11 
CAPTURED
The person Butch Cassidy had to worry about first and foremost in 1891, when the big ranchers started trying in earnest to scrub him from the landscape, was a tall, wiry, bushy-bearded, and exceedingly intense native of Sangamon, Illinois, named John William Chapman. A local newspaper known as the Stinking Water Prospector (after the Stinking Water River, since inexplicably renamed the Shoshone) gave the size of Chapman’s ranch at 1,300 deeded acres and his herd of “horned stock” at 2,000, numbers that set his sole proprietorship squarely within the “Big Cattle” class. He’d left Oregon, which was getting too crowded for his taste, for Wyoming in 1878, and, since settling in the extreme northwestern corner of the territory, had become one of its most successful horse breeders. Chapman’s secret was husky Percheron stallions, which he crossed with local mongrel mares, producing an all-purpose steed able to pull a plow through the distressingly dense Wyoming sod and look good doing it. He made a small fortune selling those horses at a penny a pound.
If you thought Oregon was too congested in the mid-nineteenth century, you probably weren’t the party-animal type, and Chapman wasn’t. He spoke little to his wife, Alphia, or anyone else. (They had no children.) He fervently loved Jesus but relished the remoteness of his ranch house, which stood fifty miles from his nearest non-Indian neighbor. Alphia, it was said, did not see another white woman for two and a half years after they moved in, and the Indians she encountered, or spied from a distance, probably frightened her. The Indian Wars were still ongoing at that point, and if you noticed the deer stirring, you took it as a sign that one or another of the local tribes was on the move, and you went home and bolted the door. Ten years later, though—in the period now under discussion—the Indians had been more or less subdued, and the situation wasn’t quite so pioneer-y. You worried about other things, like the dramatic drop-off in deer.
All was basically fine at the Chapman ranch, though, until the latter part of 1891, when some of his horses started disappearing—first in twos and threes, then in herds of tens and twenties. When that happened, Chapman got blazingly angry.
So upset was the ranch owner, in fact, that he traveled the countryside, seeking out his fellow humans. Talking with people wasn’t easy for Chapman, but he wanted to see if other ranchers had incurred similar losses or picked up any information about thieves. The answers, as it turned out, were yes and yes—and in these conversations, the name of Butch Cassidy surfaced early and often.
Perhaps that was to be expected. People talked about Butch. Remember how it was frequently said that he had a reputation for not stealing from his current employer? We ought to be impressed by that, and not just because it demonstrates loyalty. It also demonstrates his place in the local culture as something of a celebrity. It was the rare cowboy who had a reputation for anything in those days when ranch hands were for the most part regarded as cogs in a machine that ultimately spit out rib eyes and pot roasts. The very vastness of the open spaces worked against the idea of celebrity, but Butch overcame that. Many who had not met him knew him by his ripening reputation as a man set apart by his skill and magnetic personality; they had started associating his name with acts of derring-do—acts, in other words, like rustling from the Cheyenne Club set—and looking up to him as the baron-bedeviling rogue they themselves might have become if they had only been just a bit bolder by nature or not gotten married at age seventeen and taken on obligations. When people ran out of Butch stories to tell, they just made up more, often exaggerating his assets to express their esteem. Even Chapman, a virtual hermit, knew very well who Butch was and was said to admire him greatly in spite of his own strong feelings about rustlers. This put Chapman in a strange position, emotionally speaking, because as his investigation proceeded, he came to realize that if he was going to strike a blow against horse thieves, he would ultimately need to track down and arrest Butch. While no one thought that Butch was anything but a small part of the problem in terms of the number of horses he was handling, putting a flashy, name-brand rustler like him behind bars might have a chilling effect on the ongoing epidemic of theft. It would also allow the barons to pound their chests over their prowess as man hunters, for you had to be pretty damn slick to catch Butch Cassidy. This was the downside of being Butch: everything you did got magnified, as did the reaction to everything you did, and people made an example of you.
