September 28, 2016 • 45 mins
At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, a chunk of rough and unwelcoming stretch of territory in the Canyonlands area east of the Dirty Devil River became a safe haven for scoundrels, including Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch.
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Hey everybody, we have one more live show coming up
this ball on Thursday, October six, We will be talking
(00:43):
about the Reynolds pamphlet at Hudson Mercantile in New York City.
This is an all ages show, but we are talking
about Alexander Hamilton's story at Affair, so judge your own
family's ages accordingly. If you'd like to get tickets, you
can go to New York Comic Con dot Com, Slash
Events Slash ny c C Dash Presents. You do not
(01:04):
need a new York Comic Con badge to attend this show.
It is open to the public. Welcome to Steph. You
missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly from I'm Tracy V. Wilson,
(01:27):
and we recently shared our panel from Salt Lake Comic Con,
where we spoke with authors who wrote fiction inspired by history.
But that was just the first of two live shows
that we did while we were there having a fantastic time. Uh.
The other, the one that you'll hear today, is much
more along the lines of our regular narrative format. It
was just that we shared it with a live audience.
This was a fun ride. It's about outlaws of the
(01:49):
wild West, specifically famous hideout in Utah and the very
famous scoundrels who would sometimes sometimes hold up there. That's
all covered in the show. Those that were just gonna
jump right in, Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Frow, I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We joked that there
(02:14):
are times when we kind of want to switch that
up and pretend to be each other, or just subliminally
we our brains want to throw out the other name.
I don't know why more than once I've opened my
mouth and almost holly fry has come out of there,
and I'm like, what is happening to me today? That's
a job you do not want. Uh. But at the
end of the nineteenth century in the beginning of the
(02:35):
twentieth century, a chunk of really rough and unwelcoming territory
in the canyon Lands area east of the Dirty Devil
River became a safe haven for scoundrels. And I know
we all love scoundrels a little bit. Uh One of
the most famous scoundrels is which Cassidy and he and
his oh he gets to plause. I mean, I see
(02:57):
the appeal. Let me tell you, uh. He and is
wild Bunch frequented this area, which came to be known
as Robber's Roost. And there is a lot of outlaw
history connected to Robber's Roost, a lot, uh so much
that there's really no way we can cover it all
in the course of an episode. So I know that
if you came hoping to hear some piece of like
(03:18):
your favorite uh lore around the roost, like, we may
not hit it. But instead we're going to cover an
assortment of some of the people who shaped the legend
of Robber's Roost. We will talk about Butch Cassidy. I promise.
Can I interject my incredibly embarrassing story about about Butch Cassidy.
It's so dear to me. I grew up in the
(03:40):
southeastern United States, not anywhere near Utah. I believed until
Holly said, why don't we do a podcast on Robber's Roost,
that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were characters made
up by the same guy who wrote The Princess Bride
for a screenplay to be played by Paul Newman and
Robert Redford, my mother's two favorite actors of all time.
(04:03):
She really did so yeah, real people. Yes, I live
for a brief time when I was tiny in Arizona,
So I guess that's how I had my inn. Had
I spent more time in the South growing up, maybe
I would not have known that. I thought they were
made up. Uh, And even today, getting into Robber's Roost
is really big challenge. The U s Department of the
(04:25):
Interior Bureau of Land Management actually mentions on its information
page that, uh, you really shouldn't try to get into
Robber's Roost. Without a four wheel drive, and it has
this great warning that reads chances of encountering other users
is low and any kind of emergency response will not
be fast. Considering the remote and isolated nature of the roost,
(04:47):
cell phone service throughout the region is unreliable at best,
so even today it's very difficult to get into there
and communicate from there. So at the time that we're
talking about, it was a really isolated space. That reminds
me of a sign that we saw while I was
on my honeymoon in Iceland. Uh, and it was at
the geysers, and it was basically like the water coming
(05:09):
out of the ground here is literally almost boiling, and
it had a number of hazards that might happen to
you because of this literally boiling water. And then it
ended with the sentence, the nearest hospital is sixty eight
kilometers away. Yeah, I love a state run or government
agency that's just like, we really can't help you if
you're stupid. We just can't. We can't. I'm so sorry.
(05:30):
We can't cover we can't cover the spread. So Robberts
Reefs is not the only hide out in this general area.
There's a whole swath of land that runs through it
that came to be known as Outlaw Trail because of
all these many hiding places that were all over it.
Holly was telling me at lunch that Robert Redford was
actually walked the whole thing. Yeah, he hiked the Outlaw
Trail in preparation for Butch Cassidy and The Sun Dance Kid.
(05:52):
And I think it was for National Geographic that he
wrote an article about it. And I was not able
to get my hands on a copy of it because
it's in their archives and it's not one you and
just access online. And we didn't have enough time for
the turnaround for them to send me a copy or
digitize it and get it over. But it's sort of
fascinating that he went ahead and did it, because that
is no small undertaking, no, and it's still really difficult
to access. Pretty much the only way in is at
(06:13):
the mouth of the Dirty Devil River. And another spot
to tuck out of sight, uh away from the law
on the Outlaw Trail was Brown's Hole, which sits in
Colorado on the Green River. It's at the meeting point
of Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. It's actually now known as
Brown's Park because that just sounds nicer than Brown's Hole
now that you mentioned it, right, Like, I don't want
(06:35):
to hide out there. If you travel on the Outlaw
Trail into south central Wyoming, you could also lay low
at a place that is also very famous called the
Hole in the Wall, and on that two hundred mile
stretch that kind of covers the spread of these three hideouts.
There were also ample lookout points and caves, so there
were a lot of little mini hideouts that were not
(06:56):
quite so I'm using the air quotes when I say
civilized as those three places that had some amenities built in.
Robbers roosts specifically, is made up of just canyons and
cliffs all over the place. There the result of thousands
and thousands of years of erosion. So all this really
craggy rain, terrain and an almost maze like set of
natural features are what really make it into just perfect
(07:18):
hiding spots. There are tons of little places that you
can tuck yourself away and not be easily spotted. Uh.
The This area was described in one of the books
that Holly read for researching this podcast as quote the
Geography of Despair. So it's such a poetic quaint and
say it, but really it's like you're gonna die there. Um.
(07:38):
But in addition to the easy hiding, Robber's Roost also
had some legitimate appeal to bandits, and not just bandits,
we'll get to some of the people that actually lived
there as well, because it had dependable water sources in
the form of several springs that were there. And we
don't know the origin of the moniker robbers Roost for
the area, it predated the Wild Bunch by a significant margin.
(08:00):
As early as the eighteen seventies, though, outlaws were using
the trail to take stolen horses away from authorities. One
of these people was a man known as Cat Brown,
and he'd been stealing horses for quite some time before
things really got hot for him, and he would steal
horses in Utah and then he would sell them to
mining operations in Colorado. Yeah. That was really sort of
(08:22):
the business of wrestlers at the time was to supply
these mining operations, and often Cap Brown sort of served
as this sort of middleman. He would purchase stolen horses
and then he would drive them through the roost, which
was incredibly difficult to their destination to sell at a
mark up and while we are by no means endorsing
or excusing this behavior, uh, we really do want to
(08:44):
kind of acknowledge that there was no doubt that this
was really really hard work. I mean, for doing illegal things.
He was really earning his money. Um. Moving horses through
the roost was really tricky. Sometimes sand would actually have
to You'd have to have a man running ahead of
them and throwing sand under the horses hoofs as they
moved so that they would have something to kind of
grab onto, you like a little bit of traction. But
(09:06):
the horses would still struggle and slip just the same.
One of the books that I read described the smell
of burning hoofs as they slid on rock because the
horses were just trying to pull up and they were
so heavy they were grinding down as they were sliding.
That's a horrible smell, I imagine, Holly, that's horrifying. I'm
so sorry. I'm glad you left that out until just
now so I could be horrified along with everybody on
(09:29):
in the audience. Up to the eighteen eighties, there was
really no development in this area either. But in the
eighteen nineties at Denver, Taylor decided to give up city
life for the sake of his health and then to
come for this strange, forsaken canyon place and start a
small ranch up in the roost. His name was J. B. Burr,
That is b u h R, not bu r R
(09:50):
like Aaron Burr who you should vote for if it's uh.
Along with brothers, two of his brothers, they started sort
of shaping the land a little bit, making it not
quite so untamed, and they founded what would come to
be known as the Three Brief the Three Beat Ranch,
one b for each bur brother, and troughs were built
(10:10):
to make use of the roost spring water uh so
livestock could hydrate more easily. Of course, they had to
supplied this ranch, and a portion of the roost was
fenced in, like they were really trying to settle this place.
And when Burr's foreman position turned over, the ranch headquarters
also moved. So this is one of those things where
there are there's like where the ranch is, but the
(10:30):
headquarters is sort of more like a mobile. I think
it's not necessarily in one place. It's where whoever is
running the thing wants to be central to where he
thinks is most important. For the herds, so just in
case that's unclear. Uh. And this new foreman, John Cattrell,
eventually married the widow of another Roost settler who had
died while he was moving a group of horses he
(10:51):
had raised and moved into Colorado to sell for mine work.
