Legends of the Old West - TOM HORN Ep. 5 | “The Hunt for Butch and Sundance”

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

Tom moves back to Wyoming near the same time that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid organize the last major train robbery of the Old West. Tom joins the manhunt for the most wanted fugitives in America, but the only result is that he becomes associated with four more murders. As bad as that fiasco is, it’s nothing compared to what happens next… Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join Apple users join Noiser+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. On YouTube, subscribe to LEGENDS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUVRfp5H1frBzTegq9qMNIQ For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In early 1898, Tom Horn's life in Arizona was not going as planned. He had spent three years up in Wyoming, earning the reputation as one of the state's most feared and most prolific hired guns. When he returned to Arizona in 1896, range detectives were no longer needed in the territory. He went to work on the ranch of an old friend, but he quickly grew bored with the typical duties of a cowboy. He spent three months helping the army track the outlaw, the Apache Kid, through the deserts and mountains of southern Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico. The campaign yielded few results, just like his next venture. He tried one last time to get rich as a miner. He did some prospecting again at Deer Creek, but gold and silver remained elusive.

Tom was bored and frustrated. He missed the excitement of riding the high plains and, presumably, terrorizing suspected cattle rustlers. So he was thrilled when he was suddenly summoned back to Wyoming by his old friends and former bosses, John Coble and John Clay. The uproar over the murders of William Lewis and Frederick Powell in 1895 had died down. Tom Horn remained the primary suspect in the murders, but after three years, there was very little chance he would ever be prosecuted. By the spring of 1898, Tom was living at John

Coble's Iron Mountain Ranch and working for Iron Mountain and the Swan Land and Cattle Company. Some believe he went right back to his old job of hunting down cattle rustlers. Others believe he took a breather from being a hired gun and was breaking horses and working as a cowboy in Laramie County. Whatever the case, Tom Horn's life was about to take an abrupt turn. Tom Horn's life was about to take an abrupt turn. On April 25, 1898, the U.S. Congress voted to go to war with Spain in support of Cuban independence. Tom's former commander during the Apache Wars, General Nelson Miles, is alleged to have personally asked Tom to come back to work for the military.

This time, Tom wouldn't be a scout. He would be a packmaster. Because there were very few roads in Cuba, General Miles was convinced that pack trains were the only way to adequately supply soldiers on the front lines with ammunition and rations. The job of wrangling hundreds of mules that carried supplies wasn't as glamorous as, say, storming San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, but it was vitally important. Tom's work would keep the soldiers alive and in the fight, and by all accounts, he was great at it. From Black Barrel Media, this is Legends of the Old West. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. In this season, we're telling the complex and controversial story of Tom Horn,

range detective, Pinkerton agent, and hired gun. This is Episode 5, The Hunt for Butch and Sundance. Butch and Sundance. The Spanish-American War is probably the most forgotten or overlooked war in American history, and it's not really surprising. The entire war lasted just three and a half months, and it took place on small islands in the Caribbean and the Philippines. It happened during a transitional period in American history. It was at the very end of the iconic Old West era and before the well-known periods of the first half of the 1900s, the First World War, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. Compared to those, it's not hard to see why people pay less attention to the era from about 1895 to 1915. The island of Cuba was trying to throw off the colonial rule of Spain.

There'd been rumblings of war for 25 years, but the talk always stalled. In the 1890s, the peak of the yellow journalism era, newspapers greatly exaggerated claims of atrocities in Cuba to sell more copies. President William McKinley ignored the reports. But then a U.S. Navy cruiser called the Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898. 260 American crewmen were killed, which was most of the crew on board. In March, a U.S. Naval court ruled that the explosion was the result of a mine, though it didn't specifically blame Spain. By that point, it didn't matter. In April, Congress voted to go to war, and it was on.

