The Aerodrome: Grousing over an airport name. John Wayne Airport...

The Aerodrome: Grousing over an airport name. John Wayne Airport...:

Grousing over an airport name. John Wayne Airport, Orange County, California

Let me start off by noting that I'm not really a John Wayne fan.

I'm not a John Wayne anti fan either.

As I've stated on one of our other blogs, I don't really get hero worship in regard to actors and actresses, or other entertainers.  I don't expect actors in particular to reflect the characters they portray in any fashion whatsoever.  Many, I'm sure, are the very antithesis of the characters they portray and as a general rule, actors and actresses (which I'll henceforth condense into "actors") are among the most screwed up demographic that exists.*  This doesn't apply to all of them, by any means, but as a demographic they're genuinely pushing the envelope on odd and I've sometimes wondered, indeed I'm convinced, that quite a few actors take up that occupation to compensate for not feeling real, and then go on to adopt the cause de jour to try to give meaning to lives that otherwise lack them.

Now, I'm not saying that any of that applies to John Wayne.  Wayne came up in the days of acting when a lot of early actors actually came into it through some other movie industry role.  In Wayne's case he was an actor in Hollywood from the start, following a (fairly rare at the time) college career in which he played football.

I frankly don't think that Wayne was the greatest actor in the world either, or although I also think that he was a better actor than his detractors would have it.  His greatest role was in the John Ford film The Searchers, in which he doesn't play to type at all.  His portrayals in the John Ford Cavalry Trilogy films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Sands of Iwo Jima, and The Cowboys are all also excellent.  His late film The Green Berets, in contrast, is horrifically bad and I don't even think Stagecoach, which is widely beloved and celebrated, is all that good.  So my views are mixed.

Just because Wayne played a military man in a host of films in which all the portrayals were heroic doesn't make him a military man.  When his time came, during World War Two, Wayne agonized over joining the service and didn't. His career was just taking off and he worried about serving wrecking that.  He made, in my view, the improper choice.**

I know that his defenders here will cite a football injury but I just don't believe it.  By the end of the Second World war American manpower was in such short supply that men were taken into the Army who were basically blind in one eye and had border line mental psychosis.  With Wayne's connections, even if he had an injury, he could have gotten in.

So with all of that, I just regard actor John Wayne as an actor.  He had some admirable qualities to be sure.  He was apparently personally courageous in confrontation and even waded into a group of Vietnam War protesters to quiet them when he was somewhere with Jimmy Stewart, whose son had just been killed in Vietnam.*** That took guts.

Anyhow, I think it's silly in the first place that Orange County renamed their airport after John Wayne in 1979.  I wouldn't have done that. 

Indeed, I think airports that are named after people, generally ought to be named after somebody of significance, and I don't place actors in that category.  It makes no more sense, in my view, for Orange County to have renamed their former military field after John Wayne (indeed, there's some ironies in that) than it would make for the Port of Port Arthur, Texas to rename that facility Janis Joplin Port.  Indeed, the latter example might make more sense as Janis Joplin was actually from Port Arthur.

Port Arthur, Texas.  Should it be renamed Port Janis Joplin?

Indeed, if there was a desire to name the airport after a movie industry figure with a real role in aviation, it would have been Howard Hughes Airport.****

But that's impossible to imagine.

Anyhow, I also think it's silly that the Los Angeles Times has started a debate over renaming it, which they recently did with this item by columnist Michale Hitzik:

Column: It’s time to take John Wayne’s name off the Orange County airport

Most people familiar with the life story of John Wayne are aware that the late movie star was a dyed-in-the-wool right-winger — after all, he was still making a movie glorifying America’s conduct of the Vietnam War (“The Green Berets,” 1968) well after the country had begun to get sick of the conflict.But the resurrection of a 1971 interview Wayne gave to Playboy magazine has underscored the sheer crudeness of the actor’s feelings about gay people, black people, Native Americans, young people and liberals.This doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s impossible or immoral to enjoy westerns and war movies starring John Wayne; that’s a personal choice. But it certainly undermines any justification for his name and image to adorn a civic facility.

Okay, anyone familiar with John Wayne is likely already familiar with his 1971 interview with the pedophilic, pornographic smut magazine Playboy.   1971 was about the high water mark of the detestable Hugh Hefner's objectification of women, although we certainly haven't recovered from that, and part of its cover for barely disguised misogynistic pedophilia was to run serious interviews with people.  Next to Wayne's perhaps the most famous one came out a few years later when then Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter was so unwise as to allow himself to be interviewed by the rag.

Wayne's interview became famous, or perhaps more accurately infamous, due questions asked of him in the rag regarding race and other matters.  Wayne didn't hold back on his views on various things in the magazine at all.  The columnist repeated some of them in his article, in order to make his point.  And indeed, Wayne made comments about homosexuals (Hitzik uses the term "Gay people", which isn't how I think they'd probably prefer to be referred to in this context), blacks and Indians.

We might note here from the onset that it's always baffled me why anyone cares what actors think about anything at all, and for that matter, any category of entertainer. Actors act.  They aren't those real people.  Who cares what they really think on any societal issue? And if people feel that's an excuse for excusing Wayne's comments, which I'm not going to do, I'll note that this extends out to every single topic that people ask actors to comment on. Whatever it is, if you are for it or against it, there's some actor you can get to comment on it, but why?

Anyhow, as we're opining on this, we'll take a look at Wayne's comments as well, although not in the order that Hitzik did, which probably wouldn't do them justice in context, and which isn't what made them initially controversial, which in fact they initially were.  More on that in a moment.

Usually, you only hear about his comments on blacks, which were:

WAYNE: With a lot of blacks, there’s quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so. But we can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people. 

PLAYBOY: Are you equipped to judge which blacks are irresponsible and which of their leaders inexperienced? 

WAYNE: It’s not my judgment. The academic community has developed certain tests that determine whether the blacks are sufficiently equipped scholastically. But some blacks have tried to force the issue and enter college when they haven’t passed the tests and don’t have the requisite background. … But if they aren’t academically ready for that step, I don’t think they should be allowed in. Otherwise, the academic society is brought down to the lowest common denominator. … What good would it do to register anybody in a class of higher algebra or calculus if they haven’t learned to count? There has to be a standard. …I think the Hollywood studios are carrying their tokenism a little too far. There’s no doubt that 10 percent of the population is black, or colored, or whatever they want to call themselves; they certainly aren’t Caucasian. Anyway, I suppose there should be the same percentage of the colored race in films as in society. But it can’t always be that way. There isn’t necessarily going to be 10 percent of the grips or sound men who are black, because more than likely, 10 percent haven’t trained themselves for that type of work.

Wayne was out to lunch in his comments and most particularly in his "white supremacy until the blacks are educated to the point of responsibility". These came in 1971.  But they aren't unusual for the time.  Indeed, because they weren't unusual, blacks of the era reacted less than a person might suspect, much less, as they were used to such arguments being advanced.  Today the opposite is very much true, and no wonder.

They were clearly racist and a person who stated them held undoubtedly racist views.  No doubt about it. And the old line about educating them up until . . was as old as the sun.  Indeed, it dates back to slavery.  No doubt in 1971 the percentage of college educated blacks was lower than it is now, but the overall American population in general was less educated in 1971.  It wasn't until after World War Two that high school graduation became an absolute norm and college education became societaly common.  The comment was absurd.

It's usually pointed out that Wayne personally had good relationships with black actors of his era, but that's hardly a defense to this.  A person being personally nice to people he's biased against doesn't make him unbiased.  Wayne was living in the past with these arguments, which were never valid, but that's part of the point.  A lot of Americans of that era were and these views were surprisingly common.  That's not a defense, it's just a fact.  The politics of the early 1970s still reflected this.

Indeed, Wayne's interview is just two years prior to Lynrd Skinner releasing Sweet Home Alabama, which is a reaction to Neil Young's Southern Man.  Almost nobody considers this, but Sweet Home Alabama excuses the same sort of views, with the lyrics noting that they hadn't supported Wallace for Governor of Alabama but that a Southern Man didn't need Neil Young around.  That's very close to the same view, as what the Playboy interviewer was suggesting was the view that most Americans had but still had to argue, the time for waiting was over.

Put more bluntly, Sweet Home Alabama is also subtly racist.  Consider the lyrics:

Well I heard Mister Young sing about her

Well I heard old Neil put her down

Well, I hope Neil Young will remember

A southern man don't need him around anyhow

That's also a "we can take care of it" type of excuse, quite frankly.  But nobody gets too up and arms about the song and there's even been a movie in recent years that took its title from it.

Maybe they should.

Do these statements make Wayne a racist?  Yes, but in the very common society wide manner of the era.  That's not a defense to it, but it's also not a reason for the Los Angeles Times to reverse Orange County's 1979 decision.