So cal built this cabin for his family at the roost,
and he slowly expanded the markers of human beings actually
being there. Uh. The family didn't permanently stay at the Roost.
They eventually moved on to the more populated area of
Hanksville and a man named John Moore took over as
(11:13):
the foreman. I think you mean Jack Moore. Oh sure,
I name Jack Moore, but Jack is a nickname for John.
It is. It's not like this happens every single time
we record, and our producer Noll takes it magically all
out because he is a sorcerer. Uh. And this change
in personnel to from Catrell to Jack Moore was actually
(11:34):
pretty significant. It enacted a pretty big change in the
nature of the roost because it really seeded the start
of the wild bunch. More was friendly with a number
of outlaws who all seemed to know exactly where the
three D Ranch was and that they could show up
there and that they would be welcomed and they would
have shelter and water and their needs meant. And eventually
a number of the outlaws who became well acquainted with
(11:57):
the Three Bees hospitality would be the ones that formed
into Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch. I like how it seems
like it was some kind of like ranching outlaw farm.
I think that was not uncommon at the time, like
a lot of places where you know, it was an
unsettled wild time. So if you had a friend there
was maybe a little dicey, but you know, if he
showed up, you'd take care of him. Sure, you don't
(12:18):
do that for your front should be hospitable. Oh you're
on the lamb. I have cake. I think at this
point it might have been more like bourbon bourbon cake. Yeah.
So Jack Moore was this tall, dark haired guy, and
he had also gone by the name of d and
he was an excellent horseman and even better tracker. So,
(12:40):
as with the foreman who came before him, he moved
the headquarters of the ranch and he built a shock
in Burr Pass, which would be closer to where the
horses fed. He also added a tent and uh, and
he ended up with more and more people to shelter.
It was this mix of ranch hands and outlaws and
outlaw ranch hands. Yeah, there was one thing that I
(13:00):
read that suggested that he only ever hired one actually
honest ranch hand, that the rest were sort of people
that were looking for a job while they kind of
let the law situation cool off out. And while his
new location for the headquarters was closer to feed for
the horses, it really wasn't the best spot for water.
It's one of those things where you find yourself scratching
(13:21):
your head and going, really, is this a valid trade off?
The horses actually had to be driven to water once
a day, like they just didn't have a continuous source,
and that sometimes water would be carried in from a
nearby spring as well. So it seems like he was
making a lot of extra work. But it couldn't have
been too rough because the camp that he set up
was where the three B crew in all of the
(13:41):
ranch hands for quite some time camped for more than
a decade. Seems like ten years of wasting your time,
right stuff to do, not driving horses back and forth.
The water. Eventually, Jack Moore's wife, Nora, and her brother
Monty Butler, moved from Colorado to join Jack at the Roost,
and Auntie and his family didn't stay more than a
(14:02):
couple of years before they moved back, but Nora settled in.
Burr really liked her, and she would there's some screaming happening.
They really liked Burr and Nora as well. App I mean,
who doesn't really, so you really liked her and she
would look after him. Was when his asthma flared up,
and she added kind of a touch of refinement to
(14:23):
the ranch by decorating a little and insisting that some
of the men exhibit some manners. This definitely feels like
the plot of like a Western Yeah it does. Uh yeah,
I mean she it was. She just didn't want them to,
like I swear while they were, you know, all having
meals together, and she didn't want them to just put
their boots everywhere, like classic sitcom level stuff. But the
(14:44):
really lovely thing is nobody seemed to begrudge her that
they were like, oh yes, ma'am uh. And while most
real outlaw work happened in warmer weather because snow obviously
creates a number of problems in terms of making a
quick getaway on not slippery surfaces and not being just
followed by her foot and Ryan being easily tracked because
you leave footprints in the snow. Jack had this insight
(15:05):
knowing that the winters were a time when most of
the ranchers actually stayed in their safe and warm homes
and we're not at the headquarters of the actual ranching,
and they did not often, if ever, actually make it
out to their camps to check on things. They kind
of left it to the their employees that were a
little bit, you know, sort of rough around the edges
and could stand that sort of situation through the winter.
(15:27):
And so he took advantage of this by often moving
herds in the winter. So by moving, what we really
mean is stealing. Uh. He would basically mix up heads
of cattle from one ranch and another and break them
up and move them around. And this meant that if
the owners did come out and check to see what
was going on, it would seem like most of their
(15:48):
cattle were there and doing fine. I started to wonder
if this is where the slang term for wrestling actually
comes from, because that seems like I mean, not this
person inventing it, but like that this practice of kind
of mixing up cattle, I couldn't figure it out, but
uh that this wasn't unusual. Herds moved around, and most
ranches had several herds and they didn't go check on
(16:11):
them all every day or anything like that. Um, So
once Jack had kind of shuffled them around a bit,
he would move them away farther and sell them in Colorado,
which is not California. Yeah, it's kind of like to
liken it to modern day like if you have ever
had one of those high level executives in the place
where you work that is not hands on. They kind
(16:32):
of go in their office and shut the door and
then the middle managers are really running the show and
know what's happening. It's kind of like that, like those
people that owned the ranches often couldn't they didn't know
their herds by sight, Like they couldn't say, oh I
know that that cow and that horse and that. They
were just like, oh, yeah, you've got this covered right,
and they would go, yes, sir, they scooted their animals
(16:53):
away to illicit sale. So eventually, though the wrestling did
catch up to Jack, Moore is the Burr. It was
actually closing. He ended up shot while he was fleeing
from another rancher whose livestock he had stolen. Uh. Then
a lot of cases, this is sort of described as
like they would, you know, realize in the spring that
some of the flock had gone missing, and they would
(17:14):
kind of shrug it off and just write it off
as a loss. But they started noticing a lot of
the a lot of the herds under Jack started to
vanish and maybe he was really bad at his job,
or maybe he was just an outright thief, and they
realized that. So Moore's wife Nora and J. B. Burr
actually ended up together uh and they headed for Texas,
but not for long. They ended up dying unfortunately in
(17:35):
a railroad accident the following year. So we will now
get to the most famous person he was associated with
the rus. But before we do, we'll stop for a
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We have been investigating the Skeptics Guide to American History,
which is a really really interesting look at how we
perceive American history and how there have been some myths
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Courses Plus dot Com slash Stuff and you two can
be learning more all the time. So we're going to
talk about Robert Leroy Parker who you may know who
that is. Uh, he would come to be a central
(19:46):
figure in the Lord of Roberts roost. Parker was born
in Beaver, Utah on April eighteen sixty six. Beaver, Utah Natives.
Where is that in relation to here? Okay? All right,
now we know Beaver only a very happening spot. Um.
His Mormon parents, Maximilian Parker and a Gillies, were both
(20:06):
from immigrant families. They had made their way to Utah
from Britain ten years prior to his birth, and while
the couple had a pretty promising start. They were kind
of setting up their home and it looked like they
were going to be doing okay as farmers. A really
brutal winter in eighteen seventy nine wiped out most of
their livestock, and the Parkers really struggled to regain that
lost ground for a long time. However, they had twelve
(20:28):
more children. Uh. Roberts started working as a ranch hand
when he was just a teenager, and it was through
one of these jobs that he met up with a
man named Mike Cassidy. He was a ranger with a
kind of side business that I'm gonna do it to
you again because he's not a ranger. He's not a ranger,
he's a rancher. They're so pretty. Tracy is legitimately one
(20:53):
of the smartest seasons I have ever met. So when
I teach her, that's apparently I'm illiterate today for some reason.
And uh so, Mike Cassidy was in fact a livestock rustler.
I even printed this out really big so that I
would not have this problem. Okay, So Parker looked up
(21:14):
to Cassidy and working with him as a part time
cattle wrestler in the eighteen eighties. Robert hid the livestock
that he was moving at Robbers Roost, and Cassidy had
taken Parker on because he was young, he was strong,
he was not afraid of hard work. He was willing
to do the work of trail breaking groups of horses
(21:34):
as they moved them, which is not easy to their
final sale point. And because Parker had been responsible for
handling his own family's livestock, he was really already pretty
skilled in all of this. He just didn't need a
lot of effort to be gotten up to speed. So
he was a really good employee for stealing UH and
he made some of those early runs through the area
(21:54):
with the experienced Cat Brown that we mentioned earlier, and
they were both working for Cassidy at that point. In
eighteen eighty four, after working a variety of ore hauling
jobs in this brief foray into working as a butcher
and Rock Springs, Wyoming, Parker, who was too too wrestless
for a regular job, decided to make they move into
(22:15):
full time illegal work UH and he became Butch Cassidy,
allegedly choosing this name UH after his mentor in wrestling,
and then as well as the nickname Butch from his
brief time as a butcher. And for the next several
years he worked on several ranches and also wrestled livestock,
and he would often move them through various points in
the Outlaw trail. And in June of eighteen eighty nine,
(22:38):
Cassidy and another man that he had met wrestling cattle.
This is apparently the friendliest job, Like you just have
your pals that you wrestled cattle with. UH named Matt
Warner robbed a bank in Colorado, and it was the
San Miguel Valley Bank located until your Ride. And as
this incident is cited as Butch Cassidy's first bank robbery,
this is something of a point of historical pride for
(22:59):
tell your righte And the site of the crime, which
is now an office building, is actually marked with a
plaque commemorating it today. That cracks me up. Crime happened, Uh.