And it was on. By all reports, Tom Horn performed his duties in Cuba admirably. It was a grueling campaign, but most agreed that without the pack trains, victory over the Spanish would have been a far more difficult endeavor. The bravery of the packers, the men who supervised and managed the columns of mules that were used to move supplies, was well documented. So was the bravery of the mules themselves, we can't forget them. Both men and animals operated under constant fire. And as with every war until sometime in the 20th century, the biggest concern was not the enemy. It was disease. Along with hundreds of other soldiers and packers,

Tom Horn contracted yellow fever and was knocking on death's door. He lost 40 pounds and was severely weakened, but he continued working to keep the front lines supplied. Eventually, his bravery and fortitude earned him a promotion to chief of All Packed Trains. Tom's actions were genuinely and objectively heroic. But like storytellers since the beginning of time, he did exaggerate the stories of some of his duties when he told tales in the years to come. He was not, for instance, appointed the Master of Transportation, as he claimed in later years. And it's probably unlikely that soon-to-be Vice President and then President Theodore Roosevelt stumbled upon Tom Horn before the most famous battle of the war,

the Battle of San Juan Hill. Tom claimed that Roosevelt and another member of his unit, the Rough Riders, were trudging through the landscape with horses that were too exhausted to carry them any farther. Tom said he gave the men two of his mules, which then carried them into battle. So that probably didn't happen, but all things considered, those were little white lies that didn't do any harm. In mid-August 1898, the Spanish capitulated and sued for peace. Three weeks later, the Spanish capitulated and sued for peace. Three weeks later, Tom Horn was on a ship back to the U.S.

He was still ravaged by yellow fever, and when he finally made it all the way back to the Iron Mountain Ranch in Wyoming, his boss, John Coble, put him in bed. Tom's condition didn't improve, so Coble took him to Cheyenne and placed him in the care of a woman named Nanny Steele. Nanny ran a boarding house, and after a few months, she had successfully nursed 38-year-old Tom Horn back to health. Tom left the boarding house and went back to work on the ranch.

But as luck would have it, for a man who loved adventure and hated thieves, a pivotal moment in Old West history happened shortly after he recovered. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid pulled off the last big train robbery of the Old West. On June 2, 1899, the Union Pacific Railroad's Overland Flyer chugged toward a speck on the map called Wilcox, Wyoming. Wilcox was about 60 miles from the Iron Mountain Ranch where Tom Horn worked. A gang of outlaws stationed themselves near a trestle bridge outside Wilcox. As the train approached, they forced it to stop by waving stolen signal lamps. The engineer assumed they were Union Pacific men warning him the bridge was out or damaged.

After the outlaws commandeered the locomotive, they unhooked the passenger cars, leaving only the car with the money attached to the locomotive. Then they forced the engineer to drive over the bridge. They stole an estimated $50,000 in cash and jewelry, and then blew up part of the bridge to stop any pursuers. Union Pacific detectives believed five outlaws carried out the robbery, and the common theory is that Butch Cassidy supervised the

operation from a ridge, and the Sundance Kid worked with four other members of the Wild Bunch to do the job. As a podcast network, our first priority has always been audio and the stories we're able to share with you. But we also sell merch, and organizing that was made both possible and easy with Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell and grow at every stage of your business. From the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage. Whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits, Shopify helps you sell everywhere. They have an all-in-one e-commerce platform and in-person POS system. So wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. and POS system, so wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. With the internet's best converting checkout, 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce

platforms, Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers. Shopify has allowed us to share something tangible with the podcast community we've built here, selling our beanies, sweatshirts, and mugs to fans of our shows without taking up too much time from all the other work we do to bring you even more great content. And it's not just us. Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. Shopify is also the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's and Brooklinen and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across 175 countries. Because businesses that Thank you. Shopify.com slash realm. When the Union Pacific Railroad offered a reward of $3,000 for the capture of each outlaw, dead or alive, roughly a hundred men immediately put together posses to find the gang. The first close call happened a few days later.