Chapman’s search for Butch almost ended before it got going. The scuttlebutt said that the outlaw was holed up with his eternally morose pal Al Hainer on Alkali Creek, a relatively short distance from Chapman’s ranch. What Butch saw in Hainer—a drunk and a skunk if there ever was one, with shallow, dark eyes and a scraggly, red beard—we’ll never know. But Butch was always nonjudgmental to a fault, and, during this period, they were inseparable partners in crime. When Chapman reached the tiny cabin where they’d supposedly been staying, he saw that the inside walls were covered with sketches of cattle brands as well as various ways those brands might be altered. It was a true den of thieves. But the most recent occupants had already vamoosed.
A few days later, while making his way through the Owl Creek Mountains, in the central part of the state, accompanied by two livestock detectives that the WSGA had thoughtfully provided him, Chapman encountered a rancher named John Thomas, who said he had seen Butch with a half dozen or so horses bearing the brand of the giant Pitchfork Ranch; he and Hainer, Thomas said, had been heading southeast, bound, they’d told him, for Evanston, Wyoming, more than two hundred miles away. Later that day, when Chapman stopped for supplies at Fort Washakie, a clerk at the Shoshone tribal agency there confirmed Thomas’s story. Butch’s going in that direction made sense. Evanston was a stop on the Union Pacific Railroad and a magnet for rustlers, who sold their stock to unscrupulous brokers, who then quickly moved the cows and horses onto eastward-bound trains. It was a long way to ride for six horses that weren’t even your own, especially with winter coming on, but Chapman and his companions were game for the expedition. (“Plenty of powder and lead is the only thing that will break the gang up,” said the Red Lodge [Montana] Picket.) Chapman would spend several weeks in and around Evanston, asking questions and adding helpers to his search party, but ultimately he failed to find Butch and Hainer. In mid-December, disappointed but feeling confident that the coming snows would contain them until he could resume his hunt in the spring, Chapman headed back home, stopping along the way to discuss the situation with his fellow Butch aficionados Jay Torrey and Otto Franc.
In most ways, those two and Chapman were not exactly peas in a pod. Torrey, the owner of the massive Embar spread, was a classic American success story—he’d put himself through Washington University Law School in Saint Louis as a fatherless teenager by selling newspapers—and an enlightened entrepreneur who bestowed scholarships upon his employees’ children and provided free medical care for anyone injured on the job. In 1893 he would send his entire crew of thirty cowboys to the Chicago World’s Fair so they could see the pretty girls in the Javanese village, the pretty girls in the Irish village, and ride the Ferris wheel. That same year, after winning a seat in the Wyoming State Legislature, he promptly became Speaker of the House.
Otto Franc was, in terms of personality and background, something between the uneducated, staunchly religious Chapman and the sophisticated, liberal-minded Torrey. A member of the German royal family, Count Otto Franc von Liechtenstein, to use his official name, came to the Big Horn Basin on a hunting trip in 1876 (the year General George Custer was killed there by the Sioux) and fell in love with the region. The land in those days still teemed with deer, elk, bear, and, most obviously, buffalo, which the professional hunters, with their Sharps rifles, killed by the hundreds until there were no more left. For the first few years after he started the Pitchfork Ranch on the Greybull River in 1878, Franc could—and did—shoot buffalo from his living room window, especially if he saw the bulls rubbing themselves against his precious fences.
Franc almost perfectly fit the stereotype of the cranky old cattle baron eager to fend off rustlers by any means necessary. He ran his ranch the way German chancellor Otto von Bismarck ran the Reichstag, sometimes dabbling in casual cruelty. When his saddle mare died of old age, he ordered his cook to fèed it to his men and tell them it was beefsteak; while they ate, he walked among them and laughed. Another time, when he discovered someone was stealing butter from his springhouse, he rigged up a shotgun with a string so that it would fire if an intruder opened the door. Asked by an employee if that punishment wasn’t “a little severe” for such a minor offense, Franc replied, “A man who would steal your butter would steal your ranch next time.”
What these diverse men had in common, besides an interest in the cattle business, was an obsession with rustlers in general and Butch Cassidy in particular. Since Butch had worked at the Embar on two separate occasions, once in the mid-1880s and again only recently, Torrey knew him best and admired him most, and no doubt for that reason thought more than the others in terms of rehabilitating him so that he could someday return to the range, and maybe even the Embar Ranch, as an honest cowboy—but not, of course, until he’d learned his lesson. While the three never concerned themselves with any other individual rustler, they were all intent on sending Cassidy to prison. Butch seemed to excite them in ways they might not have understood themselves. Anyway, again, the downside of charisma.