Cassidy and Warner had both spent some time until You're riding,
including sometimes spent racing horses there the previous year, so
(23:19):
they knew this area and they had been able to
set up these horse relays for a clear escape plan,
and they cut in some accomplices on their takes so
that they could have their assistance along the way. Yeah.
One of the cool things that which Cassidy did was
he would set up these horse relays, like he wouldn't
just sort of take off after a crime and run
(23:40):
his horse into the ground, like every twenty miles. He
would have somebody standing by with fresh horses so he
could trade off and not have to be basically like
riding an animal that was exhausted and just completely stacked
the deck in his favor, which is I mean, he's
doing illegal things, but it's pretty genius. And they made
off with dollars in this robbery, and their hideaway while
(24:01):
the heat died down was none other than the craggy,
unwelcoming landscape of robbers roost, and as the incident is
cited as Butch's first bank robbery, I mentioned that it
is a point of of pride. Like I said, Tell
your Ride loves to tell this story. They have parades
about it. Um I don't. I don't want to go
to like the Tell your Ride robbery parade, right. I
(24:22):
make sure a lot of people it's like comic combat.
Everyone's addressed as a bandit or a cowboy. Like they're
all either in the black and white stripes of like
a criminal, like an imprison criminal, or they're in the
ten gallon hat. You're only options sounds good? Uh? Is
this where we are in eighteen ninety four? I got
distracted with thinking about a parade of outlaws. Uh. In
(24:44):
Butch was charged with stealing a five dollar horse, and
he was found guilty. And it's possible that this was
actually a set up that he had purchased the horse
from somebody not knowing that it was stolen. Uh. And
had that been introduced in the trial, that could have
changed the outcome. He wound up serving eighteen months in
prison for the crime. That he got out on good behavior,
(25:05):
behavior and maybe also a promise to the governor of
Wyoming that he wouldn't keep stealing cattle and horses from
the ranchers anymore. Yeah. There's also some historical theory that
part of why he got out early was that they
realized that they had kind of messed up in the
trial and not disclosed that he may have not even
known he was purchasing stolen goods, which would have made
him automatically innocent. Uh So. Unfortunately, though, when he was
(25:29):
released in January of eight he jumped right back into
his life of crime. So any sympathy you just had
like you can get rid of it, don't feel guilt. Uh.
But Rustling was more or less behind him, so his
criminal behavior after prison was pretty much focused on robbing
banks and trains, also probably easier than moving herds of
animals through really horrible terrain. And this is really when
(25:50):
the Wild Bunch formed, uh, though it was always a
fairly loose association. Yeah, and they didn't really run willy
nilly into their robberies either. They were all very very
carefully planned under the leadership of Butch Cassidy. The robbers
roost area and the other hideouts in the Outlaw Trail
also really factored into these plans and really important ways.
(26:11):
For one thing, the men could store supplies and horses
in these getaways and hideaways that they would have everything
they needed to survive when they were done with their job.
And then they also had the means to run and
hide when it became necessary. I while we were talking
at lunch today, I likened Butch Cassidy to like Tracy's
dreamboat of a Wild West figure, because I think he
(26:34):
really would have loved a good spreadsheet, Like he was
such a planner, which Tracy also is, and he really
was just meticulous in laying out everything he was going
to do uh. And additionally, having these predetermined meet up
places arrangement that the men after they committed a crime
could scatter in different directions because they knew where they
were all going to meet up and made pursuit by
(26:55):
authorities extremely challenging. And of course these spots on the
Outlaw Trey remained very difficult to reach, with only a
few key points of entry UH and those were difficult
to manage without a pretty high degree of familiarity. So
even if someone were to chase someone into one of
these spots, if you don't know where the trail is
going to turn or get steeper, get weird, you're in
(27:16):
a lot of trouble in a hurry. So very often
Butch Cassidy is named along with the Sundance Kid, and
we don't really know when they met for sure. The
Sundance Kid was Harry Longabaugh and he most likely started
appearing at various points on the Outlaw Trail the same
year that but Cassidy was released from prison. UH. And
(27:37):
so a lot of criminals and gangs hit out along
the Outlaw Trail, and they would also sometimes team up,
so It's likely that the two of them met through
some kind of cooperative crime network, uh sometime in or
shortly after. And we mentioned that there were some ranchers
settling this area, and you may wonder why they seemed
to be okay with all these outlaws hanging out in
(27:58):
their hood. Uh. And it seems that at this point
the bandits who like to hang out there really had
a pretty good relationship with the people that lived there. Again,
they had moved away from wrestling, uh and they were
really moving on to the more lucrative robbery business. They
just didn't there wasn't an adversarial situation there at that
(28:18):
point in time. Maybe they were contributing a lot to
the local economy with their stolen money. They were I
think we mentioned that later. Okay, I read this like
six times before we came in here. Uh, So most
of you have probably heard that. Butch Cassidy was really
known as being a nice guy. Some of the Wild
Bunch cohorts tended to be a little more violent, but
(28:40):
he really didn't seem to and allegedly even cut some
of the robbers roost residents in on his fortunes and
he would give them money help them pay for their land.
He made allies of all of them by treating them
really well. And to Butch Cassidy, if you had to
kill somebody during a robbery, you were doing a bad job.
He really insisted on very careful casing and pre planning
(29:02):
for every heist that would help him avoid ever having
to kill anybody, so would just be stealing, not murdering.
In his highs, it's a victim was crime, the steal
from rich dudes. You'll sometimes hear him referred to as
sort of a wild West Robin Hood because he was
there are people who, you know, came forward at various
points and said, he helped me pay off my land
when I was struggling, and he, you know, helped buy
(29:24):
horses when I had trouble with my my ranch. And
so he really had made this amazing not only a
network of thieves and criminals that he were willing to
work with him, but also perfectly law abiding citizens that
were very comfortable having him around. So kind of the
best of both worlds um in the late summer summery.
In the late summer of eight, Cassidy, along with Elsa
(29:47):
Lay and Harvey Logan, robbed the Mont Pelier Bank in
mont Pelier, Idaho. While the Sundance Kid is often discussed
as though he is which Cassidy's best friend Elsa was
really that person? Uh? In real life they were very
very very close. His name was actually William Ellsworth Lay,
And they were so close that people that really knew
(30:08):
them well wondered which of them was actually the brains
of all of these operations because they worked so well
together and they would trade ideas like they really had
what would today be considered like an optimal office relationship. Uh.
They just they didn't have like ego that troubled either
of them. They just had like a great equal partnership
and they could collaborate really well. So we're going to
(30:30):
talk about the two major heists that eventually led the
Wild Bunch to break up. But first we're going to
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will get back to our story starting in early seven.
This was several months after the Montpellier heist, Cassidy, Elsa
(32:22):
Lay and their respective of the Lady Friends that was
Annebassett and Mod Davis hold up at Robert's Rouse to
ride out the end of winter. And it's very likely
that during that time Butch and Elsa we're planning their
next big robbery. Also, if you ever want to look
up Elsa La, he spells it like elze. Did I
say that earlier? Okay, I don't think so. Yeah, it's
(32:43):
like e l z y, But it was pronounced elsa.
Apparently it's in the notes in all capital letters. Just
so neither of us misses that. In April of eighteen
ninety seven, Lay and Cassidy held up the Pleasant Valley
Coal Company in Castlegate, Utah. And this abbery took place
in broad daylight at a train station, and they came
away with seven thousand dollars worth of gold. And the
(33:06):
next two big robberies on the part of the Wild
Bunch were so massive that in some way they kind
of spelled the heyday, uh, the end of the heyday
of robbers roost as a bandit hideout. So that we
should point out that there is some ongoing debate about
the level of which Cassidy's involvement in these two There
is evidence on both sides of that discussion. But regardless
(33:27):
of whether he was actually at both of them, or
one of them, or even neither of them, they definitely
impacted his life because he was associated with them. The
first was on June two near Wilcox, Wyoming. Six men
common beer to Union Pacific train, the Overland Flyer, and
they dynamite at the baggage car. The roof and the
(33:49):
sides of the car were blown off and they managed
to steal more than fifty thousand dollars in cash, gold,
and other valuables. And the second big robbery took place
on Guy d and the target was once again a
Union Pacific train, this time near tipped In, Wyoming, and
it was the same m O. The bandits used dynamite
(34:10):
to blow up a safe in one of the cars.
They snatched everything of value that they could, and then
they took off on horseback. And what I didn't include
in these notes, but I should mention is that a
lot of people will tell you when these come up,
particularly if they're into bandit lower that they really were
like into overkill with the dynamite, Like, they went way
further than they ever had to. You shouldn't have to
(34:30):
blow the roof and sides off the car to get
into the safe uh. And they did the same thing again.
It does make a good shot in a movie though. Yes.
