14 
ELZY
Angus “Bud” McIntosh, the assistant cashier at Idaho’s Bank of Montpelier, always called it the unluckiest moment of his life, and it was easy to see why. At precisely 3:13 p.m. on August 13, 1896, he said, right after he’d recorded his thirteenth transaction of the day, the depositing of a check for $13, a strapping fellow with a bandanna tied around his face suddenly appeared in front of his teller’s window, pushed a canvas sack into his cage, and told him to fill it with money. Even though the man brandished a pistol, McIntosh tried to put him off at first by burbling something, in his heavy Scottish burr, about being fresh out of cash. But the robber only got angry, called him “a goddamn liar,” and hit him very hard on the head with the barrel of his gun. Stars swirled, tears welled; poor McIntosh thought he was a goner.
In the West, though, your luck could change very quickly. From a spot near the front entrance, a voice suddenly rang out, telling the robber to “leave that man alone!” It wasn’t the sheriff because Montpelier, an odd little town with distinct Mormon and gentile districts, was too small to have a sheriff. The speaker, unknown to McIntosh, sounded like the man who had just assaulted him, a bit angry as well as a bit bandanna muffled. Could it be, McIntosh wondered, that I am being defended by another bandit?
As it turned out, he was. Witnesses would say later that the man who’d stationed himself by the front door was sandy haired, somewhat on the stocky side, and obviously the leader. Even in that tense moment, with his gun drawn, he’d managed to calm down the customers and make it clear that while he and his friends—a group of three if you included the nervous-looking fellow standing outside with the sorrel packhorse—wanted to steal as much as they could, he didn’t want anyone to get hurt.
Something was happening in Montpelier that day, something more than just another a robbery. Those nicely dressed boys were not really the Wild Bunch yet, but a hierarchy was being worked out there on the floor of the bank for everyone to see. On a peaceful summer afternoon in Idaho, a gang was born.
One of its trademarks would be careful planning. The Montpelier job had actually started a month earlier. Realizing they needed to become familiar with the bank and the town, and get the citizens accustomed to the sight of them, the three principals—Butch, Elzy Lay, and Henry “Bub” Meeks—had taken jobs on the nearby ranch owned by a Swiss-born man named Samuel Emelle, who also had a jewelry shop on Montpelier’s Washington Street. This gave them an excuse to come to town, where they could case the bank and, while having a drink or two of whiskey at the general store just across the street, become a regular part of the scenery.
After eighteen months of quietly nursing his resentments in prison, Butch seemed to be feeling good about jumping back into the outlaw life with both feet. He’d pulled together a fine little team of accomplices. Bub Meeks would one day fling himself from a watchtower at an insane asylum, attempting suicide for neither the first nor last time, but for now, he was known in the bandit community as a six-foot-two gentle giant who happened to be very good around horses, a quality Butch always respected. Meeks had raised and trained the spunky little pack mare, who, once they’d loaded her down with stolen money, could be trusted to trot along after them untethered, a neat and quite useful trick. As for Elzy Lay, he was, in Butch’s opinion, the outlaw equivalent of officer material—a handsome, smart, fellow book reader (he always kept one or two in his saddlebag) who by now Butch considered his closest confidante—especially since he’d cut off communication with Al Hainer, whose acquittal he now saw as a reward for turning state’s evidence.
The kerfuffle involving McIntosh notwithstanding, Butch and Lay usually worked together exceedingly well. “If he and Cassidy had been entrepreneurs, I’m sure they would have been a great success,” Lay’s grandson Harvey Murdock (who’d met Elzy a couple of times as a kid) told me shortly before his death in 2017. “I’m sure they would have made more money than they did as outlaws.” If they’d been on a football team instead of an outlaw crew, Meeks would have been the lovable equipment manager; Butch, the genius coach; and Lay, the hearthrob quarterback, owing to his physical grace and what one of his daughters called his “striking dark eyes that radiated charm.”
