorado, the day he ran from a single citizen, leaving his kinsmen dead in the dust behind him.