Bandit Heaven: The Hole-in-the-Wall Gangs and the Final Chapter of the Wild West

“many fans of Old West banditry will overlook the book’s weaknesses and enjoy its rehashing of oft-told tales.”

The 1969 release of the Academy Award-winning film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid created something of a growth industry that continues to this day. Scores, probably hundreds, of books, magazine articles, documentaries, sequels, and prequels attempt to capitalize on the notoriety of the two outlaws and their criminal compadres. Most are popular histories and family reminiscences, many of which are known to rely on embellishments, exaggerations, even fabrications to bolster what little is actually known for fact.

In any case, author Tom Clavin seems to have consulted them all in the preparation of Bandit Heaven. The book quotes freely from numerous sources in its telling. Unfortunately, the result is more a salad than a stew—the flavors never quite meld into a cohesive narrative. The book is littered with 111 footnotes, usually explanations that could have been accommodated in the narrative, or asides. Readers may come to believe the footnotes are there to give the appearance, if not the actuality, of scholarship.

The words of the book’s title first appear on page 11, when the author writes generally about the need for hideouts for rustled livestock. “When one such place was found, the first ‘bandit heaven,’ was born.” From that point on in the book Bandit Heaven is rendered with capital letters, as if it were a distinct place rather than a contrived description of what amounts to the entirety of the western half of the nation. In a more realistic vein, the author does focus somewhat on three known refuges for outlaws on the run: Wyoming’s Hole in the Wall; Brown’s Hole where Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming meet; and Robbers Roost in Utah, which gets the least attention of the three.

There are a number of factual errors in the book. For example, Clavin repeats a common error: “On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Point in Utah, the last spike was pounded in to complete the transcontinental railroad.” The truth is, the rails met at Promontory Summit, many miles from where he claims. He misplaces the Mormons: “In 1844 Smith and his fervent followers were in Carthage, Illinois . . . He and his brother Hyrum were tossed in jail. On June 27, a mob dragged them out of their cell and lynched them.” While the brothers were shot and killed (not hanged) by a mob in Carthage, the Mormon community centered around their own city of Nauvoo, not Carthage.

Matt Warner, born Willard Erastus Christiansen, is mentioned—deservedly so—several times in the book. Sadly, almost every account departs from the facts. “When the young suitors finally fought over her, Erastus cracked his rival in the head with a rock,” the author writes about the young boy’s reason for leaving home. Actually, Warner beat the boy with a fence picket, what he called “a spratling.” In his telling of the gunfight for which Warner was tried and imprisoned, the author misstates almost every aspect of the event, from the reason Warner was there to the number of foes in the fight, writing at one point, “the trio was ambushed by two men,” and later writes they were “attacked by three shooters (as described earlier)” and that Warner was “able to kill all three of the attackers” when, in fact, two were killed and one wounded.

In writing about Butch Cassidy robbing the Castle Gate Mine payroll the author says, “the two bandits exited Meeker, leaving clouds of dust in their wake.” Meeker, Colorado, is nowhere near Castle Gate, Utah. In a footnote he reports a gunfight in front of “the Star Saloon on Austin Street in Jefferson, Utah,” but that incident took place in Texas, not Utah, where there is no town of Jefferson.

Then there’s the question of the “Wild Bunch.” Clavin, like others before him, writes as if there were some formal organization of outlaws. But the phrase was invented by newspaper writers to sensationalize often unrelated crimes. The closest to the truth is when the author quotes a source saying, “Public enemy number one was a ‘train robbers syndicate,’ the term he [William Pinkerton] used for Butch Cassidy and his mix-and-match companions who comprised the Wild Bunch gangs.” Mix-and-match, ad hoc, comings-and-goings in various disparate, informal, partnerships more accurately describes what has been romanticized as the “Wild Bunch.”

Still, many fans of Old West banditry will overlook the book’s weaknesses and enjoy its rehashing of oft-told tales. Time and technology did not eliminate crime in the West, any more than crime has been eliminated anywhere. However, as Clavin concludes, “When authorities could be alerted so quickly about a train robbery, as had happened with the Tipton heist, the world was becoming too modern for thieves and rustlers, even those who felt safe in Bandit Heaven.” (As if there were such a place.)