It might have been a reason not to name the airport after Wayne in 1979, but a better reason not to name it after him is that he was an actor, and an actor with no connection to aviation.

Well, maybe the other things that Wayne said are.  Let's take a look at them, going next to his comments about Indians.

PLAYBOY: For years American Indians have played an important — if subordinate — role in your Westerns. Do you feel any empathy with them? 

WAYNE: I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them, if that’s what you’re asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves. … 

PLAYBOY: How do you feel about the government grant for a university and cultural center that these Indians [then encamped on Alcatraz Island] have demanded as “reparations”? 

WAYNE: What happened between their forefathers and our forefathers is so far back — right, wrong or indifferent — that I don’t see why we owe them anything. I don’t know why the government should give them something that it wouldn’t give me. 

PLAYBOY: Do you think they’ve had the same advantages and opportunities that you’ve had? 

WAYNE: I’m not gonna give you one of those I-was-a-poor-boy-and-I-pulled-myself-upby-my-bootstraps stories, but I’ve gone without a meal or two in my life, and I still don’t expect the government to turn over any of its territory to me. Hard times aren’t something I can blame my fellow citizens for. Years ago, I didn’t have all the opportunities, either. But you can’t whine and bellyache ‘cause somebody else got a good break and you didn’t, like these Indians are. We’ll all be on a reservation soon if the socialists keep subsidizing groups like them with our tax money.

Shocking?

Yes, for sure.

Be that as it may, I still find plenty of people who, if you really know them, hold a basically similar view, and it was only in the 1960s that any other sort of view became widely held.

Indeed, the first time I heard it suggested that European Americans "stole" Indian lands was in the 1970s, when I was a kid and overheard it as part of a silent third party between my father and a colleague. The colleague mentioned that off hand.  This comment really surprised me at the time and I later asked my father if a theft had really happened.

He answered no, but his view was really more nuanced than that in that he regarded the pre 20th Century clash of cultures as inevitable, which is different from giving it virtue.  Plenty of people gave it virtue.  In my grade school library at the time I recall there was a book on Custer I read, written I think in the 1950s, that was practically a hagiography.  That sort of view had been extremely common into the 1960s and while there were those who swam against that current the entire time, it wasn't really until people like Mari Sandoz began to publish that there was any sort of wider reconsideration. By the 1960s the reconsideration had become widespread and was part of the era, and Indian activist movements developed and were in the news.

Wayne was still an active actor in the 1970s, to be sure.  Perhaps his most famous movie, The Cowboys, was yet to come, being released the year after this interview in 1972.  The interview obviously didn't impact his popularity much, if at all.  But here its important to remember that he was really an actor from the 40s and 50s who was the exception to the rule as he managed to age into later roles in the 60s and 70s.  By the late 60s his movies themselves, with the exception of The Cowboys, seemed to look back and Wayne was on record as hating some later Westerns, such as The Wild Bunch.  1971's movie, Big Jake, which I like, very much has that sense to it, amplified by the fact that it is itself a fin de siecle movie.  Coming after Peckinpah's violent masterpiece, the latter film seems to be from a much earlier era.

It isn't surprising, therefore, that Wayne's views were completely anachronistic.  Playboy likely knew that, and so Wayne was set up to look like a fool. Playboy itself is now a creepy anachronism and its only a matter of time until the Me Too era blows up all over it.  Unfortunately the creep who created it is dead and won't be round to take the brunt of the inevitably coming blows.

So Wayne also talked about homosexuals in his interview, which the Los Angeles Times refers to as "Gay people".  The term "gay" actually has, or at least had, a distinct meaning within the homosexual community and traditionally not all homosexuals have identified with it even if they identify as homosexual.  In this instance, therefore, the columnist himself shows himself to be insensitive an uninformed.

Wayne: Movies were once made for the whole family. Now, with the kind of junk the studios are cranking out. … I’m quite sure that within two or three years, Americans will be completely fed up with these perverted films. 

PLAYBOY: What kind of films do you consider perverted? 

WAYNE: Oh, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy — that kind of thing. Wouldn’t you say that the wonderful love of those two men in Midnight Cowboy, a story about two fags, qualifies?

I've never seen Midnight Cowboy and I don't intend to.  Wayne isn't alone in his view that it was "perverted" however and there are still those who regard the film as debased.  It was an X Rated film at the time and won an Academy Award, the first film (and maybe the only film) in that category to win one.  It came just after Hollywood abandoned the Hayes Production Code which resulted in an explosion of movies pushing the limits on depictions which indeed did result in a downward descent in what was portrayed on the screen which really hasn't ended.  1966's Best Picture went to The Sound of Music, 1967's to A Man For All Seasons, 1968's to In the Heat Of the Night, 1969 to Oliver!, and then 1970's to Midnight Cowboy.  No matter what you think of any one of those films, the 1970 award reflects some sort of shift in what was being portrayed in film.  For somebody who started making films in the 1930s, the shift would have been obvious and titanic.  Indeed, very early in the early history of film the direction was going the opposite way.

The real shocker in this comment is the use of the slur "fags".  That's an epitaph and in insulting one, and it was at the time.  Now use of that term would destroy an actors career.  Coming in 1971, however, it didn't.  That probably says something about the times.

1971 was two years after the Stonebridge Riots in New York, but it was also a time of massive social unrest.  Homosexuality may have come a bit more out in the open with the riots, but it certainly wasn't open.  Indeed, that would take at least another twenty years.  Wayne's views were probably the societal norm at the time, including a norm that was held by many others who people would regard as very liberal.  Indeed, the accusation that somebody was a homosexual was libel per se in the law and was commonly used as a smear against figures of the right and left by their enemies. 

The Los Angeles Times has been met with all of these criticisms but is sticking to its guns.  It's noted that the civil rights "revolution" had been going on for years at the time that these statements were made, which is true.  But that they were going on is different from claiming they'd been completed.  In reality they'd been gong on to some degree since the Civil War, and yet it's probable that a review of the LA Times from various years would find shocking examples of views that we'd find absolutely appalling today.  I'd be curious, for example, what its view as on Asian immigration to California?  The Times itself has acknowledged that its view on Japanese internment during World War Two was "shameful".

The Times is correct that his view was in the nature of "reacting" to the developments of the Civil Rights Era.  They were, and they were wrong.  Indeed, we might go further and hold them to be reactionary.  But they were apparently not shocking enough to keep the airport from being named for him when it was in 1979.  And they weren't so shocking to people to keep them away from The Cowboys the following year and a handful of final big films he made in the next eight years prior to his death.

In something like this, it's always popular to say "we've come a long ways", when often we really haven't.  The airport has its own problems and the naming of it after an actor in the first place is probably among the very least of them.  If anything, the naming demonstrates the vapidness of California, which takes itself very seriously on everything but which strikes many elsewhere as constantly goofy.  Celebrating an actor through the naming of an airport is just part of that.  Renaming it would likely turn into an equally odd act if not a downright circus.  Maybe if nothing else, this serves to focus on that.

If it were to be renamed, perhaps it might be time to actually consider that the figures of actors are poorly presented for anything serious.  The Times columnist suggests naming the field after guitar figure Leo Fender.  I don't know anything about Mr. Fender, but his guitars are great.  Having said that, that doesn't have anything to do with aviation.

Lots of other aviation figures who played a role in California do, however.  The Lockheeds, Donald Douglas, Glenn Martin. . .



and even Howard Hughes.

_________________________________________________________________________________



*Anyone who follows actors and actresses biographies at all can't help not only to be appalled, but also note how often their personal lives grossly depart from the people they portray.  Actresses playing nuns don't live chaste lives personally, cowboy actors who play rugged frontier individualist might very well be the polar opposite, and so on.



Occasionally the opposite is the case, but so occasionally its' often a surprise when you lean of it.



**This is noted in the LA Times op ed I'll refer to below, FWIW.



***This is omitted in the LA Times article, but it was genuinely courageous.  That courage shows how people are often very mixed in their actual characters. When it was time to serve his country, Wayne didn't. But when a friend was under a type of assault, he intervened when he didn't have to.



Wayne struggled with certain deep personal convictions his entire life, it should be noted.  Exposed to Catholicism through director John Ford, he flirted with becoming Catholic his entire life, and ultimately did, but in his final illness.  Nonetheless, he was a frequent attendee at Mass for decades prior to that.



****Hughes, of course, was not only an early movie producer, but a giant for many years in the aviation industry.



Wayne did appear in a number of aviation related films, although I hardly think that qualifies you to have an airport named after you, and that's not in fact why it was.  He lived as an actor in the community that is just outside this airport.  Ironically, complaints from the community about the airport are constant.



Those Wayne films include the following, which I think is an inclusive list, but very well may not be.



Central Airport. (1933).


His role in this film was uncredited.  He played a co-pilot.  Until making this list, I'd never even heard of this 1933 film.



