The bartender’s quarrel had already turned ugly, and Harvey Logan knew the man across the room wanted him dead. Powell Landusky, the Missouri River Fur Company trader who had nursed a grudge against Logan for months, had just threatened him at gunpoint in a saloon at the edge of the Montana badlands. Logan turned to walk away. Someone pressed a pistol into his hands—one of his brothers.
When the shooting stopped, Landusky lay on the floor with a bullet in his head, and everything that Harvey Logan had tried to leave behind caught up with him in an instant. He was twenty-seven years old, a wanted man, and the life he had built since leaving Iowa was gone. Harvey Alexander Logan was born in 1867 in Tama County, Iowa, the third of six children in a family that never had enough. His father died young, and his mother packed up the household and moved to Dodson, Missouri, a small town outside Kansas City, hoping for something better.
Instead, she died too, in 1876, leaving Harvey and his siblings orphans. Their aunt and uncle, Lizzie and Hiram Lee, took them in and gave them a home. Later, Harvey and three of his brothers moved to Texas. Harvey found work as a butcher at the Cross L Ranch near Big Spring, and it was there that he met Flatnose George Curry, a man who would change the direction of his life.
The two became close friends, close enough that Harvey eventually took Curry’s last name as his own. Trouble found him early. After a bar brawl in Colorado, Harvey knew he had to get out of sight, so he headed to southern Wyoming to start over. The following year, he and his brothers Johnny and Lonnie settled at a horse ranch in Chouteau County, Montana, just south of the Landusky Mining Camp.
On October 2, 1894, Harvey and Johnny Logan, along with their brother-in-law Lee Self, got into a dispute with their neighbor James Ross. By the time it was over, Harvey was charged with assault with a dangerous weapon. It was the first charge, and it set the young cowboy on a path he would never leave. Not long after, another incident erupted, this time with Powell Landusky, the miner after whom the camp was named.
Landusky attacked Harvey because he believed Harvey was having an affair with his daughter. Logan fought back. Landusky filed a complaint and had him arrested. A judge ruled in Logan’s favor, but a formal trial was still scheduled.
The two men kept crossing paths, and the hostility festered. Then came the night in the saloon, the argument, the gun, and the shot that killed Landusky. Fearing he would never get a fair trial for murder, Logan fled. Then came a revelation that twisted everything.
Landusky’s daughter announced she was pregnant, but the baby was not Harvey’s. It was Lonnie’s, his brother’s son. The news changed nothing about the charge against Harvey, but it would shape his family’s loyalties and his own bitterness for years to come. Now a wanted man, Harvey Logan fled to New Mexico and fell in with the infamous Black Jack Ketchum gang, continuing his life of crime.
But he could not resist returning to Montana, driven by the belief that James Winters was trying to claim a reward for his capture. In a violent confrontation in 1896, Harvey and his brothers faced Winters. During the clash, Johnny Logan was killed. Grieving and once again on the run, Harvey and Lonnie rejoined the Black Jack Ketchum gang.
But a disagreement with the gang’s leader, Thomas “Blackjack” Ketchum, split them apart, and the brothers went to Colorado, where they found work on a farm near Sand Gulch. Harvey’s criminal nature did not change. He quickly formed a new gang, bringing in his brother Lonnie, Walt Putman, Tom O’Day, and his old friend George Curry. Trouble followed them wherever they went.
In 1897, Harvey was implicated in the murder of Deputy Sheriff William Dean of Powder River, Wyoming, during a horse theft. After narrowly escaping Montana, Harvey Logan and his gang robbed a bank in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, in June of that year. Most of the party got away, but Tom O’Day was caught when his horse panicked. The remaining bandits were eventually captured in Fergus County, Montana.
In the ensuing gunfight, Logan was wounded in the wrist and arrested along with Walt Putman and George Curry. They were imprisoned in Deadwood, South Dakota—and on October 31, 1897, they escaped. Logan then teamed up with the Sundance Kid and Flatnose George Curry to rob a train of the Southern Pacific Railroad in Humboldt, Nevada, on July 14, 1898. The loot came to only about $450, a meager return for such a risk.
In 1899, the Wild Bunch—including Logan—robbed the Union Pacific Railroad near Wilcox, Wyoming. That robbery touched off a fierce chase that ended in a furious gunfight between the posse and the bandits, costing Sheriff Joe Hazen his life. The Wild Bunch escaped to their Hole-in-the-Wall hideout on the Colorado-Utah border. Pinkerton detective Charles Siringo was given the task of investigating the outlaw gang.