And there's actually a photograph of one of these trains
that's just kind of a blown out like skeleton of
a train. It looks like a line drawing where a
train once was. Um And while the loss was initially
reported as less than sixty dollars, in truth it is
(34:53):
believed that the wild Bunch made off with more than
fifty thousand dollars uh and that the railroad was in
fact very concerned that if they revealed the enormity of
this heist that uh one, it would evidence the lack
of security on their trains and to one of their
big businesses, which was moving expensive and valuable things back
and forth, would completely vanish. We had this whole conversation
(35:14):
Lens for I was like, Holly, this says sixty dollars,
but this says fifty thousand dollars. Is this sixty dollars
thing a type out new Yeah? I think one of
the reported numbers was actually fifty two dollars and eighty cents,
which is oddly specific and ridiculously low. So after the
first robbery, an eighteen thousand dollar bounty had been placed
(35:36):
on the Wild Bunch, dead or alive, and after the
second the heat continued to build. Detectives from the Pinkerton
Agency came in. There was an array, an array of
posse's who all went on the hunt for the Wild Bunch,
and the crew, in various iterations, was still kind of
doing some robberies. They became a lot harder, and the men,
uh for the most part, started to put some distance
(35:57):
between themselves and the Outlaw Trail during this time, because
people knew they hung out there. So they regrouped brief
briefly in Fort Worth, Texas. And if you have ever seen, uh,
there's a really famous picture of Butch Sun Dance, Will Carver,
Harvey Logan, and Ben Kilpatrick. And they look crazy, just
insanely dapper. They look so handsome, every one of them,
(36:19):
and they look like businessmen. Uh. That photo was actually
taken while they were in Fort Worth on the run.
It became nicknamed the Fort Worth five photograph. So at
this point, their jobs, their jobs as thieves, we're getting
more and more difficult because of the notoriety that they
had developed. The Pinkerton's are starting to close in. But
(36:39):
in the Sun Dance made the decision to leave the
country in n one and they headed for Argentina. After
they set out for South America, the Roots sort of
lost its appeal as a hideout to the other outlaws.
Without Cassidy's leadership and his propensity for planning all of
these uh pretty successful robberies, the members of the Wild
Bunch who were still survived, having and also not in prison,
(37:01):
kind of fell apart. So whether or not Butch and
Sundance died in South America or made their way back
to the United States as a matter of debate in
that movie that I thought they were just characters from
the They spoiler alert get killed in a shootout in Bolivia,
and that's a standard history that was told for a
really long time. They're actually graves of them in Bolivia.
(37:22):
But I churned up this one thing, and I wasn't
I just didn't have the time to go back and
verify all of it. But apparently there was actually an
exhumation we know we all love exhumations, right. Uh, there
was an exhumation performed and those those remains were tested
and they were not butch and Sundance. Uh, they were
not believed to be Americans at all. In fact, so
the people that we thought were buried there's which in
(37:43):
Sundance aren't. So that gives a little more credence for
the fact that they possibly made their way back to
the U. S And there are some reports of people
that will say that they saw them in the US
and that they had visited their families. So, throughout its
time as a criminal haven, lawman of every stripe had
attempted to run down the outlaws who were known to
hide out at Robbers Roost, but most of those efforts
(38:04):
went without reward. It was simply too difficult to navigate
the area, like we said, for those who did not
know it extremely well, and finding someone who was hiding
there was difficult even for an accomplished rider if they
didn't know their way around the outlaw trail specifically, really,
most people who were working for the authorities did not
really care about chasing down anybody who was in Robbers Roost.
(38:25):
It was rumored to be incredibly well fort fortified and
exceptionally defended. And part of that reputation was built, of course,
on lots of tall tales and outright falsehoods that had
been spread around it. Um. According to the account of C. L. Maxwell,
who was something of a wanna be criminal in spite
of the fact that he was nicknamed Gunplay, the roost
(38:48):
had kind of an outlaw militia that was guarding it,
and it had two men as that outlaw militia guard. Yeah.
That's uh, basically just a big fib that he was telling. Uh.
They did have amazing lookout point there that they could
see people coming, that the people coming could not see
them at all. But in this account that cel Maxwell
put together, it was in a letter that he sent
to Utah's first governor, uh, Governor Wells, which Maxwell penned
(39:12):
while he was in prison doing time for a bungled
bank robbery. Like we said, he was not the best criminal, uh.
According to him, in this the roots had a really
sophisticated defense system. They had plentiful ammunition, they had land mines,
they had tunnels and have this stuff. Um, they had
some of this stuff, not all of this stuff, and
it Bears, mentioning that while Gunplay Maxwell really yearned to
(39:32):
be a part of the Wild Bunch, he was never
really welcomed into the group. He seemed kind of like
a little bit of a poser. Uh. And they were like,
that's nice, You're not one of us. He's like the tagalog.
But can we go? Come here? Now? Can we go?
I can totally help you rob some stuff. So if
you're wondering what happens to Butch's old friend, his best friend,
(39:56):
Elsa Lay, he was in prison when Butch and Sunday
left the country. He had been found guilty of robbery
and murder. Uh. And this was in a Wild Bunch
hold up of a train near Folsom, New Mexico. He
eventually was pardoned after helping to diffuse a riot in
which the warden's wife and daughter had been taken hostage.
(40:16):
After he was released in nineteen o six, he lived
a pretty much law abiding life until he died in
Los Angeles. At Yeah, he's like one of the I mean,
I guess you could say he's one of the success
stories of robberts Rouse because so many of these guys
just did not make it into their advanced years. They
just didn't survive that long. Their lifestyle was not conducive
to longevity. Um, and then we're gonna end on this
(40:39):
really lovely poem that I found. So Joe Biddlecomb, who
had a ranch in the Heart of Robbers Roost Territory
sixty five miles which is about a hundred five kilometers
south of Green River, Utah, is said to have written
this poem about the Roost, and it appeared in the
nineteen thirty eight book The Outlaw Trail, A History of
Which Cassidy and his Wild Bunch. And whether this poem
is truly Joe Biddlecome's work or someone else's, it's sort
(41:01):
of a nice, lovely way to summarize the way that
the Roost was seen by people living in the area
at the time when this activity was going on. And
it reads in part, this isn't the entirety of it.
In the eastern end of Wayne County. There is a
lovely spring, the Robbers Roost is its name to it.
Fond memories cling one drink of it, you lose your
hope to your religions gone three you want to rob
(41:25):
a bank before another dawn. So that is the story
of Robber's Roost. It was just sort of a wonderful
piece of history that is right by you guys. So uh,
we love it. I love all of the good bank
robbery fun stuff, even though I know that's not good
to love. Kind of like talking about outlaws, Yeah, outlaws
(41:46):
are always fascinating. And this is kind of an easy
one where you don't have to feel as guilty because
Butch Cassidy was such a nice guy in many regards,
and he did a horror violence, so it's a little
easier to be comfortable saying, oh, I love all these
robbery stories. We should mention as a wrap up that
(42:08):
one of our audience members told us that she actually
lives in the robbers Roost area and that poem that
we read at the end was actually the work of
Joe Pittlecome's wife. So yeah, we want to once again
thanks Salt Like Comic Con for inviting us to be
part of their show. They do such a wonderful job
of putting together a really vibrant convention with an incredible staff.
It's amazingly well organized. The convention center where it's held,
(42:31):
it's beautiful. The area where the convention center is located
is beautiful. It's a wonderful show. I love it, love it,
love it. I love the people that work it, I
love being there. So thank you, Thank you Salt Like
Comic com because we had a wonderful time. And now
I think Holly has a little listener mail to close
(42:51):
us out. Yeah, this one is shorty, It's a postcard
and it is from our listener, Lisa. She says, Dear
Holly and Tracy, greeting from Denver, Colorado. So it's kind
of close to the area we were talking about today,
uh in the podcast. I have no idea what condition
this will arrive in, but hopefully it will be legible.
As I've been wanting to write you for some time.
I absolutely love the podcast and I recommend it to everyone.
(43:14):
Thank you for the many hours of entertainment and learning.
I thought you might appreciate this little piece of colored
fashion in gratitude for your content. Thank you, Lisa. So
she sent a beautiful um postcard with some art deco
fashion on it, which is wonderful in and of itself.
But what I really really loved. Any of you that
have listened to listener Mail for very long have probably
(43:34):
heard me say at various points on the curve that
when we get postcards, often some postal stamping has obscured
some or part of the message or a person's name.
So Lisa did this amazing smart thing, which is that
she laminated her postcard so nothing could have scared any
part of it. So she did the perfect job. It
(43:56):
absolutely worked like a charm. I don't know if there's
any shagrio in on the part of the post office
at people laminating things, but it sure did keep any
postal marks from obscuring anything. So thank you, thank you,
Thank you, Lisa. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History podcast at how stuff
works dot com. You can also find us across pretty
much any social media network with the tag at mist
(44:18):
in history. So that's Twitter at mist in history, Facebook
dot com slash mist in history, Instagram at mist in history,
mist in history dot tumbler dot com, and pinteres dot
com slash missed in history. If you would learn like
to learn a little bit more about history on your own,
you can go to our parents site, how stuff works
dot com. Type in almost any historical thing in the
search bar. You're going to churn up a load of content.
(44:40):
You can also visit us at misst in history dot com,
or we have a back catalog and archive of every
episode of the show ever of all time, from its
very humble beginnings when it was just a short little thing,
all the way through to now. You can also find
show notes for any episode that Tracy and I have
worked on together. So we encourage you come and visit
us UH at Houston works dot com and missed in
(45:01):
History dot com for more on this and thousands of
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Hey everybody, we have one more live show coming up
this ball on Thursday, October six, We will be talking
(00:43):
about the Reynolds pamphlet at Hudson Mercantile in New York City.
