16 
LAND OF ENCHANTMENT
The robbery they pulled off in Castle Gate, Utah, was never going to be a reputation-making event; rather, just a medium-sized bit of mischief that keeps a gang toned up and ready for bigger things. It probably first surfaced in conversation in the spring of 1897, when Butch and the boys began to bat around the topic of what was next, after Montpelier, over a tin cup of coffee or a game of whist—and someone said, “Why the hell not?” or maybe even, “Geez, haven’t we pulled that job already?”
Today it is a ghost town, but Castle Gate—named for the twin rock formations that straddle its main street—had a very obvious raison d’etre in those days: the Pleasant Valley Coal Company. Virtually every one of the five hundred or so people who lived in Castle Gate worked for the PVCC. Coal was king—by far the most common source of energy in the United States at the time—and business was booming. The beauty part from a robber’s standpoint was that the payroll of the PVCC consisted of about $8,000 in cash that came to Castle Gate every two weeks via the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad on a day that varied (supposedly for security purposes) but could always be determined in advance. A wagon dependably brought the bags of money from the station to the company headquarters, where two men just as dependably lugged it up an outside stairway to the payroll office on the top floor. None of this was done in secret or with any special precautions. Just in case you missed the arrival of the payroll, in fact, the company blew a loud steam whistle to let PVCC employees know they could start forming a line to pick up their cash. To put it in Utah terms, this job was, for anyone in Butch’s orbit, a low-hanging bullberry. The only question was, Who would be going on the raid?
We can see from its various permutations the way the Wild Bunch operated in its glory days of 1897 to 1901: very loosely. Like a pickup basketball team in a neighborhood where the key players are often away on business. Like the writers’ warren at Saturday Night Live, where people drift into someone’s office, spitball about a particular sketch for a while, then move on. As the historian Dan Buck has said in articles and lectures, those boys may have been wild, but they surely weren’t much of a bunch. Members, to the extent that we can call them that, came and went depending on whose idea a particular job was and who’d expressed the most interest in the early stages of the planning, often based on their particular skills. Availability was a factor, too, since men such as Harvey Logan, aka Kid Curry, and Ben “the Tall Texan” Kilpatrick sometimes had previous commitments. Even the core group of Butch, Elzy Lay, and (by the mid-1890s) Sundance were seldom all present and accounted for. Whatever their composition, there were never more than about fifteen or twenty of them all told, even when Kilpatrick and Logan brought along their girlfriends, Laura Bullion and Annie Rogers, to hold the horses or just hang around, and probably never more than a half dozen on any one job. That wasn’t good enough for the newspapers, though, which sought to titillate and frighten their readers with tales of a highly organized army of some two hundred outlaws always on the verge of sweeping down from the hills and wreaking havoc. To a great extent, the press foisted upon a gullible public a gang that only vaguely resembled the real group that surrounded Butch. “They are lawless men who have long lived in the crags and become like eagles,” said the New York Herald, on June 25, 1899. Newspaper Butch (as we might call him) was sometimes described as mean and sketched as a fat man with a moustache. He also got killed an awful lot (his death was reported on at least fifty separate occasions, by Dan Buck’s count); he ran the Train Robbers Syndicate, the Hole-in-the Wall Gang, and sometimes the Powder River Boys—until reporters settled on the Wild Bunch in 1899.
The Castle Gate heist seems to have been Butch’s and Elzy’s baby from the start; they were in, and Sundance, despite his budding friendship with the boss, was out—owing, perhaps, to his involvement in an impending bank heist in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, in which he was by default the leader. The one hurdle they had to get over with Castle Gate was that because virtually everyone in town was a miner who could walk to work, or a member of a miner’s family, horses and the cowboys who rode them were a rare sight, and two mounted strangers were liable to attract attention. Probably because he always had horse racing on his mind, Butch came up with the idea of posing as trainers, who he knew might pop up at any time in those parts, looking for a race or to make a sale. They fitted their finest horses with small English racing saddles, put on their flashiest “sportsman” clothes, and arrived in Castle Gate on Tuesday, May 20, 1897, at about noon.
Almost exactly twenty-four hours later, as Elzy sat astride his mount in front of the PVCC building, and Butch perused the merchandise in the company store just around the corner, the steam whistle announcing the arrival of the payroll shattered the silence and echoed off the walls of nearby Price Canyon.