Flying Tigers (1942).



This film is famous, but in the bad category in my view.  It's about the famous American Volunteer Group of mercenary pilots that flew P40s, with the American government's blessing, in support of the Chinese Nationalist prior to the American entry into World War Two (after Pearl Harbor the unit was converted into an American Army Air Corps unit).



I'm surprised that its cartoonish portrayal of the Chinese and Japanese didn't make the LA Times op ed.  It's a typical World War Two film and is one of several in which, contrary to the myth, John Wayne's character dies.



Flying Leathernecks (1951).



This is a famous film, but I've never seen it.  It concerns a Marine Corps squadron at Guadalcanal.



I've often been surprised that Wayne's roles portraying military heroes carried on after World War Two, in which he did not serve. But in fact, most of those roles actually came after the war, and they started during the war.



Island In The Sky (1953).


Island in the sky is about a DC-3 that crashes in the Canadian wilds.  It's an excellent movie.



The High and The Mighty (1954)


The High and the Mighty was a groundbreaking film in that it was the first of a type, the on board air disaster type.  It follows the crew and the passengers that are on a plane that's failing as they crew struggles to bring the plane in safely  It's the first of its kind, and is very well done.



Wayne's aging makes an appearance here as he's cast as an aging co pilot, side lined because of his age, whose experience wars against the younger pilots education in his craft.


The Wings Of Eagles (1957)


This film is the biography of Naval aviator Frank "Sprig" Wead, an early figure in naval aviation who was severely injured in an aircraft accident.  I've seen part, but not all, of this film.



Jet Pilot (1957)


Jet Pilot is a terrible film that can only be explained by the Hollywood studio system of the time, which also explains the shear volume of the films that anyone actor made as well. In 1957 Wayne made, for example, three films.



This film was made the year after his greatest film, The Searchers, and only his being a captive of the studio could explain his being in this Cold War dog about improbable spy craft and a romance with a female Russian pilot.



The Longest Day (1962).



In this great World War Two film based on the book by Cornelius Ryan, Wayne plays airborne office Lt. Col. Jim Vandervoot.



This isn't really an aviation picture, but I've included it here as Vandervoot was a real person, of course, and a paratrooper.  To that extent, the film involved aviation.



This is a great film, but Wayne is far too old in the film for the role he occupies in it.

Lex Anteinternet: The Unobservant Fanatic

Lex Anteinternet: The Unobservant Fanatic: And do not kill yourselves, surely God is most Merciful to you. Mohammed in the Koran. The Prophet said, "He who commits suicide by...

And, as it turns out, Al Baghdadi  not only killed himself.  He killed three children who were with him.

And so his association with cowards is complete.  Hitler didn't arm himself with a MP40 and go and take on the Russian soldiers he'd regarded as subhuman.  He killed himself. . .but Eva Braun went with him of course.

Goebbels killed himself as well, but of course he took his entire family, children and all with him.

Al Baghdadi was as religious scholar, so he knew that Islam precludes suicide and murder.

Not much of real Muslim, as it turns out.

We'd note that his final moments were accompanied by fleeing, screaming in terror, from a dog.

So, the rapist zealot turns out to be a cowardly murderer of children.

Two storms in two weeks. . .

and this one with single digit temperatures.

It could be a long winter.

October 30, 1919: "Babe Ruth rolls 'em down a new groove"

"The World's champion home-run slugger has entered the cigar manufacturing business and is learning it, as he learned baseball, from start to finish. He'll do in any box pitcher's box, batter's box or cigar box. Watch his smoke!"

High Steel

51%

That's the percentage of the local grocery market that Walmart occupies.

And that's a lot.

Not that those groceries would have been bought at local grocery stores anyhow.  The town has one, but it's a specialty store.

As late as at least the 1960s there were quite a few local grocery stores left in the county, although even then the market was dominated by national grocers.  By the 1980s the number had dwindled down to three.  Now there's only one left and its not a general grocer.  No real local grocery stores are left.

Still, this is a disturbing, if understandable, trend. The grocery stores that do exist here are all part of national chains, so what claim do they have, other than that they are specialty grocery stores, over Walmart or Sam's Club?  Not much other than that, although that is definitely something.

To date, Americans seem to be largely comfortable, at the grocery isle level anyhow, with this trend. Walmarts drive prices down which benefits consumers. They also drive wages down and wipe out local retailers, which doesn't, as it converts middle class occupations into low paying jobs.  The connection between the two seems, however, oddly lost on most people.

And regionally, a fact of the matter is that with a highly transient population, loyalty to local retailers is of course going to be largely absent, for the most part.

This trend isn't unique to grocery stores, we'd note.  It's simply that its expressed here in a way that directly and obviously impacts everyone. . . the dinner table.  It's not a trend that is inevitable, it's one that we simply allow, without thinking much about it, and in everything.

Today In Wyoming's History: Wyoming's Frontier Outlaws

Today In Wyoming's History: Wyoming's Frontier Outlaws:

Wyoming's Frontier Outlaws

Outlaw Canyon in Johnson County, so named due to its use by the Hole In The Wall Gang.

When I posted my recent item here on the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid I looked for my entry here on Butch and Sundance.

There wasn't one.

It surprised me as I had a mental recollection of having written one.  But I haven't.

Frontier outlaws are a topic that has fascinated the public from nearly day one.  Indeed, the frontier outlaw tales fit into a genera of similar tales that go back, and celebrate, outlaws all the way back to Medieval England.  I don't know if other cultures have the same genera of romanticized criminal as folk hero, but England did and its very much carried on to the United States. When it first appeared here, I can't say, but it was certainly on the scene as the U.S. entered the post Civil War frontier period and it carried on at least as late as the 1930s when contemporary criminals, some of whom were truly horrible people, caught the fascination and even the admiration of some.  And its certainly the case that folk tales in the form of movies continue to oddly glamorize criminals if not crime itself.

At any rate, frontier Wyoming certainly had its share of criminals, including famous ones, and Wyoming remained "frontier" a lot longer than many other parts of the West. We've been remiss in not addressing this, at least a bit.

That omission is likely due to the fact that the author doesn't find stories about crime or criminals interesting.  Indeed, the opposite is true.  I don't follow stories about criminal trials and the like in the press, as so many people do, and I never read novels about crimes.  With the exception of Western movies, I don't want movies about crimes very often either, although there are certain exceptions (Anatomy of a Murder is one of my favorite films).  So in this sense I'm ill equipped to write on the topic.  There are undoubtedly a lot of people who know a lot more about this topic than I do and I'm likely to miss somebody that they think is really important.  With that caveat, we dig in.

Wyoming was settled later than a lot of other areas of the Frontier West, something it shares with Montana to its immediate north.  The state remained largely unsettled, except along the Union Pacific Railroad, until after the U.S. Army's campaign of 1876 made it somewhat safe to penetrate the northern part of the state.  Even at that, it wasn't really until the 1880s when ranchers started to move up into the more northern portions of Wyoming and a plethora of difficult conditions operated against anyone moving into the area.  It took fairly dedicated ranching efforts to really make a go of it, with there being certain really exceptional early efforts that proved to be very much the exception to the rule.

Transportation lagged enormously in all of Wyoming until the turn of the prior century which played into this.  It also all operated to make much of Wyoming truly wild and lawless in the original sense of the word; i.e., without law.  In those early days the application of the law was often done by laymen with no color of right other than a roughly inherited sense of what the law was.  People speak, of course, of "English Common Law" and Wyoming is a common law jurisdiction.  In those very early days, however, the law was in fact very much like the early common law and conditions in some ways hearkened back to Saxon England.  Law was administered roughly and by the people in a lot of circumstances and everyone basically agreed that this was acceptable.  That formed a sense of "taking the law into your own hands" that proved to be very long lasting and difficult to overcome, and to some extent, it never has been.

If those conditions created a necessity for laymen to often administer the law, they were also ideal for criminals, and therefore its not surprising that there were some. What probably is more surprising is that there wasn't a lot more than there were.

In stating that, what we'd note here is that we intend to look at real frontier badmen.  That's a bit more difficult to do than it might seem, as in an era in which, all over the west, the law was fluid, crossing the boundary of the law was somewhat fluid as well.  For that reason, a person can find plenty of examples of somebody who was a criminal of some sort in one territory or state, but who ended up a lawman in another.  They'd crossed the line, but perhaps not so far as to not be able to come back.