This is an all ages show, but we are talking
about Alexander Hamilton's story at Affair, so judge your own
family's ages accordingly. If you'd like to get tickets, you
can go to New York Comic Con dot Com, Slash
Events Slash ny c C Dash Presents. You do not
(01:04):
need a new York Comic Con badge to attend this show.
It is open to the public. Welcome to Steph. You
missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly from I'm Tracy V. Wilson,
(01:27):
and we recently shared our panel from Salt Lake Comic Con,
where we spoke with authors who wrote fiction inspired by history.
But that was just the first of two live shows
that we did while we were there having a fantastic time. Uh.
The other, the one that you'll hear today, is much
more along the lines of our regular narrative format. It
was just that we shared it with a live audience.
This was a fun ride. It's about outlaws of the
(01:49):
wild West, specifically famous hideout in Utah and the very
famous scoundrels who would sometimes sometimes hold up there. That's
all covered in the show. Those that were just gonna
jump right in, Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Frow, I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We joked that there
(02:14):
are times when we kind of want to switch that
up and pretend to be each other, or just subliminally
we our brains want to throw out the other name.
I don't know why more than once I've opened my
mouth and almost holly fry has come out of there,
and I'm like, what is happening to me today? That's
a job you do not want. Uh. But at the
end of the nineteenth century in the beginning of the
(02:35):
twentieth century, a chunk of really rough and unwelcoming territory
in the canyon Lands area east of the Dirty Devil
River became a safe haven for scoundrels. And I know
we all love scoundrels a little bit. Uh One of
the most famous scoundrels is which Cassidy and he and
his oh he gets to plause. I mean, I see
(02:57):
the appeal. Let me tell you, uh. He and is
wild Bunch frequented this area, which came to be known
as Robber's Roost. And there is a lot of outlaw
history connected to Robber's Roost, a lot, uh so much
that there's really no way we can cover it all
in the course of an episode. So I know that
if you came hoping to hear some piece of like
(03:18):
your favorite uh lore around the roost, like, we may
not hit it. But instead we're going to cover an
assortment of some of the people who shaped the legend
of Robber's Roost. We will talk about Butch Cassidy. I promise.
Can I interject my incredibly embarrassing story about about Butch Cassidy.
It's so dear to me. I grew up in the
(03:40):
southeastern United States, not anywhere near Utah. I believed until
Holly said, why don't we do a podcast on Robber's Roost,
that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were characters made
up by the same guy who wrote The Princess Bride
for a screenplay to be played by Paul Newman and
Robert Redford, my mother's two favorite actors of all time.
(04:03):
She really did so yeah, real people. Yes, I live
for a brief time when I was tiny in Arizona,
So I guess that's how I had my inn. Had
I spent more time in the South growing up, maybe
I would not have known that. I thought they were
made up. Uh, And even today, getting into Robber's Roost
is really big challenge. The U s Department of the
(04:25):
Interior Bureau of Land Management actually mentions on its information
page that, uh, you really shouldn't try to get into
Robber's Roost. Without a four wheel drive, and it has
this great warning that reads chances of encountering other users
is low and any kind of emergency response will not
be fast. Considering the remote and isolated nature of the roost,
(04:47):
cell phone service throughout the region is unreliable at best,
so even today it's very difficult to get into there
and communicate from there. So at the time that we're
talking about, it was a really isolated space. That reminds
me of a sign that we saw while I was
on my honeymoon in Iceland. Uh, and it was at
the geysers, and it was basically like the water coming
(05:09):
out of the ground here is literally almost boiling, and
it had a number of hazards that might happen to
you because of this literally boiling water. And then it
ended with the sentence, the nearest hospital is sixty eight
kilometers away. Yeah, I love a state run or government
agency that's just like, we really can't help you if
you're stupid. We just can't. We can't. I'm so sorry.
(05:30):
We can't cover we can't cover the spread. So Robberts
Reefs is not the only hide out in this general area.
There's a whole swath of land that runs through it
that came to be known as Outlaw Trail because of
all these many hiding places that were all over it.
Holly was telling me at lunch that Robert Redford was
actually walked the whole thing. Yeah, he hiked the Outlaw
Trail in preparation for Butch Cassidy and The Sun Dance Kid.
(05:52):
And I think it was for National Geographic that he
wrote an article about it. And I was not able
to get my hands on a copy of it because
it's in their archives and it's not one you and
just access online. And we didn't have enough time for
the turnaround for them to send me a copy or
digitize it and get it over. But it's sort of
fascinating that he went ahead and did it, because that
is no small undertaking, no, and it's still really difficult
to access. Pretty much the only way in is at
(06:13):
the mouth of the Dirty Devil River. And another spot
to tuck out of sight, uh away from the law
on the Outlaw Trail was Brown's Hole, which sits in
Colorado on the Green River. It's at the meeting point
of Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. It's actually now known as
Brown's Park because that just sounds nicer than Brown's Hole
now that you mentioned it, right, Like, I don't want
(06:35):
to hide out there. If you travel on the Outlaw
Trail into south central Wyoming, you could also lay low
at a place that is also very famous called the
Hole in the Wall, and on that two hundred mile
stretch that kind of covers the spread of these three hideouts.
There were also ample lookout points and caves, so there
were a lot of little mini hideouts that were not
(06:56):
quite so I'm using the air quotes when I say
civilized as those three places that had some amenities built in.
Robbers roosts specifically, is made up of just canyons and
cliffs all over the place. There the result of thousands
and thousands of years of erosion. So all this really
craggy rain, terrain and an almost maze like set of
natural features are what really make it into just perfect
(07:18):
hiding spots. There are tons of little places that you
can tuck yourself away and not be easily spotted. Uh.
The This area was described in one of the books
that Holly read for researching this podcast as quote the
Geography of Despair. So it's such a poetic quaint and
say it, but really it's like you're gonna die there. Um.
(07:38):
But in addition to the easy hiding, Robber's Roost also
had some legitimate appeal to bandits, and not just bandits,
we'll get to some of the people that actually lived
there as well, because it had dependable water sources in
the form of several springs that were there. And we
don't know the origin of the moniker robbers Roost for
the area, it predated the Wild Bunch by a significant margin.
(08:00):
As early as the eighteen seventies, though, outlaws were using
the trail to take stolen horses away from authorities. One
of these people was a man known as Cat Brown,
and he'd been stealing horses for quite some time before
things really got hot for him, and he would steal
horses in Utah and then he would sell them to
mining operations in Colorado. Yeah. That was really sort of
(08:22):
the business of wrestlers at the time was to supply
these mining operations, and often Cap Brown sort of served
as this sort of middleman. He would purchase stolen horses
and then he would drive them through the roost, which
was incredibly difficult to their destination to sell at a
mark up and while we are by no means endorsing
or excusing this behavior, uh, we really do want to
(08:44):
kind of acknowledge that there was no doubt that this
was really really hard work. I mean, for doing illegal things.
He was really earning his money. Um. Moving horses through
the roost was really tricky. Sometimes sand would actually have
to You'd have to have a man running ahead of
them and throwing sand under the horses hoofs as they
moved so that they would have something to kind of
grab onto, you like a little bit of traction. But
(09:06):
the horses would still struggle and slip just the same.
One of the books that I read described the smell
of burning hoofs as they slid on rock because the
horses were just trying to pull up and they were
so heavy they were grinding down as they were sliding.
That's a horrible smell, I imagine, Holly, that's horrifying. I'm
so sorry. I'm glad you left that out until just
now so I could be horrified along with everybody on
(09:29):
in the audience. Up to the eighteen eighties, there was
really no development in this area either. But in the
eighteen nineties at Denver, Taylor decided to give up city
life for the sake of his health and then to
come for this strange, forsaken canyon place and start a
small ranch up in the roost. His name was J. B. Burr,
That is b u h R, not bu r R
(09:50):
like Aaron Burr who you should vote for if it's uh.
Along with brothers, two of his brothers, they started sort
of shaping the land a little bit, making it not
quite so untamed, and they founded what would come to
be known as the Three Brief the Three Beat Ranch,
one b for each bur brother, and troughs were built
(10:10):
to make use of the roost spring water uh so
livestock could hydrate more easily. Of course, they had to
supplied this ranch, and a portion of the roost was
fenced in, like they were really trying to settle this place.
And when Burr's foreman position turned over, the ranch headquarters
also moved. So this is one of those things where
there are there's like where the ranch is, but the
(10:30):
headquarters is sort of more like a mobile. I think
it's not necessarily in one place. It's where whoever is
running the thing wants to be central to where he
thinks is most important. For the herds, so just in
case that's unclear. Uh. And this new foreman, John Cattrell,
eventually married the widow of another Roost settler who had
died while he was moving a group of horses he
(10:51):
had raised and moved into Colorado to sell for mine work.
So cal built this cabin for his family at the roost,
and he slowly expanded the markers of human beings actually
being there. Uh. The family didn't permanently stay at the Roost.
