The Wild Bunch Gang
Cassidy and Lay began hiding out at what was called "Robbers Roost", in Utah. Girlfriends Maude Davis and Ann Bassett joined them there, Lay having ended his relationship with Ann's sister, Josie, who by that time was involved in a relationship with Lay's outlaw friend Will "News" Carver. In April, 1897, the two women were sent home, while Cassidy and Lay began planning the robbery of a payroll shipment in Castle Gate, Utah. In a recent September 26, 2006 History Channel documentary on the Old West, this robbery is described as Cassidy's boldest. On April 21, 1897, the payroll arrived, and Cassidy and his gang members simply walked out in broad daylight and took it at gunpoint. In the robbery they took $7,000. A gang member named Joe Walker is alleged to have disabled the telegraph lines to prevent word of the robbery being put out to nearby law enforcement.
By this time, Maude and Elzy had married and Maude was pregnant with Lay's child. After the birth of their daughter, Marvel, Maude insisted he leave the outlaw life and settle down. He refused. Cassidy and Lay traveled to New Mexico, and by this time were calling their gang the "Wild Bunch". There, they worked for a short time on the "WS Ranch", before heading north to Wyoming. They committed their most famous robbery on June 2, 1899, by robbing a Union Pacific train near Wilcox, Wyoming. Following the robbery, they fled to the Hole-in-the-Wall, successfully evading posses that were in pursuit. Kid Curry, who was by this time a member of the gang, killed Converse County Sheriff Josiah Hazen during that pursuit. The gang split up in different directions for a time, which was a common action following any of their robberies.
Read more about this topic: Elzy Lay
Famous quotes containing the words wild, bunch and/or gang:
“The mountainous region of the State of Maine stretches from near the White Mountains, northeasterly one hundred and sixty miles, to the head of the Aroostook River, and is about sixty miles wide. The wild or unsettled portion is far more extensive. So that some hours only of travel in this direction will carry the curious to the verge of a primitive forest, more interesting, perhaps, on all accounts, than they would reach by going a thousand miles westward.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Don: I’m not going near that country club.
Wick: Why not?
Don: They’re all a bunch of hypocrites. I don’t like to be whispered about—”Look who’s here from New York, the Birnam brothers. Or rather the nurse and the invalid.””
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“What lies behind facts like these: that so recently one could not have said Scott was not perfect without earning at least sorrowful disapproval; that a year after the Gang of Four were perfect, they were villains; that in the fifties in the United States a nothing-man called McCarthy was able to intimidate and terrorise sane and sensible people, but that in the sixties young people summoned before similar committees simply laughed.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)