Indeed, by modern standards, and even the standards of the day, some of the enforcement of the law or perceived law was pretty dicey, and that puts an author today in a difficult position.  There are lots of modern writers who would regard the ranchers who hung Ella Watson as murderers, and more particularly the principal rancher. But that's not at all how he was regarded at the time and to do so now really is plastering the veneer of modern views upon the old wall of a long past act.  Those who would sanction that would have to wonder how those ancients would regard the numerous actions now routinely regarded as legal which were illegal at the time and, moreover, illegal with wide support of their illegality.*

On a final note, we're not going to really cover, except where its intertwined with the story of badmen, violence that was illegal but of a sort of political nature, which we guess we've already made plain.  For that reason, we're not going to cover the Johnson County War or the Sheep War in any sort of detail, as those stories are really separate from those of dedicated criminals.  No matter what a person might think of the law and those stories, the actions on both sides were of a different nature than those undertaken by people who were primarily motivated by money, which almost all real crimes tend to be.

With those massive caveats, we dive in.

The Wild Bunch

The Wild Bunch as photographed in Ft. Worth, Texas. This photograph would lead to their demise.  Top from the left:  William Carver and Harvey Logan.  Bottom, Harry Longabaugh, Ben Kilpatrick and Robert Parker.

By far the most famous of Wyoming's outlaws are Harry Longabaugh and Robert LeRoy Parker, aka Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  And by extension, their gang, or their criminal circle more properly, The Wild Bunch, are Wyoming's most famous criminal gang.** 

As a gang, we should note, it's exceedingly hard to define.  It was organized, and loosely under the control of Cassidy, but people came and went.  At least one "member", Bob Meeks, participated in a single crime with the gang. Up to nineteen or more individuals wondered in and out of it, although only a handful are consistently associated with it.  It was, moreover, a regional gang, operating out of Johnson County's Hole In The Wall region, but also out of the Robber's Roost region of Utah, and operating as far south as Texas and as far north as Montana.  Indeed Utah, has just as good of claim to this story, should somebody wish to claim it, as Wyoming, and its impossible to talk about the Wild Bunch without intertwining both states.

In some ways, Cassidy (Parker) and Sundance (Longabaugh) are the exceptions to the rule in Western criminals as they come the closest to their popular image of Robin Hood like jovial characters.  They weren't that, but they depart much less than other Western gangs such as the James Gang, which were actually comprised of homicidal unhinged degenerates.

And if Parker and Longabaugh are exceptions to the rule, Parker is more so as he was actually from the region.

Wyoming Territorial Prison mugshot of Robert LeRoy Parker, aka Butch Cassidy.

Parker was born in Beaver Utah, a southern Utah town, to British parents who were converts to Mormonism, having both converted prior to their immigration to the United States with their families. Both parents came into the country as members of English Mormon families, coming over at age 12 and 14 respectively.  They married in 1865. Parker was the first of 13 children of the couple and grew up on his parents ranch in south central Utah.  This makes Parker a Western born criminal and more than that one who was born loosely in the Rocky Mountain region, something that, setting aside Texas which was settled fairly early, is unusual.  All the more unusual he was part of an observant Mormon family.

Parker was born in 1866, just a year after his parents' marriage, and was engaging in petty crime by the time he was 14.  He started to work as a cowboy at the same time, a fact that's often noted but which also means that for some reason he was not set, apparently, to take over his father's ranch even though he was the oldest son, nor was he set to homestead himself. As a cowboy he began to engage in horse theft enterprises and soon moved to Colorado.  During this period he worked as a cowhand in Wyoming, Colorado and Montana, something that would have been typical for the era.

In 1889 he turned to bank robbery hitting a bank in Telluride and fleeting to Robber's Roost in Utah.  The year after that, however, he turned towards the legitimate and bought a ranch, which proved to be unsuccessful, near Dubois.  Four years after that, however, he fell into the circle of the Bassett sisters through dealings with her rancher father.

I'm not going to blame Ann Bassett for Parker's descent into crime.  He was clearly set to head in that direction anyhow and he in fact may never have given it up.  Association with Bassett, who was just fifteen years old when she and Parker first started dating, was unfortunate however as something about the Bassett family was uniquely amoral.  It was a bad development.  Parker and Bassett became romantically involved and the Bassett sisters were unique for their era due to their easy association and participation in crime.

In 1896 he was arrested for horse theft but he may have been involved in more sinister crimes.  That sent him to the Territorial Prison in Laramie where he served 18 months out of a two year sentence before being oddly pardoned by Governor Richards.  Out of the pokey, he took up with Josie Bassett and then went back to Ann.  Out of prison he also went quickly back to crime and entered an association with a group of criminal associates and pals that included Elzy Lay, Kid Curry Logan, Ben Kilpatrick, Harry Tracy, News Caver, Laura Bullion and Flat Nose Curry.  They named themselves after another criminal gang active in Oklahoma, The Wild Bunch.  Their early specialty was bank robbery.  Soon after forming, Longabaugh was recruited to the gang.  By 1897 the gang had expanded to include Ann Basset and Maude Davis, something usually omitted from the treatments on the criminals which instead focuses on the male members.  By 1897 three of the gang were in fact female.

They operated widely including into Idaho and Utah.  In 1899 they turned to train robbery, however, which would prove to be their downfall.  They then became the target of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.  Nonetheless they expanded their train robbing activities all the way to New Mexico.  With the heat growing, however, they attempted to secure a pardon through the Governor of Utah, which failed as while waiting for the result, they infamously robbed a train near Tipton Wyoming on August 29, 1900.  In December of the same year they stupidly posed for their famous portrait in Ft. Worth, Texas, which was soon in use by the Pinkertons in aid of their efforts to arrest them.  Following this, they robbed a final train near Wagner Montana, after which the gang split up and Parker and Longabaugh fled first to New York, then to Argentina, and then to Bolivia.  The fact that they could undertake such a dramatic flight says something about the degree of their criminal enterprises and how profitable it had been.  

Their flight to Argentina was known to the Pinkertons which pursued them there after a time.  Engaged first as ranchers, they returned to bank robbery by 1905 and were in Bolivia by 1908.  They were gunned down by Bolivian authorities at a residence (not robbing a bank, as portrayed in the film) on November 6, 1908, a few days after robbing a mine courier (a scene inaccurately portrayed in the film as well).

As I've kept saying "they", and as the story of Longabaugh is so tied up with Parker's, I should pick him back up here before carrying on with Parker, which indeed a person must do to complete the story.

Harry Longabaugh was born in Pennsylvania in 1867 and came west at age 15 with a cousin.  He turned to crime by age 20 when he robbed a horse, saddle and rifle from a ranch outside of Sundance, Wyoming.  That resulted in an 18 month jail sentence in Sundance itself, which is why he adopted the Sundance Kid moniker.  After his release he worked as a cowboy in Alberta, showing the fluid nature of the border in the period.  By 1892 he returned to crime and is suspected of having participated in a train robbery.  In 1897 he participated in a bank robbery.  Shortly after that he was in the Wild Bunch.

Longabaugh was fast with a gun, but he is unknown to have killed anyone until his final gun battle in Bolivia.  Parker is unknown to have every killed anyone.  This is in part why the two remain celebrated.  They were violent men who traveled in very violent company, but they didn't actually take anyone lives themselves except, in Longabaugh's case, the very end.  Of course traveling in violent company abets violence, something that is routinely forgotten.  Just because they weren't the killers doesn't mean that people weren't killed in association with their criminal enterprises.

As already noted, Longabaugh and Parker were regional criminals, not just Wyoming ones, and in the end they fled to South America, first to Argentina, and then to Bolivia, where they resumed the life that had put them on the run.  Given as their criminal activities in the West gave them the spending power of millionaires today, you have to wonder what happened to the money, but then generally people of this character aren't really good at financial sustainability.  In the end they were both gunned down in Bolivia, which seems to be the end point for ne'er do wells from elsewhere who make their living from the gun.

Or were they?

Ever since 1908 there's been persistent rumors that both men survived.  How they evaded death in a hail of Bolivian bullets is rarely discussed with these theories, but it'd have to fall to something like mistaken identity for those who met their end in 1908.

Parker's rumored return is the most circulated story, at least in Wyoming.  At least as early as the 1930s Dr. Francis Smith, who treated Cassidy for a bullet wound and who had treated Etta Place as a patient as well, claimed to have talked to Cassidy after his claimed death and that he'd had his face surgically altered in France, something that given the state of plastic surgery at the time seems rather absurd.  Josie Bassett, one of the infamous Bassett sisters that we'll discuss below, claimed in the 1960s that Cassidy visited her in the 1920s and ultimately died in Nevada.  Residents of his hometown in Utah likewise claimed that he returned and lived in Nevada.  One of his female siblings claimed that he returned home and visited the family homestead in 1925 and then lived out his life in Washington, a story circulated by some other family members in later years, who claimed that he lived under the name Philips.  Some claim his family buried him after his death on the family ranch and have kept his burial place a secret.  The better stories all have a mid 1920s element to them.