They eventually moved on to the more populated area of
Hanksville and a man named John Moore took over as
(11:13):
the foreman. I think you mean Jack Moore. Oh sure,
I name Jack Moore, but Jack is a nickname for John.
It is. It's not like this happens every single time
we record, and our producer Noll takes it magically all
out because he is a sorcerer. Uh. And this change
in personnel to from Catrell to Jack Moore was actually
(11:34):
pretty significant. It enacted a pretty big change in the
nature of the roost because it really seeded the start
of the wild bunch. More was friendly with a number
of outlaws who all seemed to know exactly where the
three D Ranch was and that they could show up
there and that they would be welcomed and they would
have shelter and water and their needs meant. And eventually
a number of the outlaws who became well acquainted with
(11:57):
the Three Bees hospitality would be the ones that formed
into Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch. I like how it seems
like it was some kind of like ranching outlaw farm.
I think that was not uncommon at the time, like
a lot of places where you know, it was an
unsettled wild time. So if you had a friend there
was maybe a little dicey, but you know, if he
showed up, you'd take care of him. Sure, you don't
(12:18):
do that for your front should be hospitable. Oh you're
on the lamb. I have cake. I think at this
point it might have been more like bourbon bourbon cake. Yeah.
So Jack Moore was this tall, dark haired guy, and
he had also gone by the name of d and
he was an excellent horseman and even better tracker. So,
(12:40):
as with the foreman who came before him, he moved
the headquarters of the ranch and he built a shock
in Burr Pass, which would be closer to where the
horses fed. He also added a tent and uh, and
he ended up with more and more people to shelter.
It was this mix of ranch hands and outlaws and
outlaw ranch hands. Yeah, there was one thing that I
(13:00):
read that suggested that he only ever hired one actually
honest ranch hand, that the rest were sort of people
that were looking for a job while they kind of
let the law situation cool off out. And while his
new location for the headquarters was closer to feed for
the horses, it really wasn't the best spot for water.
It's one of those things where you find yourself scratching
(13:21):
your head and going, really, is this a valid trade off?
The horses actually had to be driven to water once
a day, like they just didn't have a continuous source,
and that sometimes water would be carried in from a
nearby spring as well. So it seems like he was
making a lot of extra work. But it couldn't have
been too rough because the camp that he set up
was where the three B crew in all of the
(13:41):
ranch hands for quite some time camped for more than
a decade. Seems like ten years of wasting your time,
right stuff to do, not driving horses back and forth.
The water. Eventually, Jack Moore's wife, Nora, and her brother
Monty Butler, moved from Colorado to join Jack at the Roost,
and Auntie and his family didn't stay more than a
(14:02):
couple of years before they moved back, but Nora settled in.
Burr really liked her, and she would there's some screaming happening.
They really liked Burr and Nora as well. App I mean,
who doesn't really, so you really liked her and she
would look after him. Was when his asthma flared up,
and she added kind of a touch of refinement to
(14:23):
the ranch by decorating a little and insisting that some
of the men exhibit some manners. This definitely feels like
the plot of like a Western Yeah it does. Uh yeah,
I mean she it was. She just didn't want them to,
like I swear while they were, you know, all having
meals together, and she didn't want them to just put
their boots everywhere, like classic sitcom level stuff. But the
(14:44):
really lovely thing is nobody seemed to begrudge her that
they were like, oh yes, ma'am uh. And while most
real outlaw work happened in warmer weather because snow obviously
creates a number of problems in terms of making a
quick getaway on not slippery surfaces and not being just
followed by her foot and Ryan being easily tracked because
you leave footprints in the snow. Jack had this insight
(15:05):
knowing that the winters were a time when most of
the ranchers actually stayed in their safe and warm homes
and we're not at the headquarters of the actual ranching,
and they did not often, if ever, actually make it
out to their camps to check on things. They kind
of left it to the their employees that were a
little bit, you know, sort of rough around the edges
and could stand that sort of situation through the winter.
(15:27):
And so he took advantage of this by often moving
herds in the winter. So by moving, what we really
mean is stealing. Uh. He would basically mix up heads
of cattle from one ranch and another and break them
up and move them around. And this meant that if
the owners did come out and check to see what
was going on, it would seem like most of their
(15:48):
cattle were there and doing fine. I started to wonder
if this is where the slang term for wrestling actually
comes from, because that seems like I mean, not this
person inventing it, but like that this practice of kind
of mixing up cattle, I couldn't figure it out, but
uh that this wasn't unusual. Herds moved around, and most
ranches had several herds and they didn't go check on
(16:11):
them all every day or anything like that. Um, So
once Jack had kind of shuffled them around a bit,
he would move them away farther and sell them in Colorado,
which is not California. Yeah, it's kind of like to
liken it to modern day like if you have ever
had one of those high level executives in the place
where you work that is not hands on. They kind
(16:32):
of go in their office and shut the door and
then the middle managers are really running the show and
know what's happening. It's kind of like that, like those
people that owned the ranches often couldn't they didn't know
their herds by sight, Like they couldn't say, oh I
know that that cow and that horse and that. They
were just like, oh, yeah, you've got this covered right,
and they would go, yes, sir, they scooted their animals
(16:53):
away to illicit sale. So eventually, though the wrestling did
catch up to Jack, Moore is the Burr. It was
actually closing. He ended up shot while he was fleeing
from another rancher whose livestock he had stolen. Uh. Then
a lot of cases, this is sort of described as
like they would, you know, realize in the spring that
some of the flock had gone missing, and they would
(17:14):
kind of shrug it off and just write it off
as a loss. But they started noticing a lot of
the a lot of the herds under Jack started to
vanish and maybe he was really bad at his job,
or maybe he was just an outright thief, and they
realized that. So Moore's wife Nora and J. B. Burr
actually ended up together uh and they headed for Texas,
but not for long. They ended up dying unfortunately in
(17:35):
a railroad accident the following year. So we will now
get to the most famous person he was associated with
the rus. But before we do, we'll stop for a
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We have been investigating the Skeptics Guide to American History,
which is a really really interesting look at how we
perceive American history and how there have been some myths
and some mis misconceptions along the way that have kind
of shaped way history has been told. But those aren't
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Courses Plus dot Com slash Stuff and you two can
be learning more all the time. So we're going to
talk about Robert Leroy Parker who you may know who
that is. Uh, he would come to be a central
(19:46):
figure in the Lord of Roberts roost. Parker was born
in Beaver, Utah on April eighteen sixty six. Beaver, Utah Natives.
Where is that in relation to here? Okay? All right,
now we know Beaver only a very happening spot. Um.
His Mormon parents, Maximilian Parker and a Gillies, were both
(20:06):
from immigrant families. They had made their way to Utah
from Britain ten years prior to his birth, and while
the couple had a pretty promising start. They were kind
of setting up their home and it looked like they
were going to be doing okay as farmers. A really
brutal winter in eighteen seventy nine wiped out most of
their livestock, and the Parkers really struggled to regain that
lost ground for a long time. However, they had twelve
(20:28):
more children. Uh. Roberts started working as a ranch hand
when he was just a teenager, and it was through
one of these jobs that he met up with a
man named Mike Cassidy. He was a ranger with a
kind of side business that I'm gonna do it to
you again because he's not a ranger. He's not a ranger,
he's a rancher. They're so pretty. Tracy is legitimately one
(20:53):
of the smartest seasons I have ever met. So when
I teach her, that's apparently I'm illiterate today for some reason.
And uh so, Mike Cassidy was in fact a livestock rustler.
I even printed this out really big so that I
would not have this problem. Okay, So Parker looked up
(21:14):
to Cassidy and working with him as a part time
cattle wrestler in the eighteen eighties. Robert hid the livestock
that he was moving at Robbers Roost, and Cassidy had
taken Parker on because he was young, he was strong,
he was not afraid of hard work. He was willing
to do the work of trail breaking groups of horses
(21:34):
as they moved them, which is not easy to their
final sale point. And because Parker had been responsible for
handling his own family's livestock, he was really already pretty
skilled in all of this. He just didn't need a
lot of effort to be gotten up to speed. So
he was a really good employee for stealing UH and
he made some of those early runs through the area
(21:54):
with the experienced Cat Brown that we mentioned earlier, and
they were both working for Cassidy at that point. In
eighteen eighty four, after working a variety of ore hauling
jobs in this brief foray into working as a butcher
and Rock Springs, Wyoming, Parker, who was too too wrestless
for a regular job, decided to make they move into
(22:15):
full time illegal work UH and he became Butch Cassidy,
allegedly choosing this name UH after his mentor in wrestling,
and then as well as the nickname Butch from his
brief time as a butcher. And for the next several
years he worked on several ranches and also wrestled livestock,
and he would often move them through various points in
the Outlaw trail. And in June of eighteen eighty nine,
(22:38):
Cassidy and another man that he had met wrestling cattle.
This is apparently the friendliest job, Like you just have
your pals that you wrestled cattle with. UH named Matt
Warner robbed a bank in Colorado, and it was the
San Miguel Valley Bank located until your Ride. And as
this incident is cited as Butch Cassidy's first bank robbery,
this is something of a point of historical pride for
(22:59):
tell your righte And the site of the crime, which
is now an office building, is actually marked with a
plaque commemorating it today. That cracks me up. Crime happened, Uh.