Aside from Butch and Sundance, the gang was comprised of George Curry, Harvey Logan, Harvey's brother Lonnie, and their cousin Robert Lee. A few days after the robbery, George Curry and a couple others ambushed a posse and killed a county sheriff. The outlaws then rode into the Bighorn Basin, where they were given fresh horses and rations by two ranchers. The gang then disappeared into the Wind River Range, and the posses gave up the chase. Overnight, the gang known as the Wild Bunch became the most wanted fugitives in the country. By the end of June 1899, the Wild Bunch, also known as the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, a name that came from their remote Wyoming hideout, had split the money and headed in different directions. George Curry and Harvey Logan were thought to be hiding out in Wyoming,

probably back at the hole in the wall. Butch and Sundance were believed to have fled to New Mexico, and Lonnie Logan and Robert Lee returned home to Montana. But despite having no luck tracking down the outlaws in the days and weeks that followed the Wilcox robbery, law enforcement had no intention of abandoning their manhunt. The U.S. Marshal Service and the Union Pacific Detectives decided they needed help, and they enlisted Tom Horn's old employer, the Pinkerton Agency, to assist in the manhunt. The Union Pacific Detectives wanted to keep men in the field and keep an active search going.

They wanted to keep pressure on the outlaws. But the U.S. Marshals and the Pinkertons had a different idea. They believed the gang had found their hiding spots and would not come out until they thought the heat had died down. So, the hunters needed to make it look like the heat had died down. The two agencies finally convinced the Union Pacific detectives to agree to lay low for a while. They began what was known as a still hunt. Instead of sending out more posses, which tended to draw a lot of attention, they would simply stay still and wait for the outlaws

to show themselves. Pinkerton's most experienced agents and the U.S. Marshal Service's best deputies would spread out all over the Rocky Mountain region and go undercover in the areas where the outlaws were suspected of hiding out. They would wait and watch and listen. And one of the men who was already in the area and knew the area and had experience as an undercover operative, was Tom Horn. The plan was to divide the agents and the detectives into two groups. One would cover the northern portion of the Rocky Mountain Range, and the other would cover the southern portion.

Tom Horn's old friend and Pinkerton colleague, Charlie Seringo, who was still with the agency, was assigned to supervise the hunt in the north, and Tom was assigned to head up the search in the south. Both men were allowed to bring one man to work with him directly. allowed to bring one man to work with him directly. Tom supposedly summoned his old friend Ed Tewksbury, the lone survivor of the Pleasant Valley War, to join him in Wyoming. Although the point of a still hunt was to stay put and wait, Tom, true to his restless nature, continued discreetly tracking the outlaws with his partner Ed, and that led to, once again, more killings and more trouble. Tom claimed they were in the vicinity of a regular hideout for the wild bunch, but the outlaws had moved on. Tom and Ed continued to track them farther west into the Jackson Hole

area. After nearly a month on the hunt, Tom and Ed came across a campsite where two men were cooking dinner over a campfire. Tom identified them as members of the gang. In the version of the story he later told to the Rocky Mountain News, the outlaws and the manhunters quickly found themselves in a shootout. During the exchange, Ed was shot in the leg. Both robbers died, and Tom left them on the ground while he took Ed to the nearest town to have his leg treated. Notably, Tom and Ed did not report the shooting of the alleged train robbers to the Pinkerton agency or the U.S. Marshals or anyone else. Ed Tewksbury decided he'd had enough of hunting outlaws with Tom Horn, so he limped back to Arizona. But Tom, according to his own story, stayed on the trail of the

outlaws, though that's probably a loose interpretation of what he was doing, as will probably become clear. On January 27th, 1900, a few months after the killings in Jackson Hole, Tom traveled to Denver, Colorado. The Wild Bunch was still on the loose, and Tom claimed he was on the trail of George Curry, but that seems unlikely. Curry wasn't known to hang out in Denver. It was more likely that Tom had a plan to collect reward money from the Union Pacific Railroad for killing those two men near Jackson Hole. To get the ball rolling, he met with a reporter from the Rocky Mountain News. He told the reporter, in great detail, about the two train robbers he and Ed Tewksbury had tracked and killed in Jackson Hole.