In Wyoming there were and remain persistent rumors of his return.  He's claimed to have visited Baggs in 1925, prior to returning to Circleville Utah in 1925.  I personally heard a rumor related to me from Fremont County of his having more than once visited a female friend of his in that county.  That story came to me second hand, of course, but he person who heard it first hand had it related to him by an old resident of the county.

There are many fewer rumors regarding Harry Longabaugh, but one is that he returned and lived out his life in Utah.  A person claimed to be him in these rumors was actually exhumed recently and his DNA did not relate to Longabaugh's family's.

They're almost certainly in a busy grave in some Bolivian cemetery having met a fate they deserved.

They were, of course, the two most famous of a prolific criminal enterprise.  We should at least list the other more notable members of the same gang.

William Ellsworth (Elzy) Lay was a member from Mount Pleasant, Ohio who was taken to Colorado with his family as an infant.  He left home at age 18 and was running with Cassidy by the time he was 20.  He dated Josie Basset at the same time that Cassidy was dating Ann Bassett. . . those girls again.

Lay actually married and had a child, although his wife was not one of the Bassett's, and he refused her demands that he give up being an outlaw.  Lay was also a killer, being responsible for the deaths of several lawmen.  In 1899 he was captured, convicted of his crimes, and surprisingly sentenced to life in prison, showing that Western law was more lenient than supposed.  His wife divorced him.  In 1906 he was paroled.  He worked in Baggs for awhile, remarried and then moved to California where he lived out the rest of his life, dying in 1934 at age 65.

Kilpatrick, seated bottom right, with other Wild Bunch members.

Ben Kilpatrick was known as the "Tall Texan".  He was from Texas and participated in the gang, but not that much is really known about him.  He was captured and sentenced to prison in St. Louis Missouri in 1901 and received a fifteen year sentence for his crimes there.

He returned to crime upon his early release in 1912 and attempted a train robbery soon thereafter. During the robbery an express messenger beat his brains out, literally, with an ice mallet.  He was 38 years old at the time.

William "News" Carver was a member who acquired his nickname as he liked to read his name in the paper.  Carver was part of the infamous Wild Bunch 1900 train robbery of a train near Tipton Wyoming in which they famously ended up accidentally blowing up a rail car.  The gang split up to make their arrest by law enforcement more difficult after that.  Carver robbed a train in Montana the following year and then fled to Texas.  He was shot in a bakery in Sonora Texas the following year when they were arresting him on suspicion of a murder he didn't commit.  A companion appeared to be going for a gun.  Carver's didn't clear his holster before he was shot six time.

Carver had been in various other gangs before he took up with The Wild Bunch. He's also been married early in his life but his wife had died shortly after their marriage.  He's yet another member of this gang associated with the Bassett sisters, dating Josie Bassett, although not surprisingly his relationship with her would not prove to be permanent.

Orlando Camillia ("O.C" or "Deaf Charlie") Hanks was a barely known member.  He was arrested for his part in a bank robbery in Texas in 1894 and released in 1901.  He robbed a train in Texas the following year and was shot upon being run down while resisting arrest.

George Curry.

George "Flat Nose" Curry (Currie) is a well known member of the gang.  He was a Canadian by birth who relocated with his family to Nebraska when he was a child.  He was killed in 1900 by a Sheriff in Utah when being pursued for rustling.

Harvey Logan, aka "Kid Curry".

Harvey Logan was perhaps the most violent member of the gang and was responsible for the revenge killing of the Utah sheriff who killed George Curry.  He'd earlier committed another revenge killing upon a rancher who had killed his brother.  He may have killed up to nine men in his criminal career before killing himself in 1904 when he was run down by a posse in Colorado.

Logan was a prolific and early criminal.  He was, as noted, violent, but he was none the less popular.  Oddly, his popularity was such that it was common at one time, while he lived, for prostitutes to claim him as the father of their children, irrespective of their actual parentage.

Three women, including one associated strongly with Logan, were members of the gang at various times. The one associated with Logan was Laura Bullion.

Laura Bullion

Bullion was also a girlfriend of Kilpatrick's and perhaps fell into the gang naturally as Kilpatrick was a friend of her father's and he himself had been an outlaw.  She'd also been involved with Carver as early as age 15.  She was arrested in 1901 for her role in passing bank notes from a Montana train robbery undertaken by the gang.  She served only three years of a twenty years sentence, showing the surprising leniency of the time, and moved to Memphis in 1918, claiming to be a war widow. She worked as a domestic after her release from prison.

We should note before moving on that Matilda Maude Davis enters the story here in some fashion as she was uniquely one of a handful of women who were allowed into The Wild Bunch's criminal sanctuaries.  Photos show here to be a petite attractive woman.  Little is really known about her but she did marry Elzy Lay and was obviously aware of his profession, if we wish to call it that.  After she became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, she unsuccessfully insisted that Lay give up a life of crime and ultimately she divorced him.  She later remarried and lived in Utah.  She passed away in 1958 at age 83. Their daughter, Marvel, also lived out her life in Utah and died in Vernal at age 86 in 1983.

As a side note, this may make the extended story of Lay and his family the happiest one here, although its not happy.  None of them died at the end of a rope or gun and they all lived out natural lives.

The most famous female members of the Wild Bunch, if we don't include Etta Place as a member, and if we regard them as members, are the Bassett sisters who are strongly intertwined with it and its various members.  Associated with various gang members from their teenage years, they were the daughters of a rancher, and later ranchers in their own right.  Their father Herb, twenty years senior to his wife, was sympathetic to the gang and the family appears to be uniquely amoral.

Ann Bassett, 1904.

The Bassett family ranch straddled Utah and Wyoming and their father received stolen horses as part of his enterprise. The father himself was eclectic.  He was a civil war veteran and well known local musician who actually relocated to Utah with his wife as he was afflicted with asthma.  Locating in Brown's Hole, he seems to have taken up the fairly loose association with the law that was common there at the time. That exposed the Bassett sister to criminals and they obviously had no compunctions about taking up with them.  This was reinforced when the girls stepped into the family ranching operation on their own and came under pressure to sell their interests to larger ranches.

The Bassett girls were well educated for the time.  Their mother sent them to high school in Craig, Colorado and then to a Catholic boarding school in Salt Lake.  Ann was asked not to return to the boarding school and was subsequently sent to a boarding school on the East Coast. Their formal educations ended when their mother, who was twenty years younger than their father, died in 1892.

The Sisters Bassett provide an interesting example of the blurring of lines between legality and illegality in Wyoming and the West at the time.  Their father was a rancher dealing in legitimate and illegitimate livestock and they stepped into the position, occupying what would normally be a male role in the family.  They became highly active in ranching in their own right, crossing the same boundaries that their father did. They were also under illegitimate pressure to sell from well monied outside interests, and in that position they resorted to protection from criminal elements and also to rustling themselves.  Their activities were sufficiently aggravating that they became the target of another infamous Wyoming criminal, Tom Horn, who was brought in to address tensions in the area, although Horn never took action against the Bassetts.  Ann Bassett came to figure so prominently that she became known as "Queen Ann Bassett".

By most accounts, the Bassetts were sent home by the Wild Bunch in 1897 so that the gang could focus on its criminal activities. By any account, the Bassetts were of a higher class than Bullion.  Following that, Ann Bassett married rancher Hyrum Bernard in 1903.  She was arrested, but acquitted, of rustling in Utah that year. The marriage did not last and the couple divorced six years later, although Bernard continued to help the girls with their ranching efforts after that.  She married again in 1928 at which time she was middle aged to another rancher. That marriage was long lasting and indeed when she died in 1956 her surviving husband was crushed by her loss.  She lived until 1956, passing away at age 77.

Harry Longabaugh and Etta Place. . . maybe.

On Ann Bassett, and enduring legend has maintained that she was the actual Etta Place, the final enigmatic girlfriend of Harry Longabaugh, and indeed there is evidence for that.  Place is surrounded in mystery and her origins are not known.  She bore a strong resemblance to the only verified period photograph of Ann Bassett and at least one effort of scientific photo analysis concluded that they are the same person.  However, details of Place's presence contradict known activities of Bassett's, including her 1903 marriage and arrest for cattle rustling.  At least from my prospective, the two look alike but not identical, with the interesting fact that the efforts of contract a common law marriage or near common law marriage by the senior members of the gang involved exceptionally attractive women.

Josie Bassett was the older of the two Bassett sisters and arguably the wilder.  While she was born first, she also lived longer.  Her associations where nearly identical, as were her activities.  She was actually married shortly after her mother's death in what would be the first of five marriages, which must have ended soon as she was shortly after that in the Wild Bunch orbit.

Like Ann, her association wit the Wild Bunch dropped off after 1897, although she'd engage in bootlegging during the Depression.  She lived an entire life as an outdoorsman and lived frugally in a cabin after loosing her ranch in her later years.  She married five times as noted.  She had three children, all by her first husband.