Cassidy and Warner had both spent some time until You're riding,
including sometimes spent racing horses there the previous year, so
(23:19):
they knew this area and they had been able to
set up these horse relays for a clear escape plan,
and they cut in some accomplices on their takes so
that they could have their assistance along the way. Yeah.
One of the cool things that which Cassidy did was
he would set up these horse relays, like he wouldn't
just sort of take off after a crime and run
(23:40):
his horse into the ground, like every twenty miles. He
would have somebody standing by with fresh horses so he
could trade off and not have to be basically like
riding an animal that was exhausted and just completely stacked
the deck in his favor, which is I mean, he's
doing illegal things, but it's pretty genius. And they made
off with dollars in this robbery, and their hideaway while
(24:01):
the heat died down was none other than the craggy,
unwelcoming landscape of robbers roost, and as the incident is
cited as Butch's first bank robbery, I mentioned that it
is a point of of pride. Like I said, Tell
your Ride loves to tell this story. They have parades
about it. Um I don't. I don't want to go
to like the Tell your Ride robbery parade, right. I
(24:22):
make sure a lot of people it's like comic combat.
Everyone's addressed as a bandit or a cowboy. Like they're
all either in the black and white stripes of like
a criminal, like an imprison criminal, or they're in the
ten gallon hat. You're only options sounds good? Uh? Is
this where we are in eighteen ninety four? I got
distracted with thinking about a parade of outlaws. Uh. In
(24:44):
Butch was charged with stealing a five dollar horse, and
he was found guilty. And it's possible that this was
actually a set up that he had purchased the horse
from somebody not knowing that it was stolen. Uh. And
had that been introduced in the trial, that could have
changed the outcome. He wound up serving eighteen months in
prison for the crime. That he got out on good behavior,
(25:05):
behavior and maybe also a promise to the governor of
Wyoming that he wouldn't keep stealing cattle and horses from
the ranchers anymore. Yeah. There's also some historical theory that
part of why he got out early was that they
realized that they had kind of messed up in the
trial and not disclosed that he may have not even
known he was purchasing stolen goods, which would have made
him automatically innocent. Uh So. Unfortunately, though, when he was
(25:29):
released in January of eight he jumped right back into
his life of crime. So any sympathy you just had
like you can get rid of it, don't feel guilt. Uh.
But Rustling was more or less behind him, so his
criminal behavior after prison was pretty much focused on robbing
banks and trains, also probably easier than moving herds of
animals through really horrible terrain. And this is really when
(25:50):
the Wild Bunch formed, uh, though it was always a
fairly loose association. Yeah, and they didn't really run willy
nilly into their robberies either. They were all very very
carefully planned under the leadership of Butch Cassidy. The robbers
roost area and the other hideouts in the Outlaw Trail
also really factored into these plans and really important ways.
(26:11):
For one thing, the men could store supplies and horses
in these getaways and hideaways that they would have everything
they needed to survive when they were done with their job.
And then they also had the means to run and
hide when it became necessary. I while we were talking
at lunch today, I likened Butch Cassidy to like Tracy's
dreamboat of a Wild West figure, because I think he
(26:34):
really would have loved a good spreadsheet, Like he was
such a planner, which Tracy also is, and he really
was just meticulous in laying out everything he was going
to do uh. And additionally, having these predetermined meet up
places arrangement that the men after they committed a crime
could scatter in different directions because they knew where they
were all going to meet up and made pursuit by
(26:55):
authorities extremely challenging. And of course these spots on the
Outlaw Trey remained very difficult to reach, with only a
few key points of entry UH and those were difficult
to manage without a pretty high degree of familiarity. So
even if someone were to chase someone into one of
these spots, if you don't know where the trail is
going to turn or get steeper, get weird, you're in
(27:16):
a lot of trouble in a hurry. So very often
Butch Cassidy is named along with the Sundance Kid, and
we don't really know when they met for sure. The
Sundance Kid was Harry Longabaugh and he most likely started
appearing at various points on the Outlaw Trail the same
year that but Cassidy was released from prison. UH. And
(27:37):
so a lot of criminals and gangs hit out along
the Outlaw Trail, and they would also sometimes team up,
so It's likely that the two of them met through
some kind of cooperative crime network, uh sometime in or
shortly after. And we mentioned that there were some ranchers
settling this area, and you may wonder why they seemed
to be okay with all these outlaws hanging out in
(27:58):
their hood. Uh. And it seems that at this point
the bandits who like to hang out there really had
a pretty good relationship with the people that lived there. Again,
they had moved away from wrestling, uh and they were
really moving on to the more lucrative robbery business. They
just didn't there wasn't an adversarial situation there at that
(28:18):
point in time. Maybe they were contributing a lot to
the local economy with their stolen money. They were I
think we mentioned that later. Okay, I read this like
six times before we came in here. Uh, So most
of you have probably heard that. Butch Cassidy was really
known as being a nice guy. Some of the Wild
Bunch cohorts tended to be a little more violent, but
(28:40):
he really didn't seem to and allegedly even cut some
of the robbers roost residents in on his fortunes and
he would give them money help them pay for their land.
He made allies of all of them by treating them
really well. And to Butch Cassidy, if you had to
kill somebody during a robbery, you were doing a bad job.
He really insisted on very careful casing and pre planning
(29:02):
for every heist that would help him avoid ever having
to kill anybody, so would just be stealing, not murdering.
In his highs, it's a victim was crime, the steal
from rich dudes. You'll sometimes hear him referred to as
sort of a wild West Robin Hood because he was
there are people who, you know, came forward at various
points and said, he helped me pay off my land
when I was struggling, and he, you know, helped buy
(29:24):
horses when I had trouble with my my ranch. And
so he really had made this amazing not only a
network of thieves and criminals that he were willing to
work with him, but also perfectly law abiding citizens that
were very comfortable having him around. So kind of the
best of both worlds um in the late summer summery.
In the late summer of eight, Cassidy, along with Elsa
(29:47):
Lay and Harvey Logan, robbed the Mont Pelier Bank in
mont Pelier, Idaho. While the Sundance Kid is often discussed
as though he is which Cassidy's best friend Elsa was
really that person? Uh? In real life they were very
very very close. His name was actually William Ellsworth Lay,
And they were so close that people that really knew
(30:08):
them well wondered which of them was actually the brains
of all of these operations because they worked so well
together and they would trade ideas like they really had
what would today be considered like an optimal office relationship. Uh.
They just they didn't have like ego that troubled either
of them. They just had like a great equal partnership
and they could collaborate really well. So we're going to
(30:30):
talk about the two major heists that eventually led the
Wild Bunch to break up. But first we're going to
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com slash history for two three snacks and now we
will get back to our story starting in early seven.
This was several months after the Montpellier heist, Cassidy, Elsa
(32:22):
Lay and their respective of the Lady Friends that was
Annebassett and Mod Davis hold up at Robert's Rouse to
ride out the end of winter. And it's very likely
that during that time Butch and Elsa we're planning their
next big robbery. Also, if you ever want to look
up Elsa La, he spells it like elze. Did I
say that earlier? Okay, I don't think so. Yeah, it's
(32:43):
like e l z y, But it was pronounced elsa.
Apparently it's in the notes in all capital letters. Just
so neither of us misses that. In April of eighteen
ninety seven, Lay and Cassidy held up the Pleasant Valley
Coal Company in Castlegate, Utah. And this abbery took place
in broad daylight at a train station, and they came
away with seven thousand dollars worth of gold. And the
(33:06):
next two big robberies on the part of the Wild
Bunch were so massive that in some way they kind
of spelled the heyday, uh, the end of the heyday
of robbers roost as a bandit hideout. So that we
should point out that there is some ongoing debate about
the level of which Cassidy's involvement in these two There
is evidence on both sides of that discussion. But regardless
(33:27):
of whether he was actually at both of them, or
one of them, or even neither of them, they definitely
impacted his life because he was associated with them. The
first was on June two near Wilcox, Wyoming. Six men
common beer to Union Pacific train, the Overland Flyer, and
they dynamite at the baggage car. The roof and the
(33:49):
sides of the car were blown off and they managed
to steal more than fifty thousand dollars in cash, gold,
and other valuables. And the second big robbery took place
on Guy d and the target was once again a
Union Pacific train, this time near tipped In, Wyoming, and
it was the same m O. The bandits used dynamite
(34:10):
to blow up a safe in one of the cars.
They snatched everything of value that they could, and then
they took off on horseback. And what I didn't include
in these notes, but I should mention is that a
lot of people will tell you when these come up,
particularly if they're into bandit lower that they really were
like into overkill with the dynamite, Like, they went way
further than they ever had to. You shouldn't have to
(34:30):
blow the roof and sides off the car to get
into the safe uh. And they did the same thing again.
It does make a good shot in a movie though. Yes.
