One of the biggest staples in the mythology of the Wild West is the outlaw. In western movies, outlaws are the ones who kill indiscriminately
While robbing every single bank in sight, tie down
Innocent women to railroad tracks, wear edgy black trench coats, and stand ominously in the center of town for hours on end
hoping that their antagonist, the cowboy, will show up just in time for a dramatic duel. As it happens, though, this type of
Outlaws described in the movies was as much of an active threat to the Old West as Loki is to real-life New York.
Which is to say, not very.
While the West certainly had its share of outlaws hiding among the plains,
mountains, and deserts of the still sparsely settled West, the truth of the matter is that outlaw stories are the
exceptions, not the rules. So let's take a look at a few of those famous outliers. First up,
Let's talk about Jesse James.
He'd come from a well-to-do southern family and actually started his life of violence fighting for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
He served as part of Quantrill's Raiders
using guerrilla tactics
Against the Union Army. After the war, Jesse and his brother joined up with some old confederate friends to form the James-Younger gang,
which robbed banks and trains, held up stagecoaches, the more typical outlaw fare
you expect now. James and friends were certainly outlaws,
but they weren't really Old West outlaws since they barely went all that far west at all.
James has also been
characterized both during and after his life as a Robin Hood-like champion of the people, but historians largely dismissed this because not only did
his gang keep all of their money to
themselves and not really do much of anything to actually help people, his gang also operated more in the style of anti-reconstruction southern
insurrectionists, which isn't really a Robin Hood thing to do at all.
James was ultimately
betrayed and killed in 1882 by a new recruit to his gang, who wanted to collect the bounty that was out on him.
So, that's pretty much Jesse James.
Definitely an outlaw and certainly notorious, but also not really a Western outlaw all that much at all. So, uh...
Six out of ten.
Now, perhaps one of the most notorious
names in the Old West is that of Billy the Kid. Billy had a good upbringing, but he was orphaned at the age of 15
After killing his first victim in self-defense during a bar fight, Billy got caught up in an economic turf war that turned shooty in
1878 when his employer was murdered. This triggered a giant wave of revenge killings that spilled over into what's known as the Lincoln County War.
Eventually the local authorities called in some U.S. cavalrymen
to deal with Billy and his pals, which I'm pretty sure is the closest real-life equivalent to getting five stars in GTA that I've ever seen.
Miraculously, Billy survived a fierce encounter and attempted to go clean by testifying about the war in exchange for a pardon,
But when a judge refused to grant that pardon, Billy ran away.
Eventually, sheriff and aspiring mustache farmer Pat Garrett came in to take care of the adolescent outlaw and his crew.
One night, Billy's posse was attacked, surrounded, and captured. Billy was sentenced to hanging, but he broke out because that's what Billy does.
Ultimately, Billy was killed in 1881 at the age of twenty-one.
He didn't do that much robbery, but he was one prolific killer and escape artist.
And now, let's take a look at the improbable success of one Butch Cassidy.
Born Robert Leroy Parker in 1886, he was the last great outlaw of the American West, and as we'll see that is no small feat.
After Parker's father lost a land dispute on account of a vindictive judge, the young outlaw-to-be developed a distinct
animosity towards people whom he felt were abusing their power
He got a start as a cowboy on a few ranches around the Northwest, and eventually took on the surname Cassidy in honor of his mentor
By all accounts, he was good with a horse and very charismatic.
His first recorded crime was breaking into a tailor shop, stealing a pair of pants and a pie, and leaving an
IOU saying he'd come back and pay later. Cassidy later settled in a mining town in Colorado because it was fast
fancy, showy, and it had such luxuries as actual female humans.
There, Cassidy made some friends and started racing horses, a skill that ended up coming in handy in his subsequent life of crime.
Which speaking of, his inaugural heist was in Colorado, and the way he went about it was damn impressive.
See, Cassidy wasn't just a good horse rider,
he was also an absolute genius. He knew that he couldn't outrun the law in a straight race,
and he also knew exactly how far a horse could run at full speed before getting tired.
And he knew exactly where he would be running from and where he would run to.
So, he pre-planned relay points where he would switch off of his tired horse and onto a new and fresh horse, leaving the authorities
completely in the dust.