Well what about Etta Place?

Place is by far the best known of the Wild Bunch damsels, but she's also the one that the least is known about.  Even her real name is not known.  Nor is her ultimate fate.

Place appears out of nowhere in this story right at about 1900, at which time she was somewhere in her 20s (like Ann Bassett at the time).  She was uniformly regarded as a pretty woman, and indeed bore a remarkable resemblance to Bassett.  When she appeared, she appeared as Longabaugh's girlfriend/paramour/common law wife.  Indeed, under the common law, they would have been married, assuming no impediments to marriage, as she would hold herself out as his wife.

The Pinkerton Agency listed her origin as being in Texas but she claimed to be from the East.  Interestingly, Ann Bassett was adept at affecting a New England accent due to her stint in the East as as student.  She went with Longabaugh and Parker to Argentina, and indeed she went back and forth from Argentina to the United States apparently with Longabaugh on at least two occasions, once in 1902 and once in 1904, showing the depth of the resources they had.  She participated in a robbery in Argentina in 1905 and fled into Chile with the gang thereafter.

She was apparently much effected by the loss of their ranch in Argentina and is believed to have grown weary of leading a criminal life.  In 1905, after their fleeting to Chile, she returned to the United States, this time to San Francisco, that year.  Longabaugh came with her.   They are not known to have seen each other again, although she was believed to be in San Francisco as late as 1907.  A woman matching her description inquired after Longabaugh's, death of the U.S. Envoy to Chile about obtaining a death certificate for him, a curios thing to do in 1909 if she was not in fact his common law widow.

After that last 1909 appearance she simply disappeared.  She's subject to numerous intriguing rumors, but none of them have any kind of adequate factual support to back them up, particularly given the nature of the evidence at the time. She was a striking beauty, but that alone was not a sufficiently  unique distinguisher to lead to any real knowledge of her later whereabouts.

We should wrap up the Wild Bunch in some fashion as they really are the most unique and well known of Wyoming's criminal gangs, and perhaps they're the only one that oddly reflects Wyoming's status as "the Equality State", given female participation in it.  It was a highly effective criminal gang until it overstepped itself with the Tipton train robbery which really lead to its end.  The money it took in robberies, in the context of the time, was frankly vast, which is perhaps best demonstrated by the amount of post Tipton travelling Parker and Longabaugh did.  The members were much more violent, however, than people like to imagine, and indeed quite a few members of the gang ultimately met violent deaths.  Very few managed to disassociate themselves with crime later on.

The female members are a real oddity and individually can't be neatly summed up.  At least Bullion appears to be a sad character who had fallen into a low state in life but who was attractive to the male members of the gang who consorted with that element.  Maude Davis is a mystery as to how she ended up in its orbit but she clearly saw the defects in their existence and pulled out for a more conventional life early on, with her ex husband ultimately being one of the few male members of the gang who also did so later.  The Bassett's are recognizable to those who spend a lot of time on ranches today as fitting the sometimes free spirited female rural personalities that aren't uncommon today, and they likely never saw themselves as aiding and abetting criminals. While not to draw excessively feminist analogies, they are unique early on for rejecting conventional female roles, but then that was true of nearly every woman allowed into the Wild Bunch except for Davis.

Etta Place is simply a mystery, having arrived from somewhere and disappeared into somewhere as well.  Perhaps she can be summed up by her photos, in which she's pretty, but looks profoundly sad. We don't really know what caused her to take up with Longabaugh and her early origins are all speculative.  What we can say is that due to their crimes, Longabaugh and Parker were quite rich and spent freely, and that is always attractive to some.

The Hole In The Wall Gang

What?  Didn't we just cover that?

Well yes and no.  The problem here is that sometimes in referring to the Wild Bunch, people call them The Hole In The Wall Gang, not realizing that they actually weren't the same thing.

The Hole In The Wall Gang were those criminals who hung out at the Hole In The Wall, which included the Wild Bunch.  It included others who didn't run with the Wild Bunch however.  Basically, the Hole In The Wall Gang wasn't a gang at all, but a loose association of criminals who took refuge in the Hole In The Wall Country of Johnson County.  Given that the Wild Bunch was a pretty loose group in and of itself, that makes the Hole In The Wall Gang really loose.

Given as we've covered the Wild Bunch, we've covered most of the more famous members of the Hole In The Wall Gang. There were, however, others.  The unifying factor however was the Hole In The Wall itself, which featured protection from all sides and facilities within in it in the form of cabins and a corral.

Indeed, that alone is part of the story that's very hard for moderns to grasp.  Refuge to the Hole In The Wall and Outlaw Canyon started early on in Wyoming after the Powder River country opened up and it continued on all the way into the very early 20th Century.  Today the region is easily accessible to people living in Buffalo, Sheridan and Casper and lots of fisherman venture down the canyon every summer.  But at the time, before automobiles, the country was so vast that this region was essentially ceded to criminals.  It remained a criminal refuge even after statehood and the entire Johnson County War was fought around it without penetrating it or ending its status.  As a natural fortress it was impenetrable, keeping in mind that law enforcement in Wyoming was extremely thinly manned.  No Sheriff could possibly mount a sufficient expedition to even think of entering it.  It was only time and the narrowing of the world that the technology of the early 20th Century introduced that ended that.

The gangs that operated out of the Hole In The Wall formed a sort of alliance and traveled in each others company, sometimes according to a loose set of rules that had been formed in order to keep the alliance active.  In the 1880s and 1890s they were highly active.  The Tipton raid however operated to put the focus on the Wild Bunch and caused it to disperse.  That event in and of itself changed the nature of the toleration for crime in the state.  The 1909 Spring Creek Raid would show that the support for it had evaporated.

The use of the hideout declined steadily after the Tipton Raid and was basically over by 1910.

Tom Horn

The next individual we'll mention here has already been mentioned, and some wouldn't consider him an outlaw at all.  Once again, this demonstrates the blurred lines that existed between the law and the outlaw at the time.

Tom Horn was just about the same age as Longabaugh and Parker, having been born in 1860.  He'd been born in Missouri and was already working as a scout and packer for the U.S. Army by 1876, the same year that the Battle of the Little Big Horn was fought.   He served in the Southwest under the legendary scout Al Sieber and was himself a Chief of Scouts by 1885.  He served with distinction in the wars against the Apaches. During this period he became acclimated to violence and had already killed in a man in what amounted to a type of duel, that being with a Mexican Army lieutenant over a prostitute.

After the Apache wars he became a rancher briefly but was cleaned out by thieves, an event that left a lasting impact on him.  He wondered into being a stock detective by title, but in reality was an assassin for large livestock interests, a position that tended to have the cover of law.  He reentered the Army during the Spanish American War but upon coming back out went to work as a killer for the the large livestock interests during the Wyoming stock wars period.

Horn was distinctly different than figures like Parker and Longabaugh as he did operate, albeit barely, under the cover of law. That ran out for him with the murder of Willie Nickell, which is still disputed as to who did it. No matter who did the killing, it was likely a mistake as Nickell was a teenage boy and likely not the intended target of the killing.  Horn was none the less convicted of the murder and executed for it.  In some ways, given Horn's undoubted role in many other extra judicial killings, it hardly even matters if he was guilty of the Nickell murder or not.

Horn was active in Wyoming in the 1890s and early 1900s, and had various employers, some of whom are only suspected.  He is rumored to have been at significant Johnson County War events although his presence can't really be established.  He was a Pinkerton agent for a time, although they ultimately asked him to resign.  His execution fell in 1903 meaning that he died an earlier death than some of his outright criminal adversaries.

His 1903 execution also demonstrated that the era of lawlessness was really ending.  We've already noted that above, but prior to his killing Nickell there'd been no effort to arrest Horn even though he was complicit in a lot of killings for hire.  Much of that was because powerful parties sanctioned the killings and thought them justified, even if fully illegal.  Nickell's killing was shocking, but prior murders had also been shocking.  The arrest of Horn for the Albany County murder showed what the Spring Creek arrests would demonstrate in Big Horn County shortly thereafter.  Toleration for criminal violence for any cause had ended.

The Red Sash Gang

This entry will be a brief one as nobody is certain if a Red Sash Gang really existed or what it consisted of.

Rumors and stories of a violent Red Sash Gang circulated following the Johnson County War and are somewhat tied up in its aftermath.

Stories of a group of violent rustlers who stole cattle, threatened people, and committed murder, while wearing red sashes, a popular cowboy affectation at the time, circulated in the early 1890s.  The murder of Marshal George Wellman in May, 1892, while he was out in prairie to investigate the events of the prior month's raid into Johnson County, was attributed to them.

