On this day in history Harvey “Kid Curry” Logan, the second in command of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch gang is sent to jail. He is given twenty years hard labor in a Tennessee penitentiary. Logan was arguably closer to Butch Cassidy than the Sundance Kid. Cassidy probably trusted Logan more than Sundance and relied on him to help him run the gang. Logan came from Kentucky but as a child moved to Missouri. Here he began his life of crime and he was believed to have shot and killed a man, while still a teenager. From then on he was a professional criminal and was always on the wrong side of the law. Soon he hooked up with a gang and soon he became a bank robber and by all accounts a good one. During one bank raid, some innocent people were killed and the local law began to set out to catch him. Logan left the state and headed toward Wyoming and he went to one of the Hole-in-the Wall hideouts. The area where he hid was desolate and uninhabited and it was ideal for fugitives from justice. Here Logan met Cassidy. At this time Cassidy formed a gang and appointed Logan as his second in command. Cassidy and Logan soon formed a small gang of desperadoes. Another prominent member of the gang was Robert Parker, a former butcher but now a bank robber. Among the other members were notorious outlaws such as Ben Kirkpatrick known as the Tall Texan. The gang soon began to rob banks and trains across several states. They operated in Utah, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming and Nevada. The made their headquarters the Hole-in-the-Wall. Logan was possibly the wildest of the bunch and he may have killed up to ten lawmen and an unknown number of other people. The gang was able to evade the law for many years and not many lawmen dared to enter the Hole-in-the-Wall area because there were so many outlaws there. The gang became known as the Wild Bunch and soon they became some of the most notorious outlaws in the West. They were highly organized and they even had their own lawyers.
The Pinkerton’s Detective Agency was hired to track them down and bring them to justice but not even they could bring the Wild Bunch to Justice. However, the West was changing and the forces of law and order were getting the upper hand and the days of the old-style outlaw were numbered. The Pinkerton’s finally began to make real progress against the gang. They began arresting individual gang members. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid realized that things were changing and decided to escape to first Argentina and then Bolivia. No one is really certain of what became of them. The fate of Logan is reasonably well-documented. After he was sentenced to jail, he only served a year. He managed to escape from jail and fled out west. He made it to Colorado but he was pursued by local lawmen who wounded him in a shootout. Logan did manage to get away but he was badly wounded and he knew he would soon be caught. It is believed that Logan shot himself rather than be caught and spend the rest of his days in prison.