Early Day Outlaws

The old West produced some tolerably lurid gunslingers. Their hole card was a single-action frontier model .45 Colt, and their long suit was fanning it a split second quicker than similarly inclined gents. This talent sometimes postponed their obsequies quite a while, providing they weren’t pushed into taking up rope spinning from the loop end of a lariat by a wearied public. Through choice or force of circumstances these parties sometimes threw in with the “wild bunch” – rough riding, shooting hombres, prone to disregard the customary respect accorded other people’s cattle brands. Kid Curry’s stomping ground in the 1880s was the Little Rockies country about forty miles southwest of here. On July 3, 1901, Curry and his partners, Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and Deaf Charlie, pulled off a premature Independence Day celebration by holding up the Great Northern Railway’s No. 3 passenger train and blowing the express car safe near this point. Montana’s most famous train robbery netted the crooks a bag of gold coins and $40,000 in unsigned and worthless banknotes. Soon after, Curry and his gang departed Montana.