The existence of the gang was widely held to be true at the time, but the lack of any real definition to them, other than some sinister activities at the time, has caused people to wonder if they really existed.  If they did, it was only briefly.  And the sashes may have meant nothing at all.  At this particularity period in time it was very common for cowboys for some reason, including those on the Northern Plains.  Frontier artist Charlie Russell, for example, routinely wore one.

William L. Carlisle

Bill Carlisle started his criminal career, brief though it was, the decade following the end of Longabaugh, Parker and Horn's, making him arguably the last of Wyoming's frontier criminals.

Carlisle robbed a series of trains in 1916 after reaching a state of absolute destitution.  Twenty six years old at the time, he'd lived a hard life prior to those events, but was none the less noted to be a polite robber who eschewed taking money from women and children.

Sentenced to a long prison sentence, he escaped from prison in 1919 and took up train robbery one more time.  However, his attempt failed as the train he targeted was full of servicemen he could not bring himself to rob, and instead it merely ended up in his flight.  He was shot when a posse caught up with him near Glendo and returned to prison.  In prison for the second time he underwent a profound religious conversion and converted to Catholicism and became a model prisoner.  He was released from prison in 1936.  He lived for many years in Laramie before returning to his native Pennsylvania in his old age.

Carlisle is a unique criminal in that he seems to have been poorly constituted for it from the very first.  His early life as a near orphan had seemingly left him without a really strong moral compass, but it wasn't completely absent.  He proved to be more willing to die committing a crime than he was willing to kill committing one. He couldn't bring himself to rob anyone except men, and he exempted servicemen.  Even in his arrest and trial photos he's smiling and his captors appeared to have no concern that he'd flee once caught.  Once he found some guidance, he permanently corrected his direction.

Earl Durand

If Carlisle is not the last of Wyoming's frontier era outlaws, assuming that even he is, than Earl Durand has to be.  Or at least he wanted to be.

Durand was born three years prior to Carlisle's first train robberies and was active as an odd criminal in a brief 1930s episode.

From a Mormon family in Park County, Durand lived an outdoor life seemingly calculated to ignore the law, including poaching.  He had a strangely willful streak in which he refused to comport his lifestyle to the realities of the modern world, seemingly believing that he personally could live more as if it was 1839, rather than 1939.  Arrested in 1939 for poaching, as he refused to buy a license, he escaped from jail and killed several law enforcement officers in his flight.  This lead in turn to a man hunt which became absurdly overblown.

Escaping first to the hills, he came down into Powell and died from a self inflicted gunshot wound during a failed attempted bank robbery.  Durand, in fairness, likely fits into the violent 1930s more than the frontier era, however.  I  note it here as he seems to have wished to act as if he lived in a much earlier frontier era at a time at which it wasn't completely impossible to imagine doing so.

What about Frank and Jesse James?

I'm going to call bull on this one.

Frank and Jesse James are so famous that it seems there's no region of the West in which it isn't claimed that they were there.  The oddity of that is that they were Southern criminals, not Western ones, and there's simply no evidence of it.

Jesse James, the leader of the James Gang, was a generation older than the youngest of the criminals we've been writing about here.  So was his brother Frank. Both men had been acclimated to a blistering level of violence by the Civil War and they fit into a unique category of American criminal that came out of that war and whose era lasted into the 1930s.  They were regional criminals and as their raid into Northfield Minnesota demonstrated, they were inept out of it.

They're so famous, and they were active in the immediate post Civil War period we associate with the West, that people adopt them into any scenario.  I've heard it claimed that they took refuge in The Hole In The Wall at one point, that they had a cabin in the Big Horns, and that a high point I know of in the foothills of the Big Horns was used as a lookout spot by Jesse to evade pursuers.

It's all myth.

The James Gang was broken by the 1876 Northfield Minnesota Raid and it never really returned to any sort of significant activity after that, although they did attempt to.  Frank James sundered to authorities in 1882 with a promise that he would not be extradited to Minnesota.  Jesse James met with a bullet to the back of a head fired by a cousin that same year.

Most of Wyoming's criminals of the era weren't even active at the time that Jesse died and Frank surrendered.  The Big Horn Basin where they took refuge had barely been opened up at the time and use of the Hole In The Wall was just about to start.  The James weren't frontiersmen and they were cowboys. They were Missouri smallholding farmers who were introduced to horrific violence during the Civil War and kept it up, where they lived, and where there was sympathy for them, after it.

So What Can We Say?

Well, perhaps we have already said it. But what is clear is that, in looking at it, Wyoming never really had any criminals who were really Wyomingites per se in the frontier era.  The territory and state were too new for it.  The vastness of the country attracted some by the 1880s to a life of crime, but it also wan't really until then that the state had anything to steal.  With a widely dispersed population, the West was ideal for criminals hiding from the law, but at the same time that same condition meant that dedicated criminals had to act over a vast swath of territory.  Most criminals operating out of Wyoming also hit targets in other Western states.  The Wild Bunch ranged north to Montana and south to Texas, and operated out of Utah as much as Wyoming.

Those criminals are romantic only in the romanticized portrayals of the. Even the Wild Bunch, with its attractive young men and women, included members who were outright killers.  All of the more notorious criminals risked death at the hands of lawmen who were not shy about using firearms and who were free to do so almost without question, and many met their end that way. At the same time, societal tolerance for criminals was remarkably high during the 1880s and 1890s and only started to end in the 1900s.  Those caught in the 19th Century were actually quite unlikely to meet with the severest of penalties upon being tried and often severed very light sentences even for really horrific crimes.  Again, starting in the 20th Century this began to change and those caught risked severe sentences after that.

Much of the wilder era of crime in Wyoming overlapped with the stress of the cattle conflicts and the cattle/sheep conflict which seemingly operated to support it being ongoing.  The Johnson County War amazingly managed to take place in and around the Hole In The Wall without impacting its status at all.  Men and women loosely associated with the small livestock side of the conflict had interaction with some criminals that tainted that side of the conflict in reputation but which also created a seeming high degree of tolerance for those living outside of the law.

By 1900 almost all of the underlying conditions that gave rise to the era of criminal ranging were coming to an end.  The railroads had penetrated everywhere in the state by that time.  The cattle war ended and the small rancher was established.  The sheep war was ongoing but winding down.  Frontier towns had yielded to being small towns and residents didn't want their banks and trains robbed.  The first automobiles came in during that decade in numbers allowing people to cover distances in hours that had once taken days, and which rendered a place like the Hole In The Wall to a fishing hole, rather than a thieve's fortress.

Or perhaps we should say returning it, thankfully, to that former status.

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*The comparisons that tend to be made in this area tend to run only one way, but in reality there are plenty of things that are illegal now which those in the 19th Century would regard as flat out bizarre in legal terms while there are a lot of  social topics in which the law was much different than now and our ancestors would find  the evolution of the law to be disappointing in its results at best.

**The latter name, The Wild Bunch, has become confusing over time due to Sam Peckinpah's use of that title for his fictional 1969 movie about 1910s Western outlaws, a movie that set new standards in cinematic violence.  Peckinpah's film is not set in Wyoming and it is not about the Hole In The Wall Gang. The title, however, may in fact be intended to recall them, as Peckinpah's movie intentionally sought to smash the image of the Robin Hood Western criminal, which the Hole In The Wall Gang symbolizes, with the violent reality of frontier crime.

Lex Anteinternet: Today in History. October 28, 1919

Lex Anteinternet: Today in History. October 28, 1919:

A repeat post, as it were:

Today in History. October 28, 1919

The Volstead Act goes into effect. Booze, banned.

The movement to ban alcohol had really been around for a good twenty or so years, and was sort of oddly and closely wrapped up with a bunch of other social movements to which it otherwise had no obvious connection. For example, it was related in a way to the Women's Sufferance Movement, even though voting and drinking (or not drinking) are not obviously connected.

It was really World War One, however, that managed to get Prohibition enough traction to be come the law. That may sound odd, but it was the fear that American servicemen had been exposed to booze and corruption in France that caused enough Americans to want to address what they feared would be a post war drinking problem to pass it. Of course, we know the rest of the story.

I didn't note it in the original entry, but what brought the Volstead Act fully into law on this day was the Senate overriding President Wilson's veto of yesterday.  The House had overridden on the very same day as the veto.

Wilson, it should be noted, was still recovering from a stroke, and not his first, so his action on this was remarkable.

Elsewhere, other things were going on, such as the 1st International Congress of Working Women. Attendees posted for this photograph.

The Unobservant Fanatic

And do not kill yourselves, surely God is most Merciful to you.

Mohammed in the Koran.

The Prophet said, "He who commits suicide by throttling shall keep on throttling himself in Hell Fire and he who commits suicide by stabbing shall keep on stabbing himself in the Hell-Fire.

The Hadith.