Butch calmly left the store, walked to the staircase that PVCC paymaster Edwin Carpenter always used to take the money to his office on the upper floor, and nonchalantly leaned against the outer wall of the building. It took Carpenter and his assistant, T. W. Lewis, a few minutes to make the trip on foot from the train depot, loaded down as they were with money. The former was carrying a leather satchel that contained $7,000 in gold, $860 in silver, and $1,000 in currency, and the latter had a cloth bag holding another $1,000 in cash and checks. As they began to pass by him, Butch stuck a pistol in Carpenter’s ribs and told him to drop the satchel. He immediately did, but Lewis, clutching his bag to his chest, darted into the first-floor entrance—nearly colliding, in the process, with another PVCC employee named Frank Caffey, who had seen Butch’s gun and was rushing out to alert the sheriff. Caffey got only a few feet, though, before running into Elzy, who stared down at him from his saddle with pistol drawn. “Get back in there, you son of a bitch,” he said, “or I’ll fill your belly full of hot lead.” Caffey did as instructed.
Elzy had untied Butch’s horse in preparation for the getaway and was holding the reins. The only thing that went wrong that day was that when Butch tossed him the leather satchel he’d taken from Carpenter, Elzy dropped the lines, and the riderless horse bolted down the street, weaving its way through the crowd of people already gathering to get their pay. Butch, according to several witnesses, remained calm and in command. “Don’t anyone make a mistake!” he announced. “Everything is going to be all right.” What happened next resembled an equestrian stunt that you might see in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show: spurring his own mount from a standing start, Elzy ran down the loose horse, and Butch, in an all-out sprint, grabbed the surcingle that held the tiny saddle in place and swung deftly aboard. Then, as four or five riflemen fired at them from the roof of the PVCC building, the two amigos disappeared in a cloud of dust between the twin castle towers.
Posses pursued them, as posses will, but to little avail. Not only did they have a good head start, but Bub Meeks, their compadre on the Montpelier job, and another crew member named Joe Walker, had planted fresh mounts along the way. Whatever you wanted to call this group, it was hitting its stride and doing it in its signature style.
If you pull back and look at the arc of Butch’s relatively long career (for an outlaw), you’ll see that nearly every time he hit a peak, two things happened: he went broke, and he started dreaming of having the relatively quiet, steady life of a rancher. For the former, we can blame the faro tables, which it seems he never could resist. The yearning for the straight life posed a more complicated problem, because peace always looked better from a distance.
In the early 1970s, an eighty-eight-year-old man named Fred Hilman told the outlaw historian Larry Pointer that less than a week after the Castle Gate holdup, a lone rider with “steel-blue eyes” turned up at the ranch owned by his father, Dan, in Wyoming’s Little Goose Canyon. He gave his name as LeRoy Parker and said he was hungry and in need of work. Because he had the air of a cowboy about him—Dan Hilman saw him as the slick, haughty sort who “just wanted to sit in the saddle and ride herd”—the master of the ranch was at first reluctant to hire him. In short order, though, LeRoy Parker turned out to be the best ranch hand his father ever had, on most days cheerful, brimming with energy, and up for any fence mending or cow milking that needed to be done. When little Fred admired his .44 carbine, Parker gave him the gun.
But as friendly as he was, the drifter also had an “aloof” and “mysterious” side, Fred said. During the several months he worked at the Hilman place, Parker always kept a saddle horse picketed nearby, presumably in case he needed to make a quick exit. Surely thoughts of pursuers, real or imagined, were never far from his mind. “Relaxing around the table after dinner,” Pointer wrote, paraphrasing Fred, “he would set his chair backwards, elbows lightly resting on the chair’s back, in a position commanding a view of the door and windows. His actions were quick, almost nervous.” Occasionally, Fred said, a friend of Parker’s would come by—“tall and dark, with a carefully trimmed moustache, polite but distant.” Parker seems never to have introduced the man—who might have been Elzy or Sundance—to the family, but, with Dan Hilman’s permission, he would go off with him now and then for a few days on some never-explained mission. One morning in the late summer of 1897, they woke up to discover that the mysterious Parker had gone for good. A note on his bed said, “Sorry to be leaving you. The authorities are getting on to us. Best home I’ve ever had.”