Two years younger than Butch, Lay was the son of a Civil War veteran who farmed in Ohio before moving his family west. As a young man, he’d had found excitement as a partner in the Gambling-Hell Saloon near Fort Duchesne, as well as the kind of old-fashioned highwayman who stepped out from behind boulders to rob travelers, and, it almost goes without saying, a rustler. How he and Butch met is not known, but biographer Patterson thinks they connected in the mid-1880s when both were staying at the Bassett ranch in Brown’s Park and Lay invited Butch to participate in a scheme distributing counterfeit money coming down from Canada.
Early on, he and Butch discovered they had similar values. When negotiating for a horse, for example, they would, as a goodwill gesture, always give the owner $5 or $10 more than his asking price. Once when they got roaring drunk and shot up a saloon, they came back the next day and, with heads throbbing, counted the bullet holes and gave the owner a silver dollar for each one. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, they liked to keep their sort-of girlfriends Josie and “Queen Anne” Bassett guessing about whose beau was whose. According to one neighbor, the sisters once had a “knock-down-drag-out” over which one had first dibs on Butch.
Many of the scholars think that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, though widely considered to be one of the all-time great buddy movies, gets the buddies seriously wrong. While Harry Longabaugh, aka the Sundance Kid, went through an awful lot with Butch and was there at the bitter end, it was Elzy Lay who ranked overall as Butch’s true bestie. No one in the intermountain West would have thought otherwise until the movie came out. Harvey Murdock told me that when he and Butch’s sister, Lula Parker Betenson, emerged from the Salt Lake City premiere of the film in 1969, they were still scratching their heads about all the stuff Hollywood had added and subtracted but especially the conflation of Lay and Longabaugh in the character of Sundance. While they waited outside the theater, hoping (in vain) to greet Robert Redford and Paul Newman, Lula said to Murdock, “Looks like they made over your granddaddy into the Sundance Kid.”
“I know,” Harvey said. “But I guess they figured who would want to go see a movie called Butch Cassidy and Elzy Lay?”
The summer of 1896, when the outlaws arrived in Montpelier, was a tumultuous time in America, three years into the ruinous Panic of 1893 and one month into a presidential campaign—William McKinley, who represented the Eastern Establishment, versus William Jennings Bryan, a.k.a. The Great Commoner—that felt like a struggle for the nation’s soul. In southeastern Idaho, meanwhile, it was haying season. Most folks were out in the fields that sunny afternoon, leaving the streets of little Montpelier nearly bereft of horse and foot traffic—just the way Butch and company wanted it.
Even if you planned things as patiently as they did, though, you never knew how a bank or train robbery would play out. Seemingly simple heists got botched and stymied all the time. In 1892 Butch’s future partner Harry Longabaugh had, with several others, attempted to rob a Great Northern Railway train near Malta, Montana, but because no one on board knew the combination to the safe, they realized only about $65 in total. Whether Butch was aware of that or even knew who the Sundance Kid was at this point, the scholars can’t say, but either way, he and his friends couldn’t afford to have the Montpelier robbery result in one of those comically small hauls that newspaper readers first snickered about, then read aloud to their companions.
Whatever happened in Montpelier, the pot was going to be split more than three ways. Besides the principals, a minor outlaw named William “Curly” Harris, who wasn’t along for the heist but had served as a kind of consultant in the planning stages, was due to receive a portion. A much bigger chunk, in all likelihood the lion’s share, would go to Butch’s old compadre Matt Warner, who was just then down on his luck in a serious fashion: facing the hangman’s noose, in fact, for killing two men around Vernal, Utah. It’s a long story, and Warner’s ghostwriter in 1937 made it even longer to fill pages after Warner died prior to the book’s completion. Let’s just say for now that Warner in 1896 needed a lawyer like Douglas Preston, whose price for trying to save a man from the gallows was about $3,500. Butch was basically pulling the Montpelier job for him.