Tom was later seen meeting with two Union Pacific detectives, presumably to file an official report on the killings and to work out the details of the reward money he claimed he was owed. And that was where the trouble for Tom Horn started, and it quickly snowballed. Tom couldn't keep his story straight. He didn't get paid the reward money, and the whole thing played out in the press, which he himself initiated, and all that media attention backfired on him. The Cheyenne Bureau of the Rocky Mountain News ran a story of the killings in Jackson Hole on January 28th, the day after Tom met with the reporter. The day after that, on January 29th, a rival newspaper, the Cheyenne Sun-Leader, ran an article that said the Rocky Mountain News' story was fake.

The Cheyenne Sun-Leader claimed the robbers had not been killed. The reporter from the Rocky Mountain News then confronted Tom and asked him if his story was true. And immediately, Tom's story started to change, and virtually all of it was called into question. Tom said it was true, and that it had happened just three weeks earlier. In reality, the killings happened months earlier. Tom originally said the shootout happened at a campsite near Jackson Hole. Now, he said it happened 40 miles west of Jackson Hole. Now, he said it happened 40 miles west of Jackson Hole. Finally, he admitted that they had left the bodies unburied, which was considered very poor frontier etiquette.

If you're going to kill someone, the least you could do was bury them. And soon, the final and biggest problem with the story would reveal itself. Were the two dead men part of the gang, or train robbers in general, or even criminals at all? When Tom returned to Cheyenne, he was confronted by a reporter from the Sun Leader. Tom's story changed again. He said yes, he shot and killed two men. But now he said they were notorious cattle rustlers, not the Wilcox train robbers. The very next day, Tom changed his story back to the original version and told the reporter that he had killed the robbers

and he would be claiming the reward from the Union Pacific. It was a complete mess. The Sun-Leader newspaper retracted its article that called Tom's story a fake. And as if things weren't complicated enough, the Union Pacific Railroad had to enter the fray. The Union Pacific, which was headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, supported Tom Horn in a Nebraska newspaper article and said he had followed proper protocol in shooting the two men. The railroad basically had no choice. If it said Tom killed those two men without just cause while working on behalf of the railroad, that would have been worse. But then the railroad actually made it worse by adding its own lies.

The railroad claimed Tom and Ed acted in self-defense, but then went on to say the two men brought the bodies of the dead men into a nearby town, reported the killings to law enforcement, and saw to it that they were properly buried. Because it was self-defense, no charges were filed. The situation is really confusing, but one thing has never changed. Tom claimed he killed two men somewhere in eastern Wyoming. And because of his reputation as a hired gun for big cattle companies, it was easy to believe that Tom had killed two innocent men and then made up a story to try to collect the reward. The people of Wyoming were angry all over

again. And then, as if the whole thing wasn't complicated enough, it might have happened again. A deputy sheriff of a nearby county got drunk in the tiny town of Dixon, Wyoming. He boasted that he and Tom Horn had mistakenly killed two men whom they thought were train robbers, but turned out not to be. This was totally separate from the two men whom Tom claimed to have killedbers, but turned out not to be. This was totally separate from the two men whom Tom claimed to have killed with Ed Tewksbury. And it just so happened that two prospectors had gone missing around the same time as the second set of murders. Tom Horn later admitted to the killings and claimed self-defense, and again claimed the dead men were train robbers

and that he was entitled to reward money from the Union Pacific. But this time, railroad detectives called his bluff and told him they wanted to see the bodies. Tom agreed and took them to a spot near Wilcox where railroad employees dug up the corpses of two men. Neither man had a weapon, nor were they known train robbers or members of the Wild Bunch. More than likely, they were the two missing prospectors who were unlucky to be in Tom's vicinity. Tom's friends and employers, namely Rich Cattleman, rushed to defend him and see that he wasn't charged with these latest murders. Tom Horn was the last person they wanted talking to the authorities. Their clout prevailed, and Tom was not charged. His benefactors did insist that he lay low for a while, because he

was now associated with four more murders. Tom did as he was told and disappeared for a while. Where he went, nobody ever knew. But while he stayed out of sight, the manhunt for Butch and Sundance and the rest of the Wild Bunch started to gain results. Maybe it was a coincidence that the manhunt started to improve without Tom Horn, maybe it wasn't. But either way, Tom made sure that his name stayed involved, even if he wasn't. if he wasn't. While Tom was out causing chaos, the other law enforcement officials stuck to the plan of the still hunt. They finally tracked Lonnie Logan to his aunt's house in Missouri. He was shot and killed while trying to escape. His cousin, Robert Lee, was found in Cripple Creek, Colorado and taken in alive. Lee was later convicted of stealing U.S. mail instead of money and given 10 years in prison. In April of 1900, George Curry was killed in northern Utah.

