Butch Cassidy In Wyoming: Outlaw Buddy Matt Warner Started A Criminal Life Early

This is the second in a series about the famous outlaw Butch Cassidy and his connection to Wyoming. In the first, read about how the notorious criminal found a hideout in Wyoming after his first bank robbery.

There was but one place in Brown’s Hole to shop. That was John Jarvie’s ranch and general store.

Here the pioneers of Brown’s Hole, near the spot where Wyoming, Utah and Colorado join, could buy just about everything they needed.

There was Indian flour and sugar, new saddles and boots, wagon supplies and ammunition. There were even teepee poles for the Indians stacked outside, and there was bootleg whiskey — a very popular item.

Supplies and equipment, though, weren’t the only things traded in the store. Rumor and gossip were traded as well in what was the main social center of the Brown’s Hole world.

So perhaps that is where Matt Warner’s friend, Elzy Lay — an eventual Butch Cassidy friend and Wild Bunch member — heard about a Jewish merchant who was transporting some stolen goods through Brown’s Park.

The man’s store in Rock Springs had gone bust, Lay told his friend Warner, and creditors had attached the man’s goods.

The merchant — let’s just call him Goldberg like Warner did in his memoir, Last of the Bandit Riders — had hired a Diamond Mountain man named Bill Sparks to steal those goods under cover of darkness and escape with them to the Uintah Basin, where he planned to sell it all off.

Warner had a visitor at the time. A young cousin named Lew McCarty, 13, and robbing those goods all sounded like quite a fun adventure to him.

Warner decided it would be a safe job for the two to hold Goldberg up and relieve him of the goods. The storekeeper, he reasoned, would not be able to complain to authorities since he himself had stolen the items from his creditors.

Sparks, the man’s driver, was willing to help with the caper for a share of the loot.

Lay, who hadn’t yet fully crossed over to the outlaw way of life, would take some loot in exchange for the information, but didn’t want to take any part in the job itself.

A Simple Plan

Sparks was to drive the covered wagon with the merchant’s goods at an easy trot, while Warner and McCarty would lay in wait behind some brush, along with four horses and pack saddles to carry everything away.

When the wagon rounded the bend, Warner and Lew popped out as planned in front of the wagon, guns at the ready, yelling for Sparks and the merchant to stick their hands up.

Sparks, true to plan, threw the brakes on hard, reining the horses so hard, they practically sat down on their rear haunches.

Warner, in his account of the holdup, described the merchant as so scared he forgot to throw up his hands.

“His jaw dropped, his eyes bunged out, and he turned as white as a dead man,” Warner wrote in his memoir, “Last of the Bandit Riders.”

Sparks, meanwhile, was putting on quite the show, hollering and begging McCarty not to kill him.

The bandits tied Goldberg to a tree and Sparks to a wheel of the wagon, so they could unload all of the loot without interference. Once they’d finished, they untied Sparks and Goldberg, ordering them into the wagon and telling them to drive away fast, without looking back.

Sparks, though, only drove a little ways before he accused Goldberg of being in on the holdup. Then he forced the hapless merchant from the wagon, leaving him to walk.

An Unusual Masquerade Ball

Warner’s Ranch on Diamond Mountain bordered Brown’s Hole on its south side. At the ranch, the four men each took out the things they wanted from the loot, but, even split four ways, there were an awful lot of things left over that none of the cowboys had any interest in.

“We didn’t rightly know what to do with women’s clothes, trinkets, and jewelry, men’s outfits no self-respecting cowboy would be seen in, and other stuff a decent cowpuncher wouldn’t be caught with,” Warner wrote in his memoir. “We didn’t want to make peddlers of ourselves, and we didn’t want to throw it away.”

Warner eventually thought of a novel distribution method, though. He would take all these unwanted items down to John Jarvie’s store. The Scottish merchant could distribute them to Browns Hole residents, along with an invitation to attend the dance at the schoolhouse next Friday night, wearing the clothes.

Before too long, everyone in Brown’s Park had heard about Warner’s caper from Jarvie’s store, and everyone knew all about the idea to wear them to the forthcoming dance party, as if it were a grand masquerade ball.

“The whole valley thought it was a great joke and was laughing about it,” Warner wrote in his memoir. “It ain’t on record, either, that anybody refused to take the stolen goods.”

Jarvie helped the residents mix and match the clothing, creating unique and colorful outfits.

Store clothes paired with cowboy clothes were topped with 10-gallon range hats and cheap derbies supported with high-heeled boots and brogans — a heavy ankle boot. The more mis-matched the items were, the better the costume.

“One old weather-beaten rancher was dressed like a minister, except he had his gun belt and gun on the outside of his long black coat,” Warner wrote. “A cowboy was dressed like a gambler with a bright green vest and high hat, but persisted in wearing his leather chaps, high-heeled boots and spurs.”

Each time a new person arrived at the dance, shrieks of laughter and stomping would greet them and their new outfit. It was so loud, the fiddler could hardly be heard, and the party kept on going this way until daylight.

That was Warner’s very first holdup — but it certainly wouldn’t be his last.

The caper gave Butch Cassidy’s eventual friend, Warner, the sense that this sort of thing was “easy and made a hero of a feller.”

Warner wasn’t even 19 when he pulled this first robbery. He’d run to Brown’s Hole when he was a lad of 14, thinking he’d killed someone over a girl. He had little idea yet how easily things could go wrong when frightened men and guns mix it up.

The ease of that first robbery made it inevitable, Warner wrote in his memoir, that his footsteps would travel further and further along the path of the Outlaw Trail, and to a life of crime that would eventually put him in prison for five years on a charge of voluntary manslaughter.

Contact Renee Jean at renee@cowboystatedaily.com

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.