And there's actually a photograph of one of these trains
that's just kind of a blown out like skeleton of
a train. It looks like a line drawing where a
train once was. Um And while the loss was initially
reported as less than sixty dollars, in truth it is
(34:53):
believed that the wild Bunch made off with more than
fifty thousand dollars uh and that the railroad was in
fact very concerned that if they revealed the enormity of
this heist that uh one, it would evidence the lack
of security on their trains and to one of their
big businesses, which was moving expensive and valuable things back
and forth, would completely vanish. We had this whole conversation
(35:14):
Lens for I was like, Holly, this says sixty dollars,
but this says fifty thousand dollars. Is this sixty dollars
thing a type out new Yeah? I think one of
the reported numbers was actually fifty two dollars and eighty cents,
which is oddly specific and ridiculously low. So after the
first robbery, an eighteen thousand dollar bounty had been placed
(35:36):
on the Wild Bunch, dead or alive, and after the
second the heat continued to build. Detectives from the Pinkerton
Agency came in. There was an array, an array of
posse's who all went on the hunt for the Wild Bunch,
and the crew, in various iterations, was still kind of
doing some robberies. They became a lot harder, and the men,
uh for the most part, started to put some distance
(35:57):
between themselves and the Outlaw Trail during this time, because
people knew they hung out there. So they regrouped brief
briefly in Fort Worth, Texas. And if you have ever seen, uh,
there's a really famous picture of Butch Sun Dance, Will Carver,
Harvey Logan, and Ben Kilpatrick. And they look crazy, just
insanely dapper. They look so handsome, every one of them,
(36:19):
and they look like businessmen. Uh. That photo was actually
taken while they were in Fort Worth on the run.
It became nicknamed the Fort Worth five photograph. So at
this point, their jobs, their jobs as thieves, we're getting
more and more difficult because of the notoriety that they
had developed. The Pinkerton's are starting to close in. But
(36:39):
in the Sun Dance made the decision to leave the
country in n one and they headed for Argentina. After
they set out for South America, the Roots sort of
lost its appeal as a hideout to the other outlaws.
Without Cassidy's leadership and his propensity for planning all of
these uh pretty successful robberies, the members of the Wild
Bunch who were still survived, having and also not in prison,
(37:01):
kind of fell apart. So whether or not Butch and
Sundance died in South America or made their way back
to the United States as a matter of debate in
that movie that I thought they were just characters from
the They spoiler alert get killed in a shootout in Bolivia,
and that's a standard history that was told for a
really long time. They're actually graves of them in Bolivia.
(37:22):
But I churned up this one thing, and I wasn't
I just didn't have the time to go back and
verify all of it. But apparently there was actually an
exhumation we know we all love exhumations, right. Uh, there
was an exhumation performed and those those remains were tested
and they were not butch and Sundance. Uh, they were
not believed to be Americans at all. In fact, so
the people that we thought were buried there's which in
(37:43):
Sundance aren't. So that gives a little more credence for
the fact that they possibly made their way back to
the U. S And there are some reports of people
that will say that they saw them in the US
and that they had visited their families. So, throughout its
time as a criminal haven, lawman of every stripe had
attempted to run down the outlaws who were known to
hide out at Robbers Roost, but most of those efforts
(38:04):
went without reward. It was simply too difficult to navigate
the area, like we said, for those who did not
know it extremely well, and finding someone who was hiding
there was difficult even for an accomplished rider if they
didn't know their way around the outlaw trail specifically, really,
most people who were working for the authorities did not
really care about chasing down anybody who was in Robbers Roost.
(38:25):
It was rumored to be incredibly well fort fortified and
exceptionally defended. And part of that reputation was built, of course,
on lots of tall tales and outright falsehoods that had
been spread around it. Um. According to the account of C. L. Maxwell,
who was something of a wanna be criminal in spite
of the fact that he was nicknamed Gunplay, the roost
(38:48):
had kind of an outlaw militia that was guarding it,
and it had two men as that outlaw militia guard. Yeah.
That's uh, basically just a big fib that he was telling. Uh.
They did have amazing lookout point there that they could
see people coming, that the people coming could not see
them at all. But in this account that cel Maxwell
put together, it was in a letter that he sent
to Utah's first governor, uh, Governor Wells, which Maxwell penned
(39:12):
while he was in prison doing time for a bungled
bank robbery. Like we said, he was not the best criminal, uh.
According to him, in this the roots had a really
sophisticated defense system. They had plentiful ammunition, they had land mines,
they had tunnels and have this stuff. Um, they had
some of this stuff, not all of this stuff, and
it Bears, mentioning that while Gunplay Maxwell really yearned to
(39:32):
be a part of the Wild Bunch, he was never
really welcomed into the group. He seemed kind of like
a little bit of a poser. Uh. And they were like,
that's nice, You're not one of us. He's like the tagalog.
But can we go? Come here? Now? Can we go?
I can totally help you rob some stuff. So if
you're wondering what happens to Butch's old friend, his best friend,
(39:56):
Elsa Lay, he was in prison when Butch and Sunday
left the country. He had been found guilty of robbery
and murder. Uh. And this was in a Wild Bunch
hold up of a train near Folsom, New Mexico. He
eventually was pardoned after helping to diffuse a riot in
which the warden's wife and daughter had been taken hostage.
(40:16):
After he was released in nineteen o six, he lived
a pretty much law abiding life until he died in
Los Angeles. At Yeah, he's like one of the I mean,
I guess you could say he's one of the success
stories of robberts Rouse because so many of these guys
just did not make it into their advanced years. They
just didn't survive that long. Their lifestyle was not conducive
to longevity. Um, and then we're gonna end on this
(40:39):
really lovely poem that I found. So Joe Biddlecomb, who
had a ranch in the Heart of Robbers Roost Territory
sixty five miles which is about a hundred five kilometers
south of Green River, Utah, is said to have written
this poem about the Roost, and it appeared in the
nineteen thirty eight book The Outlaw Trail, A History of
Which Cassidy and his Wild Bunch. And whether this poem
is truly Joe Biddlecome's work or someone else's, it's sort
(41:01):
of a nice, lovely way to summarize the way that
the Roost was seen by people living in the area
at the time when this activity was going on. And
it reads in part, this isn't the entirety of it.
In the eastern end of Wayne County. There is a
lovely spring, the Robbers Roost is its name to it.
Fond memories cling one drink of it, you lose your
hope to your religions gone three you want to rob
(41:25):
a bank before another dawn. So that is the story
of Robber's Roost. It was just sort of a wonderful
piece of history that is right by you guys. So uh,
we love it. I love all of the good bank
robbery fun stuff, even though I know that's not good
to love. Kind of like talking about outlaws, Yeah, outlaws
(41:46):
are always fascinating. And this is kind of an easy
one where you don't have to feel as guilty because
Butch Cassidy was such a nice guy in many regards,
and he did a horror violence, so it's a little
easier to be comfortable saying, oh, I love all these
robbery stories. We should mention as a wrap up that
(42:08):
one of our audience members told us that she actually
lives in the robbers Roost area and that poem that
we read at the end was actually the work of
Joe Pittlecome's wife. So yeah, we want to once again
thanks Salt Like Comic Con for inviting us to be
part of their show. They do such a wonderful job
of putting together a really vibrant convention with an incredible staff.
It's amazingly well organized. The convention center where it's held,
(42:31):
it's beautiful. The area where the convention center is located
is beautiful. It's a wonderful show. I love it, love it,
love it. I love the people that work it, I
love being there. So thank you, Thank you Salt Like
Comic com because we had a wonderful time. And now
I think Holly has a little listener mail to close
(42:51):
us out. Yeah, this one is shorty, It's a postcard
and it is from our listener, Lisa. She says, Dear
Holly and Tracy, greeting from Denver, Colorado. So it's kind
of close to the area we were talking about today,
uh in the podcast. I have no idea what condition
this will arrive in, but hopefully it will be legible.
As I've been wanting to write you for some time.
I absolutely love the podcast and I recommend it to everyone.
(43:14):
Thank you for the many hours of entertainment and learning.
I thought you might appreciate this little piece of colored
fashion in gratitude for your content. Thank you, Lisa. So
she sent a beautiful um postcard with some art deco
fashion on it, which is wonderful in and of itself.
But what I really really loved. Any of you that
have listened to listener Mail for very long have probably
(43:34):
heard me say at various points on the curve that
when we get postcards, often some postal stamping has obscured
some or part of the message or a person's name.
So Lisa did this amazing smart thing, which is that
she laminated her postcard so nothing could have scared any
part of it. So she did the perfect job. It
(43:56):
absolutely worked like a charm. I don't know if there's
any shagrio in on the part of the post office
at people laminating things, but it sure did keep any
postal marks from obscuring anything. So thank you, thank you,
Thank you, Lisa. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History podcast at how stuff
works dot com. You can also find us across pretty
much any social media network with the tag at mist
(44:18):
in history. So that's Twitter at mist in history, Facebook
dot com slash mist in history, Instagram at mist in history,
mist in history dot tumbler dot com, and pinteres dot
com slash missed in history. If you would learn like
to learn a little bit more about history on your own,
you can go to our parents site, how stuff works
dot com. Type in almost any historical thing in the
search bar. You're going to churn up a load of content.
(44:40):
You can also visit us at misst in history dot com,
or we have a back catalog and archive of every
episode of the show ever of all time, from its
very humble beginnings when it was just a short little thing,
all the way through to now. You can also find
show notes for any episode that Tracy and I have
worked on together. So we encourage you come and visit
us UH at Houston works dot com and missed in
(45:01):
History dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com, M
M
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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