Then Tom claimed he killed Lonnie Logan's brother, Harvey. Harvey, who was still very much alive, was offended and said, of course we know they have Tom Horn out shooting people from ambush, but he ain't come within a hundred miles of me. Harvey was caught in Tennessee in 1902 and sent to prison. He escaped in 1903 and eventually took his own life in 1904 to avoid capture again. and eventually took his own life in 1904 to avoid capture again. As for Butch and Sundance, they escaped to Bolivia with Sundance's girlfriend at a place,

and they may or may not have been killed by Bolivian soldiers in 1908, depending on the story you choose to believe. Tom Horn returned to Wyoming after his time in exile. He went back to riding the range for John Coble of the Iron Mountain Ranch Company. He was back on the prowl for cattle rustlers, and it didn't take him long to find one. Tom claimed he had evidence that a small-time rancher named Matt Rash was branding cows that were stolen from Iron Mountain. Tom also named Rash as the head of a rustling ring. Whether that was true or not is still unknown.

Tom anonymously posted a threatening note on Matt Rash's door, just like he had with Fred Powell. The note told Rash that he had 60 days to leave the area or he could stay and face the consequences. Rash lived just south of the Wyoming border in northern Colorado, and he chose to stay. On July 10, 1900, a neighbor was riding by Matt Rash's ranch. He stopped and went inside the cabin. He discovered Rash's dead body in a pool of blood.

Based on the position of the body and the blood trail, investigators told newspaper reporters that it looked like Matt had been eating at his table when someone entered his cabin and shot him in the back. After the first shot, he stood up and turned around, and then he was shot in the chest. He crashed to the floor and crawled a short distance before he died of his wounds. On October 10th, 1900, almost exactly three months after Matt Rash was killed,

his friend Isom Dart was murdered. Dart was a former slave and a well-respected cowboy, and he had also been accused of cattle rustling. Dart stepped out of his cabin and started to walk toward his corral when a shot rang out. It hit him in the chest and severed his spine. A second shot rang out, but no one knows where it went. The next day, two shell casings were found at the base of a tree. That was the place where the sniper lay in wait. They were casings from a.30-30 Winchester rifle, and Tom Horn was said to have been the only one around who used a.30-30 Winchester.

Matt Rash and Isom Dart were both cowboys from Texas who had come north with cattle drives and decided to stay, and that put them in conflict with the Big Ranchers. Suspicion quickly fell on a man who called himself Tom Hicks, and who was, of course, Tom Horn. Tom was never arrested or charged, and because the murders happened in Colorado, the Colorado newspapers called out the Big Ranchers and their hired killers, though not by name, of course. The Steamboat Pilot newspaper in Steamboat Springs, Colorado said,

there is certainly some fiend in human form somewhere in that section. The killing was the boldest, most defiant, reckless, and desperate ever committed anywhere. The newspaper might have been right at that time, but less than a year later, Tom would give them one to top it. And that was the one that finally brought him down.

Next time on Legends of the Old West, it's the final murder and the final controversial chapter in the saga of Tom Horn. As always in Tom's story, the full truth may never be known, but it doesn't change what happened. That's next week on the season finale here on Legends of the Old West. And members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials. to week. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships begin at just $5 per month. This series was researched and written by Michael Byrne. Original music by

Rob Valliere. Copy editing by me, Chris Wimmer, and I'm your host and producer. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. Check out our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, for more details. And join us on social media. We're at Old West Podcast on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Thanks for listening. So join Rakuten and start getting cash back at Sephora, Old Navy, Expedia, and other stores you love. You can even stack sales on top of cash back. Just start your shopping with Rakuten to save money at over 750 stores.

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