Convinced Harvey Logan — known worldwide as the Old West outlaw Kid Curry — wasn’t the wild gunman his legacy had made him out to be, historian Dawn Newland was determined to prove it.
Born Harvey Alexander Logan in 1867, Logan was a known gunman who rode with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid's infamous Wild Bunch gang during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Logan was personally involved in shootouts with police and civilians and participated in several bank and train robberies.
After their escapades ended, Logan was dubbed “the wildest of the Wild Bunch” with claims circulating that he had killed at least nine law enforcement officers in five shootings and another two men in other confrontations.
These accounts are not quite true according to modern historians, including Newland.
In 2010, Newland had joined a historical reenactment of a 250-mile trek wagon train from Miles City to Deadwood. Along the way, she met Dr. James Curtis, affectionately known as “Montana Doc.”
Curtis was a wagon master who owned the old town of Landesky where Kid Curry had killed Pike Landesky and started his outlaw career in the late 1800s.
During their campfire talks, “Montana Doc” had dared Newland to prove him wrong that Kid Curry was the worst of the Wild Bunch. As a result of their banter, Newland has spent the past 15 years researching the true life of Harvey Logan.
Montana Doc encouraged Newland with her research and would often joke with Newland that she was “Kid’s riding pard.”
If a few weeks passed by without an update, Doc would ask if she had been down at the hideout waiting for the posse to clear away.
Newland was driven by this constant teasing to continue her quest to prove to Doc that the Kid was not a wild killer.
“The people that loved Harvey, loved him till the end of his days and stood beside him,” Newland said. “The friends he had were loyal friends and said he was as good a man as could ever be found.”
Newland’s research took her to the original courthouse where Logan’s court documents were still housed, to his hideouts and even to his own family who shared with Newland original history still in their possession.
The Real Kid Curry
Newland originally got to know Harvey Logan’s story when she was researching another historical figure, Lucy Sanderson Tressler Thornhill, a young neighbor who was accused of being the lover of all three Logan brothers.
“I was looking to right a wrong I felt had been done against the woman accused of being his lover,” Newland said. “I did not know in finding Lucy's story, it would eventually lead me to Kid Curry's complete story.”
Newland said that during her research, not only did she prove that Lucy was not the lover of all three brothers, she also started gathering new information on Harvey Logan that had been handed down by his family in Oklahoma.
“I got to be good friends with them, and then last year they told me that mine is the only story that has ever treated Harvey like more than just a wild killer,” Newland said.
Newland described Kid Curry as a soft-spoken man who was a very quiet and articulate gentleman. He was a ladies man and earned his nickname not from his criminal activities but from his skill with a horse.
“He was as good a horseman as ever rode into Montana, and that's how he got his name,” Newland said. “He was a bronc riding kid who, at 16, rode the rough string for everybody.”
However, when Kid Curry had been drinking, Newland admitted that he was very dangerous. She said that he liked to dress well and was what she described as a transformationist.
“He could be clean shaven and handsome one day and he could grow a beard in two days and be on the run again,” Newland said. “He learned to be pretty evasive.”
Oral History Paints A Nice Guy
Newland said that Kid Curry was a ghost because most everything anybody wrote about him wasn't really true. She said that Logan laughed about his fake reputation and had a cryptic sense of humor.
Newland collected these descriptions of Harvey Logan from both first-person accounts and the oral histories of ranching families that knew him personally.
“You go into Montana even yet around Landusky and the local ranchers will sit and tell you stories all day long of their grandparents hanging out with Kid Curry,” Newland said.
One family told her how their many greats grandmother was a widow that Logan befriended. He would get a team of cowboys together to gather all her cattle and brand them for her.
They would also do other chores for her such as chop her wood for the winter.
“I think he's been misrepresented and was a good guy,” Newland said. “A lot of things went wrong in his early life, and he did become an outlaw, but there was a lot of good about him.”
Newland said that Logan’s childhood friend was Jim Thornhill who married Lucy, the woman accused of being Kid Curry’s lover. Thornhill stood by Logan through all the years he was on the run with the Hole in the Wall gang.
“Thornhill said that Kid Curry was good at everything, and a loyal friend,” Newland said.
She also said that she uncovered another account that said even though Kid Curry was a known outlaw, he had a string of good men that stood behind him.
What gave Harvey Logan his wild gunman reputation were the Pinkertons.
According to Newland, during the 1930s and the Pulp Western era, a man named James D. Horan, a Pinkerton man, wrote about the last of the outlaws.
“It was complete fabrication and most historians used his books as references,” Newland said. “I've completely dispelled pretty much everything I ever wrote.”
Historian Michael Bell agrees. He told Cowboy State Daily that based on the evidence in the Pinkerton archives, Newland is correct that the “Pinks” inflated Harvey Logan’s role as a threat to the Union Pacific Railroad and the banks, particularly after 1903.
“By then the Pinks knew that Butch and Sundance were in South America but also that the UP and the ABA were not going to pay for an expedition to go after them, so they made Logan into the bogeyman,” Bell said.