He stopped two or even sometimes three times to switch horses in a single get away. Because of his forethought,
it was basically impossible to ever catch him. At the end of the 19th century,
Being an outlaw was hard business, and we don't hear many stories of famous latter-day outlaws who accomplished as much as Butch Cassidy
because no criminal was anywhere near as smart as him. But speaking of getaways,
he owned a ranch by the famous Hole in the Wall outlaw hideout in Wyoming, which was naturally very well protected.
He ostensibly continued to be a rancher in his non-heisting downtime,
but it was more likely just the Wild West equivalent of a mafia-owned Italian restaurant.
But for all of his smarts and careful pre-planning, Cassidy was once arrested after being set up for selling stolen horses.
He served under two years in jail, where he was apparently a model prisoner. And you might be thinking, two years
And, you might be thinking, "Two years? What?"
Well, as it happens, he didn't like killing people and only saw guns as a last resort,
so, no murder charges there.
But also, he'd earned the help of an accomplished lawyer by saving his life in a bar fight
So Cassidy, again, played his cards right. In any case, though he was by all accounts a smart
but still small-time outlaw before his arrest, when he got out
he was hell-bent on becoming the greatest outlaw in the West. In the 1890's,
he and his outlaw pals realized that the first step to eternal glory was a cool name.
So, they became known as the Wild Bunch,
which...
honestly...
Ehh? For all of his smarts,
you'd think Cassidy could come up with a more imposing name. For one, 'bunch'
isn't threatening, and 'wild' is kind of a misnomer when they prided themselves on strategy and pre-planning. But in any case,
Cassidy picked up a sidekick of sorts named Harry Longabaugh, a.k.a. the Sundance Kid, so named for his avant-garde
appreciation of indie film festivals. Still, Cassidy was very particular about his crew and picked only the best. In between heists,
Cassidy supposedly retained his famous charm and only ever got vindictive against people who had wronged him or people whom he felt abused their power.
It's not really a case of steal from the rich and give to the poor,
because the gang pretty much kept all of it to themselves, again,
but he had enough vaguely Robin hood-like qualities for the comparison to stick.
Still, it's another case of historians saying
"No, he was not like Robin Hood. Stop comparing him to Robin Hood. They're two entirely different archetypes."
Anyway. Between
1896 and 1899, the Wild Bunch robbed three trains and a bank across four states, raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in today's money.
Union Pacific, the company who owned all the trains that Cassidy had been robbing,
was understandably displeased with this and started hiring out private agencies like the notorious Pinkerton Detectives for protection.
In 1900 and 1901, the gang pulled off two more heists in two more states to the tune of three million more dollars.
And in a world of increasing communication and more sophisticated law enforcement, that kind of success is a serious accomplishment.
But still, technology and a hint of vanity proved to be their undoing.
In 1900, the gang stopped into Fort Worth Texas to gamble, buy fancy clothes, and generally make merry.
They also happened to get this picture taken of them, which found its way into the hands of the law,
who now conveniently had images to put to a lot of these previously faceless names.
After that, free space in the open West grew smaller and smaller, and the law fiercely hunted most of the Wild Bunch.
From there,
it was pretty clearly time to bail. in 1901
In 1901, Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and his mysterious lady friend at a place fled to
Argentina as the gang started dissolving. They laid low and stuck to the straight and narrow for all of two and a half seconds before
they started robbing people again and had to go back on the run. Hilariously,
they failed a couple of attempts at a train robbery because neither of them had good enough Spanish to even communicate
what was going on to the passengers. And they say language requirements are useless!
Etta Place disappeared just as
mysteriously as she had appeared in the first place, and then Cassidy and the Sundance Kid died in probably
1908. Between all of the alias changes and running around, we can't be a hundred percent sure, but for the sake of narrative closure,
let's just go with it.
The story goes that they died gloriously,
in a shootout with the police as Cassidy killed both the Sundance Kid and himself before the law could ever get to them.
Yay?
Moral of the story is: if you're going to become an outlaw, get good at riding horses,
probably learn Spanish, and be aware that there are no takesies-backsies in a life of crime.