Chapman, after wintering at his secluded ranch, resumed his search for Butch and Hainer before spring had truly arrived—before March, even. A man less consumed by the task at hand would surely have waited. The mountain trails were still treacherous, the snows still deep enough for him to consider riding as far as he could toward Evanston, then walking the rest of the way in snowshoes. He just had to keep going. The range wars of northern Wyoming were coming to a head just then. That army of Texas “stock detectives” would a few weeks later “invade” Johnson County, and the big ranchers were working themselves, and one another, into a foaming hatred of rustlers real or imagined. On February 6 the Livingston (Montana) Enterprise carried the headline “War on Rustlers—War on the Horse Thieves Will Soon Be Vigorously Begun in North-Eastern Montana and Northern Wyoming—Beginning of a War of Extermination!” On March 2 Franc, in his understated way, wrote in his diary: “I start for Billings to attend a meeting of the Stockmen of Northern Wyoming to consider ways to protect ourselves against the rustlers.” He would take with him rifles and ammunition—“a veritable arsenal,” one newspaper called it—which he would distribute to men in the field so that they could shoot suspected horse and cattle thieves on sight.
In early March Chapman and four unofficial deputies arrived in Auburn, Wyoming, 130 miles north of Evanston, and began checking out reports that Cassidy and Hainer had made their way there during the winter. It took a couple of weeks, and maybe a memory-stirring double eagle or two, but they eventually learned that the pair had hired a girl of about twelve named Kate Davis to run errands and bring them supplies from town. Chapman and company kept an eye on Kate, and when they saw her heading into the mountains on Monday, April 11—two days, by the way, after Nate Champion was killed by the invaders in Kaycee, Wyoming—they followed her from a distance to a combination ranch and sawmill at a place called Stump’s Creek.
It was early morning, but Hainer was already up and outside, standing with a few other men watching logs being cut while he sipped coffee. One of the “regulators” in Chapman’s party, Uinta County deputy sheriff Robert Calverly, a stout, heavily moustached man of thirty-six, came up behind them with his gun drawn, put his hand on Hainer’s shoulder, and told him to come along quietly, he was under arrest. Hainer, abashed and ashen faced, did what he was told, and when Calverly asked where Cassidy was, he said, “In the cabin.” Calverly then took Hainer a short distance into the woods and tied him to a tree.
Butch, by that point, seemed aware of what was happening and stepped out the back door of the cabin just as Calverly was coming in the front. “Stop, I have a warrant for your arrest—come with me!” the deputy shouted.
“I’ll be damned if I do!” Butch said.
In a letter written many years later, Calverly recalled that Butch then reached into the overalls he was wearing over his regular clothing, pulled out a gun, and said, “Let’s get to shooting!” The first thing he did, though, was to try to grab Calverly’s gun. Meanwhile, another member of the posse named Al Cook somehow got between them, and the confrontation turned into a three-way wrestling match.
Calverly said that at one point he had the barrel of his revolver “almost touching Cassidy’s stomach,” but when he snapped the trigger, the gun misfired. He then snapped it three more times with the same result. On the fifth pull, the gun fired, and a bullet grazed Butch’s forehead, drawing blood and knocking him to the ground where, said Calverly, “he made no further resistance.”
While others attended to Butch, Calverly and Cook holstered their weapons and went around the property looking for stolen horses. The initial reports said they found eight, all but one belonging to the Greybull Cattle Company, a ranch that Otto Franc managed for a New York socialite friend of his named Archibald Rogers. Meanwhile, Cassidy sat on the ground, Calverly said, loudly bemoaning the injustice of being accused of horse thievery.
That much, of course, was only to be expected. What is striking is that as Butch babbled on, saying, according to one newspaper, “that he preferred death to prison,” John Chapman—his relentless pursuer—knelt beside him on the cabin floor, tending silently to his wounds.