Bell explained that the business model for the Pinkerton’s was to create a threat to get people to pay for their services.
Pike Landusky: Murder or Self Defense
In late 1894, Kid Curry, the soft-spoken ladies man, went on the run and became an outlaw after a bar fight ended with the other man dead.
Montana miner and lawman Powell “Pike” Landusky had accused Curry of being involved romantically with his stepdaughter, Elfie, which was later proved to be Curry’s brother, not Harvey Logan.
Unaware of the mistaken identity, Landusky, according to eyewitnesses, confronted Curry and attacked him, defending her honor. Landusky then filed assault charges against Curry, who was arrested and beaten while in custody.
On Dec. 27, 1894, Curry caught Landusky at a local saloon and hit Landusky, stunning him.
Believing the fight was over, Curry began walking away but Landusky pulled his pistol and began threatening the unarmed Curry. It was then that Thornhill gave Curry his pistol. Landusky's gun jammed and Curry’s own shot rang true, killing Landusky.
Curry did not wait around for a trial even though the judge at the inquest had ruled he had acted in self-defense. Curry believed that he would not get a fair trial and went on the run, soon joining the outlaw trail.
Modern historians now say that it was a clear act of self-defense and marked the beginning of Kid Curry the Outlaw.
“When you, when you Google it, the fact pops up that Kid Curry murdered Pike Landusky,” Newland said. “I've sat with all of the court records and the witness accounts and Jim Thornhill's account and, he didn't murder him.”
Bell agrees that this is another incident that became twisted in the life of Kid Curry.
:Opinion is divided as to whether or not he would have been acquitted on the grounds of self defense if he had stood trial,” Bell said. “But the Pinks removed all nuance from their account of the event.”
Newland asserts that Landusky was a known bully who had killed people with his bare hands. Furthermore, he wanted the water rights for the land Kid Curry’s brother and Thornhill had homesteaded.
“He actually had Kid Curry, and one of his brothers arrested,” Newland said. “He filed false cattle charges and he took him out and tied him in a barn and beat Curry in unspeakable ways.”
The Outlaw Trail
Newland read all the original transcripts and firmly believes that this injustice forced Curry on the run.
He became an outlaw and later did kill several officers, just not as many as was later attributed to him by the Pinkertons who needed to justify their expensive chase to bring him down.
“It is all relative — Logan did not need his reputation inflated given that by 1904 he had wounded two policemen in Knoxville and robbed two or three trains and probably one bank,” Bell said.
According to Bell, the Pinkertons inflated Curry’s kill list by adding in Tyler & Jenkins, Gibbons & LeSeuer, Winters, and a couple of lawmen in the 1899 Turkey Canon fight.
None of these deaths can be definitively pinned on Logan.
Newland has spent countless hours following the trail of Kid Curry, including hiking into his hide out and visiting the descendants of his Logan family.
“With the Kid Curry story, there's been books written about him that I can just punch holes in,” Newland said. “They don't have it right and a lot of it was because they used the Pinkerton files, which were totally manufactured and wrong.”
Newland is currently compiling her proof into a historical novel, including the oral histories she has collected that show that Curry did not die in a shoot-out some Pinkerton’s claim took his life.
“It's based on all fact, and then I'm putting together the compendium that will have all of the paperwork and the documentation of where I found them,” Newland said.
Bell said that he is eager to see the proof that she has since even the Pinkertons who would have preferred to have had a live outlaw to pursue conceded that Harvey Logan had committed suicide after the shoot-out in Parachute, Colorado in 1904.
“Alan and Robert Pinkerton were ambivalent about agreeing with their own detectives - Spence and McParland - who said Logan died after Parachute,” Bell said. “But by 1910 they were conceding that he was dead and dismissed sightings of him in South America.”
Newland, however, is adamant that not only was Harvey Logan misaligned in the press as a wild outlaw but that he lived long after he was declared dead by suicide.
“I have tons of documentation of people seeing him after that,” Newland said. “Jim Thornhill, his best friend, said, yes, they can call him dead, but we still write. Harvey Logan lived up into the 1930s.”
Montana Doc, the man who instigated the research into proving just who Harvey Logan really was, died before she could share with him all that she discovered.
The two had met up on a research trip and, at dinner that night, Newland believed that she finally convinced Doc that Lucy was not Logan’s lover.
“Right after supper that eve, Doc had a massive heart attack and I did CPR on him until the medics arrived, but he was gone,” Newland said. “He was in his late 70s and an active fellow right up until he stepped over to ride with Kid Curry across the broad sunset.”
Whether or not Harvey Logan survived his outlaw years remains a mystery, but modern historians now agree that the Pinkertons painted a wilder reputation for Kid Curry than really existed and Newland is certain that even Montana Doc would agree that the Kid was portayed much worse than he really was.
Historians base the Kid’s more mild reputation on first-person records rather than a book written by a former Pinkerton agent.
Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com.