It's now reported that Al Baghdadi followed the route of the great cowards who are comfortable with sending others to their deaths, but when the time comes for them to take up the sword, use it on themselves rather than bravely face the vagarities of real combat.  Al Baghdadi therefore turns out in the end to have just as much personal moral courage as Adolph Hitler, which wasn't much.  Getting somebody to storm the bunker for the Fatherland or for the Faith is one thing. . . doing it yourself, well that's quite another.

Hitler seemed to have that courage, we'd note, before he was a full blown racist hater.  In the Great War, serving under the Kaiser, he legitimately received an Iron Cross. But at that time he was a cog on the wheel of Imperial Germany.

And that's important to note.

Al Baghdadi has been hanging around in areas where he was at risk for a 500 lbs bomb whistling in any day, just like Hitler was at risk for a 75mm shell landing in the middle of his units dinner table.  But that isn't really the same as representing vast evil hatred, encouraging others to die for it, and then, when your turn comes, blowing yourself up or putting a pistol to your head.  If French Artillery sends one into your plate of brots and bread and blows you to atoms, or if an F-16 traveling so fast that by the time you'd hear it from where you are, you're already dead, gets you, well, that's not quite as scary as taking on, with deliberation, Ivan and his PPsh or Joe and his M4.

No, it isn't.

It's not, after all, as if these guys drew their Samurai swords, or perhaps more accurately for their place and time, their MP40s or AKMs, and said "follow me boys" and went to their deaths gun blazing.  No, they said "oh crap, my stupidity has run its course, I'm turning my back on everything, because I'm a big chicken bastard".

Hitler didn't show what the Ubermensch could do.

And Al Baghdadi didn't go down fighting either.  He didn't even go down as an  observant Muslim.

Mohammed never said that when your back was against the wall and the infidels coming in, well kill yourself.

No, he wouldn't have either.

And that's an important thing to note.

There's an odd fashion with fanatic movements to look back into an idealized past and imagine  yourself in a reconstructed future version of it, where you are nifty in the extreme and the glorified past is right there in front of you in its present glory. For Nazis, that meant that the good old Germany Aryans, who were never really like the Nazis imagined them, would be in the drivers seat and being all big and blond and whatever.  For people like Lenin, the good old working man would come into his own in a preternatural way and work would be cool, nifty and if Soviet Realism is any example, it would also apparently feature a lot of buxom blonds as well.  For people like Al Baghdadi, the centuries would roll back, a Caliphate would be created, and men would be in the driver's seat taking women as they pleased, apparently, who would be happy to receive them.

Odd.

And they were happy to have people fight for that.  They just weren't willing to fight themselves (with a bit of a pass for Lenin, who didn't kill himself after all).

There's something really narcissistic in all that.

And in Al Baghdadi's case, there's something deeply antithetical to his faith in it as well.  I'm certainly not a scholar of Islam and I'm also not a fan of it, but Muhammad did live at a time when prisoners of war didn't exist in the modern sense and slavery remained common.  I can't and won't sanction Islam's treatment of women, but I'm not really too sure that Muhammad, were he around today, would really be sanctioning enslavement of women for sexual purposes.  I doubt it.

And I'm sure he wouldn't sanction killing yourself.

Assuming that he'd approve of anything Al Baghdadi did, which is pretty doubtful, at the end he'd probably expect him to take up his sword and go down fighting.  This assumes that he wouldn't have found Al Baghdadi to be a scary nut in the first place, which is probably more likely.

A person's actions are, of course, a test of their belief.  And now we know.  As a Muslim, well. . . he could claim the title of Caliph with dubious qualifications, but he certainly didn't measure up in terms of radiance.

ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi apparently killed by U.S/Kurdish strikes in Syria

Ironies abound.

We've recently been hearing how a U.S. presence in Syria isn't necessary anymore (and I'll concede that I both didn't think we should be in Syria in the fist place but, having gone in, we shouldn't leave and abandon the Kurds).

Now we find that Syria is hotter, ISIL wise, than we supposed.

And we've gotten Al Baghdadi, in a joint operation with the Kurds.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is the leader of ISIL.  Not a huge amount about him is known other than that.  He's an Iraqi by birth and had some university education, apparently being a student of Islamic law while attending university.

ISIL started off as the Iraqi component of Al Queda and became active after the U.S. occupation of Iraq.  It's early history is murky but Al-Baghdadi quickly became its leader and has been ever since.  His death would therefore be roughly equivalent to that of Bin Laden's, which came about in a similar fashion.

He took his group in a highly radical direction, at least as radical as that of Al Queda, if not more so.  He proclaimed himself to be the new Caliph, a proposition that's dubious under Islamic law in his case, and found adherents for a brand of Islam that is uniquely severe.  Included in its views are the wide scale use of violence against all opponents and the routine use of violence against non Muslims.  Moreover, his group revived the line from the Koran allowing men to take concubines with "their strong right hand", although that was interpreted, apparently, to amount to forced marriage.* All sorts of horrors have accordingly resulted.

Al-Baghdadi has an odd connection with the U.S. in that he was the apparent direct detainer of American Christian relief worker Kayla Mueller.  Mueller was working with Syrian refugees in Syria but stunned Doctors Without Borders when she showed up with a Syrian boyfriend in Aleppo.  They put her on a bus back to Turkey the next day but it was ambushed and she was taken prisoner and forcibly married to Al-Baghdadi who reportedly repeatedly raped her while she was his captive.  ISIL attempted to force her to renounce Christianity while she was a captive, which she would not do.** She also reportedly acted as a protector and sympathetic ear for younger captive "brides" of Al-Baghdadi.  She was later a casualty of a Coalition air strike.

All of things brings a number of points to the forefront right at the point in which there may still be time to do something about them, even though its highly unlikely the United States under the current administration will.

This raid took place in northwestern Syria, the very region we're currently pulling out of.  While ISIL is an opponent of the Syrian regime in Damascus, our withdrawal or quasi withdrawal is to that regime's benefit.  What would have occurred if Damascus completely reasserted its sovereignty on the portions of the country not occupied by Turkey and Russia isn't clear.

Murkier yet is what would have happened had this are been occupied by the Turks.  The Turks have shown a surprising level of ambivalence recently in regard to Islamic extremist and their occupation of what amounts to an expansion of their border with Syria has resulted in ISIL adherents being freed and the insertion of radical Islamic Syrian militias.  If Al-Baghdadi's enclave had been found in their territory, which is admittedly unlikely, what would have we done?  This points out that even with the U.S. out, we're much better off with the Turks also not in.

That would raise again my point about UN Peacekeepers.  Not that this is going to happen.
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*I'm certain many current Muslims would dispute that the Koran allows the taking of captive sex slaves but the fact of the matter is that it was at one time highly common in Islam and there is in fact a line in the Koran allowing Mohammed's male combatant adherents to have sex with women captives.  I'm  not a scholar on the topic so what the current counters to that within Islam are, I don't know.

In ISIL's case, however, the practice was widespread and apparently limited in the way it was originally was, i.e., the captives are non Muslims when forced into the relationship.  The Koran, however, may sanction taking slaves in that fashion (I don't think it actually requires the captor to marry the slave) but it doesn't appear to actually sanction rape.  That may seem like a distinction without a difference, but its noted here anyhow.  I.e., a woman forced into captivity in the ancient world in the role of  sex slave probably doesn't have a lot of choice in what she does.

ISIL does seem to depart in requiring that there be a "marriage" in these circumstances.  However, in the Christian view of marriage, no such marriage would exist as marriage requires consent of both parties and always has.

**The entire Mueller story was an example of monumentally bad reporting by the American press.

Mueller was only in Turkey as she was a Christian.  She'd previously gone to Guatemala in the same role.  However, Mueller was a Protestant of the supposedly unaffiliated type.

This particular topic is really badly reported in general as "unaffiliated" Christians in fact are affiliated, as they fit into the loose  American protestant tradition. This means that they aren't part of one of the "main line" Protestant faiths, but the "unaffiliated" churches are in fact fairly uniform in their theology and are affiliated, even if they don't realize it.

Her Christian status was nearly completely ignored by the Press.

As was the fact that she was naive.  Apparently the courage of her convictions really showed while she was a captive, but she never should have been where she was in the first place.

October 27, 1919. President Wilson Vetoed The Volstead Act.

The Act that was set to make Prohibition the law of the land and thereby bring teeth into the recently passed Constitutional Amendment.

The House of Representatives overrode the veto on this very same day.

Wilson's veto was based on the inclusion of enforcement of wartime prohibition which he felt was now unnecessary, therefore his objection was essentially technical.

My life has been running a lot like today's 1919 Gasoline Alley cartoon:

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: St. Anne Catholic Church, Big Piney Wyoming

Churches of the West: St. Anne Catholic Church, Big Piney Wyoming:

St. Anne Catholic Church, Big Piney Wyoming

This is St. Anne's Catholic Church in Big Piney, Wyoming.  The church was built in 1934.