The robbery itself was not a complicated affair. As Butch kept the half dozen or so customers calm, Lay scrambled to scoop up every last paper dollar in McIntosh’s drawer, then went into the vault to grab additional bills before finally sweeping any remaining gold and silver coins off the counter. He stole everything he could see, even the Winchester rifle that McIntosh had standing in the corner by his work station. He took so much—$16,500 in cash, as it turned out—that he needed to make several trips out to the horses, with Butch clearing a path among the customers for him each time. Lay put the paper money in his own saddlebag and strapped the dozen or so sacks of gold and silver pieces to the riderless sorrel horse. When he and Meeks finally swung into their saddles, Butch told the people in the bank to stay quiet and not leave for ten minutes—then dashed out the door himself. The robbers at first proceeded slowly down Washington Street so as not to attract attention, but when they reached the town limits, they spurred their horses into a gallop, with the pack mare keeping up as best she could.
It wasn’t much of a chase. The closest thing to a law enforcement official in Montpelier was a part-time process server named Fred Cruickshank, who owned neither a gun nor a horse. He was working that day at the dry goods store two blocks from the bank, folding overalls, and when word of the robbery reached him, he climbed aboard his trusty (if already obsolete) high-wheeled penny-farthing bicycle and took off in the direction of the robbers. (If the movie had to have a bicycle scene, this would have been a better one than Newman riding Katharine Ross around.) Cruickshank was forced to stop pedaling when he ran out of street, though, while the robbers continued on the trail that would have them across the border and into Wyoming in fifteen miles.
Summoned by telegraph—an innovation that was already making the Western outlaw an endangered species—the county sheriff, M. Jeff Davis, and his deputy, Mike Malone, rushed the ten miles from Paris, Idaho, to Montpelier, formed a posse, and set off in pursuit, but the seven or eight civilians they’d sworn in turned back as soon as they heard gunfire. Davis and Malone kept going—until they realized that the robbers had planted fresh horses at relay stations along their escape route, and they had no chance.
The trio’s big worry in the initial stages of the escape was not that they’d get caught but that they might outrun their money. By day two, the poor sorrel, who had been laboring under her considerable burden almost from the start, was nowhere in sight. Thinking they had put too much trust in Meeks’s mare, Butch and Lay grew sullen. But as they sat around their campfire that evening, with Meeks, jolly as ever, droning on about how Robin Hood once rescued one of his merry men from the sheriff of Nottingham, Lay caught sight of a tiny copper-colored speck down in the valley and let out a whoop. It was indeed the intrepid sorrel. When she finally staggered into their camp a half hour later, they stripped her of her cargo and, as a member of Meeks’s family tells the tale, stood back, and laughed as “she rolled gratefully in the red dust.”
While all this was happening, the newspapers scrambled to construct the inside story of what one had called the “bold and daring” Montpelier heist. Good information was hard to come by. Initially the robbery was attributed to Tom McCarty and his gang by, among others, the Pinkerton Detective Agency, whose chief Denver operative, while not officially involved in the case, opined that the crime was too well planned to be the work of any other outlaw. Just as unhelpful was Sidonia Emelle, wife of the jeweler who’d employed the robbers on the family ranch; she thought that one of them might be named Frank. When even a $500 reward produced no leads, the Idaho Mountain Express groused that the robbers were probably off somewhere “playing stallion poker or feeding the tiger in some city” with the stolen loot. It took a few weeks, but lawmen and journalists finally found themselves a reliable source: Matt Warner’s wife, Rose.
Rose Morgan had been a fourteen-year-old Mormon lass “with eyes that plumb got me from the first,” Warner says in his memoir, when the two married about ten years earlier. It was never a happy union, though, because of his alcoholism, his outlawry, and his penchant for domestic violence. Warner once kicked her so brutally that she needed to get her leg amputated. Rose hated her husband and wanted to tell the world everything she knew about him—and also about the man who wanted to help him beat the rap: Butch Cassidy.