Even today a lot of people in the West will tell you that Butch Cassidy stayed at their granddaddy’s house for a spell and helped him milk the cows. Most of these tales can be rejected as false, especially if they supposedly occurred in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, as quite a few do. To me and a good number of the scholars, though, Fred Hilman’s story, at the very least, does a bracing job of capturing the nuances of Butch’s mood in mid-to-late 1897, when he would have been particularly worried about “the authorities getting on to us.” In the months following Castle Gate, his name appeared more frequently in Western newspapers—often coming up speculatively in stories about crimes he was not involved in—and governors of the intermountain West states found themselves under increasing pressure from railroads, express companies, cattle barons, and banks to crack down on the desperado who was a drain on their profits. In early 1898 Colorado governor Alva Adams wrote his Wyoming counterpart, William Alford Richards, that he had hired a professional bounty hunter named James Catron “to go to the land of the rustlers and arrest Cassidy if possible. I am inclined to the belief that he will either get Cassidy or Cassidy will get him, with the chances in favor of him getting Cassidy.” A few weeks later, however, Adams became disenchanted with Catron and called off the hunt. “He talked so much that he was more apt to give up his scalp than to get the scalp of the other fellow,” he wrote to Richards. Still, Butch realized that a fundamental shift was under way: that besides being the object of sheriffs and bounty hunters, he’d become a political prize, someone whose demise could lead to someone else’s election—and so more than ever, he had to sleep with one eye open and keep moving.
It was that sense of urgency that probably drove him south to New Mexico in early 1898. We don’t know how he first met an experienced ranch foreman named Perry Tucker, but when William French, the owner of the WS Ranch in Alma, New Mexico, lured Tucker away from a cattle outfit in Arizona to manage his cows and quell a recent upsurge in rustling, the new hire brought along both Butch and Elzy. In a memoir French would publish in 1928, he said he took to Tucker’s two friends instantly. The one who called himself Jim Lowe (Butch) was “stoutly built and of middle height” and “had a habit of grinning and showing you a very even row of small teeth when he spoke to you.” As for Elzy, who gave his name as William McGuinness, he was “several years younger, much taller and darker—in fact, a quite good-looking young man, debonair, with a bit of a swagger. He seemed quite above the ordinary cow hand and definitely had more education.”
French, who’d been born in Ireland and served as a captain in the British army, appreciated that Jim and Mac, unlike your typical cowpokes, were disciplined in their appearance and demeanor. “When they went on the road, they were the most decorous,” he wrote. “There was no such thing as drinking or gambling or shooting up the town. I was frequently complimented by the merchants of [nearby] Magdelena for having such a well-behaved outfit. I was very proud of them.”
It was as management-level ranch hands, however, that they impressed him most, helping him turn around the business after a bad stretch. On the trail, said French, “Jim’s real genius came under my notice. The way he handled those poor cattle over the long and dusty trail of over two hundred miles was a revelation. Frequently they had to go as much as seventy-five miles without water, but they never dropped a hoof, and there was no tail to his herd when he arrived at the road. Mac usually accompanied him in charge of a bunch of broncos, and when they got through with the trip, they were nice and gentle and furnished new mounts for the hands of the range. Their zeal for everything in connection with the outfit was beyond all praise. Truly, the way these men handled stock was a marvel.”
The other thing that struck French was that he was no longer losing animals, like the magnificent saddle horse and a beloved buggy team that had been filched, he was sure, by the notorious Ketchum brothers the previous autumn, as well as many rank-and-file members of the herd that had been disappearing almost daily. He was doubly impressed by the fact that the thieves who’d been preying on his stock did not push back against the crackdown imposed by Jim and Mac. “The rustlers, for the time being, seemed entirely buffaloed,” French wrote. In a short time, Jim and Mac were for all practical purposes running the ranch.
Some things about the duo did sort of baffle him, he admitted. When men quit, it never disrupted the operation because Jim and Mac always seemed to have replacements handy; those boys were suspiciously well connected. Strange, too, was how the new hires acted tentative and deferential to each other while he was around, but “in the dusk of the evening, I frequently saw them together, sitting under a fence in close confab like long-lost brothers.” French at least once discussed these matters with his second in command but ultimately shrugged and figured that “as long as things were going so well, it was no affair of ours to inquire into it.”
Things were going so well, and life was so smooth and predictable, in fact, that Butch and Elzy just had to get the hell out of there.