Logan joined forces with Butch Cassidy and a group of criminals in New Mexico. On July 11, 1899, they hijacked a train near Folsom, New Mexico. Their success was short-lived. Sheriff Ed Farr and his team caught up with them at Turkey Creek, and a fierce gun battle erupted.
Elzy Lay and Sam Ketchum were wounded, Sheriff Farr was killed, and Deputy Henry Love was also injured. Logan and Cassidy managed to escape. Harvey eventually found refuge in Fanny Porter’s brothel in San Antonio. There he met Della Moore, also known as Annie Rogers.
The two began a romantic relationship that lasted several years. Their peaceful existence was shattered when Lonnie Curry, Harvey’s friend, was killed in a gunfight with law enforcement. Harvey was devastated, and his grief compounded just two months later when George Curry, his best friend, was also killed. On April 17, 1900, Sheriff Jesse M.
Tyler pursued Curry after he rustled some cattle near Moab, Utah. In the ensuing gunfight, Curry was shot dead. Harvey Logan’s criminal life continued with his accomplice Will Carver. In March, they were discovered in St.
Johns, Arizona, suspected of involvement in the Wilcox robbery. Sheriff Edward Beers tried to arrest them, but they escaped quickly. Harvey and Carver fled to Alma, New Mexico, where they met up with Butch Cassidy again. Along the way, Sheriff George Scarborough and cowboy Walter Birchfield set out to hunt them down.
Harvey was one step ahead and ambushed both of them on April 5, killing Scarborough and wounding Birchfield. The loss of George Curry had filled Harvey with anger and a thirst for vengeance. He traveled north and, on May 26, killed Grand County Sheriff John Tyler and his deputy Sam Jenkins. Still on the run, Harvey rejoined the Wild Bunch, and on August 29, 1900, they robbed a train near Tipton, Wyoming, taking about $55,000.
The group then split, with Logan and Ben Kilpatrick heading for Fort Worth, Texas. Meanwhile, Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and Will Carver robbed the First National Bank in Winnemucca, Nevada, on September 19, taking about $22,000. The following year, members of the Wild Bunch—Harvey Logan, Will Carver, Butch Cassidy, Ben Kilpatrick, and the Sundance Kid—gathered at Hell’s Half Acre in Fort Worth, Texas, to celebrate. They made a fatal mistake: they posed for a portrait.
When the Pinkertons got hold of the photograph, it quickly appeared on countless wanted posters across the country. In 1901, William Carver was ambushed and shot dead by Sheriff Elijah Briant and his deputies in Sonora, Texas. He died just three hours later, leaving Harvey and the rest of the Wild Bunch heartbroken and furious. Determined to get revenge, Harvey and several members of the gang hijacked a Union Pacific train near Wagner, Montana, on July 3, 1901, and took about $40,000.
The group split up and went in different directions, but Harvey was still not satisfied. On July 26, 1901, he killed Jim Winters, the man who had killed his brother John in 1896. Harvey then went to Tennessee, where his girlfriend Annie Rogers was arrested in Nashville that month for transferring notes from the Montana robbery. But Harvey’s anger was not quenched.
On December 13, 1901, he killed two Knoxville policemen, William Dinwiddle and Robert Saylor, as they attempted to arrest him. Despite being chased by Pinkerton agents and other law enforcement officials, Harvey returned to Montana for a time. Then, on November 30, 1902, Curry was in a Knoxville billiards hall when he got into an altercation with a lawman and was arrested. He was sentenced to twenty years of hard labor and fined $5,000 for robbery.
On June 27, 1903, he escaped from prison. Many historians have suggested that a police officer accepted a bribe of $88,000 to help him escape, but that has never been proven. Logan was involved in another train robbery a year later, this time near Parachute, Colorado. A team of lawmen caught up with the outlaws, and during the confrontation Logan was injured.
Facing justice and prison, he chose instead to take his own life. William Pinkerton, head of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, had nothing but contempt for Logan, calling him the worst outlaw in America. According to Pinkerton, Logan did not have a single redeeming trait—the only criminal he knew who had no good point at all. Harvey Logan was buried in Pioneer Cemetery in Lynwood, overlooking Glenwood Springs, Colorado, a short distance from the memorial to legendary gunman Doc Holliday.
Kid Curry remained one of the Old West’s most notorious and intriguing outlaws. His life was filled with adventure, violence, and tragedy. Cut short at the age of thirty-seven, his legacy has lived on—a symbol of the lawlessness and danger of the frontier, and of the spirit of rebellion and independence that defined the era.