Suddenly the newspaper accounts of the Montpelier robbery were detail rich and dead-on accurate, at least by the standards of the Old West press. On Wednesday, September 9, the Salt Lake Tribune devoted its entire front page and much more to what its banner headline called a “Most Desperate Plot Unearthed.” The report named Butch, Lay, and “Bob” Meeks as the perpetrators and noted that they had robbed the bank to pay Warner’s legal fees. Laying the foundation stones for the Wild Bunch myth, it called them “notorious outlaws” and “desperados of the first water” who had a “perfect organization” and a “bold plot to set [Warner] free at the point of pistols” if court proceedings didn’t seem to be going his way.
But Rose wasn’t finished helping the authorities. Besides serving as a source of information, she agreed to take part in a “honeypot” scheme designed to lure Butch into Vernal so that he could be arrested for the Montpelier heist. At the request of the sheriff, she sent word to him that she’d appreciate a visit and added that if he came by to talk to her, he could have “anything he wanted.” Butch saw through the ploy, though, and on August 25 responded with a letter that was promptly published in the Tribune:
Mrs. Rosa Warner, Salt Lake;
My Dear friend.
Through the kindness of Mrs. Rummel [Rose’s mother], I received your letter last night. I am sorry that I can’t comply with your request, but at present it is impossible for me to go to see you, and I can’t tell just when I can get there. If you have got anything to tell me that will help your Matt, write and tell me what it is, and I will be there on time. I can’t understand what it can be, for I have heard from reliable partys that you did not want Matt to get out, and I can’t see what benefit it would be to you unless it was in his behalf. I may be misinformed, but I got it so straight that I would have to be shown why you made this talk before I could think otherwise. But that is neither here nor there, you are a lady and I would do all I could for you or any of the sex that was in trouble, of course. I am foolish (Which you have found out), but it is my nature and I can’t change it. I may be wrong in this, but if so I hope you will look over it and prove to me that you are all right, and I will ask forgiveness for writing you as I have. I understand you and Matt named your boy Rex Leroy after me, thank you. I hope I will be able to meet you all before long if everything is satisfactory. I [am] sorry to hear about your leg. If I can do anything to help you out let me know and I will do it. Lay and I have got a good man to defend Matt and [his codefendant Bill] Wall, and put up plenty of money, too, for Matt and Wall to defend themselves. Write me here in care of John Bluford [the black barber at the Antler’s Saloon in Vernal] and believe me to be a true friend to my kind of people.
George Cassidy
The lawyer that the Montpelier robbery paid for was the dapper Orlando Woodworth Powers, a former member of the Utah Supreme Court. (An in-state lawyer seemed a more politic choice than Douglas Preston, who was from Wyoming.) The version of events he tried to peddle in the late 1896 trial was that Warner had been helping an acquaintance move his mining camp when he got involved in a dispute with two interlopers and shot them in self-defense. Given the strength of the evidence and the popularity of the deceased, though, Powers had his work cut out for him. He didn’t help his case with his habit of asking that the trial be stopped, and the ladies in the courtroom escorted into the hallway, every time he thought bad language was about to be quoted in testimony. Nor did his chief strategy—to call upon a series of character witnesses—seem sufficient, especially given his client’s character. Under cross examination, Warner’s father, Christen Christiansen, admitted that he’d seen Matt only twice in the last twenty years and had no idea what he did for a living.
Worried about the outcome, Butch was said to have smuggled a note to Warner via a man who visited him in his jail cell. According to Charles Kelly, Butch’s first biographer, it said “Dear Matt, The boys are here. If you give the word, we will come and take you out.” But if that story is true, nothing ever came of the offer.
In the end, Warner caught a break when a witness became less certain about who’d fired the first shot, and the charge against him was reduced from first-degree murder to voluntary manslaughter. Still, he was convicted and sentenced to five years at hard labor in the Utah State Penitentiary. His criminal career was effectively over.
Butch’s, though, was just picking up steam.