Jimmy orr

Jimmy Orr

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

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Jackie Dorothy

Jen kocher

Jen Kocher

Wyoming Life

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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. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Real Kid Curry"}]

Newland originally got to know Harvey Logan’s story when she was researching another historical figure, 

, 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.”

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, 

“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. 

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.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"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.

Kid Curry 6 Dawn at Kid Curry cabin inset 6 13 26

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<title>Wyoming History: Kid Curry May Not Have Been The Wild Gunman Legends Say He Was | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Harvey Logan, aka Kid Curry, was not the wild gunman Wild West legends have made him out to be, a historian discovered while researching The Kid. “He did become an outlaw, but there was a lot of good about him,” she said.

Wyoming History: Kid Curry May Not Have Been The Wild Gunman Legends Say He Was

Oliver Perry “O.P” Hanna — pioneer, Indian fighter, frontiersman and first settler in Sheridan County — was 30 years old when law and order came to Buffalo, Wyoming. 

He related just what these changes meant for the future state of Wyoming in his memoir, “An Old-Timer’s Story of the Old Wild West.” 

Hanna had gone West when he was just 16 and had seen many changes over his lifetime. 

One notable change came in 1881 when the new Johnson County was formed in the Powder River and Bighorn country. 

An organizational election had been held April 19, 1881, and the new county government formed on May 10 of that year, Hanna’s birthday. 

Buffalo was named the county seat and Johnson County originally included all of today’s Johnson County, Sheridan County and portions of Big Horn and Washakie counties east of the Big Horn River. 

Judges, lawyers and others were appointed to maintain the peace and court was soon called to session.

Hanna’s name was drawn as one of 16 men to serve on the county’s first grand jury, and he had to go to Buffalo to sit on the backlog of court trials. 

To illustrate the changes the new law and order was bringing to Buffalo was the fact that the new county courthouse had originally been a dance hall. 

The new county commission bought the building, transforming it to a place, they hoped, of decorum and respect. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Feuding Neighbors"}]

During the two weeks that Hanna was in Buffalo learning how to be a proper law-abiding citizen, trouble was brewing with his neighbors on Little Goose Creek. 

The town of Big Horn had a council, a cemetery and a vigilante committee, according to Sally Springer, author of “Big Horn City Tidbits of History.” 

It was this latter committee that had sprung into action, led by Elder Benton, who was the Baptist minister, resident doctor, dentist and veterinarian. 

“They condemned Buck Martin, who had settled on a ranch up the creek near Elder Benton, as an undesirable citizen,” Hanna wrote. 

Old “Buck” Martin, according to Springer, was a trapper, mountain man and miner who had built a “cabin of sorts” on what was later known as Kemp Creek. 

It is now the Bar 13 Ranch south of Big Horn.

“Buck was a loner who had an intense dislike for people and a mean streak to boot,” Stringer wrote. “Those who found it neighborly to stop by his cabin found a mountain lion chained to one of the interior cabin walls.” 

These visitors rarely came back for a second visit. 

Martin had put in a garden but did not fence it properly, and the horses and cattle got to it and destroyed some of the vegetables according to Hanna. 

Martin used his shotgun on the stock, filling their hides with fine shot. After a while, he began using coarser shot until one of Benton's mules got such a big dose that he died the next day. 

Benton rode up and down the creek, called the brethren together, and related his outrage. 

The vigilante committee decided that justice was needed for the murder of the mule and that Martin should hang.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"New Law & Order"}]

Unaware of what his neighbors were planning, Hanna was learning what it meant to be on the first grand jury in Buffalo. 

Judge Blair was the first judge to hold court in northern Wyoming, and when the 16 men of the jury appeared before him, he looked them over.

 Blair then promptly appointed Hanna as foreman. 

Hanna said that gave him a shock and after a few moments, he jumped to his feet in protest.

“Judge, you've made a very poor selection,” Hanna said. “I have never had anything to do with court or law in my life, and I don't know any more about it than a Crow Indian.”

Blair was not to be swayed and told Hanna, “Well, you can't learn any younger.”

Blair gave Hanna some instructions, an armful of documents, and the grand jury filed out to a little log cabin that was situated near the old dance hall, now converted into the courthouse. 

Hanna said he dropped his armload of documents on the table and shouted, "Boys, if you know what to do with those papers, come on and go to it. I don't.”

Fortunately for Hanna, jury member Ed Chapman was experienced in the legal business and explained what to do, and before long the new grand jury had things running smoothly. 

“We were in session about two weeks and made many indictments, as the country was full of thieves, crooks and murderers,” Hanna said. 

It was also full of lawyers ready to defend all the accused. 

Hanna was not the only one who was learning the ropes of law and order. The new justice of the peace for Buffalo was G.E.A. Moeller and he was not experienced in regulating law and order. 

According to Hanna, Moeller was presiding at his first case that had long, drawn-out arguments by the lawyers, objections to questions put to the witnesses, and they were not making any headway. 

All at once Moeller jumped up and shouted, “Stop the evidence! Stop the evidence! My mind is made up!” 

Moeller turned to the prisoner and said, “I fine you $100 and 60 days in jail.”

A lawyer started to protest, but Moeller threatened to put him in jail for contempt of court. The case was thus settled. 

“I am not sure, but that plan would work very effectively in many cases at the present time,” Hanna later wrote. 

As for  Moeller, he became one of the prominent citizens of Buffalo in later years.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"An Old-Fashioned Hanging "}]

Armed with his new knowledge of the law, Hanna returned home to Big Horn to discover that all his neighbors had gone up to Benton’s ranch to hang Buck Martin. 

He immediately grabbed his fastest horse, Buster, and rushed up to the ranch. 

“When I arrived, they were all greatly excited,” Hanna wrote. “Bill Davis was telling them the way the Vigilante Committee used to attend to men like Martin in ‘California.'” 

Davis had a new rope and was showing the men how to tie a hangman's knot. The Big Horn residents “were all excited,” and many of them were ready to take part in the hanging. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Hanna understood their motivation. "}]

“In those days, horses and mules were at a premium and it was a serious thing to lose one,” Hanna said. 

However, after spending two weeks on the county’s first grand jury, Hanna said he “felt differently about the hanging matter.”  

He got up on a wagon and made a talk to the people gathered around. 

Hanna said he told them that they now had a court to try criminals, and if they hung Martin they would be the first to break the law, and there would be some very sorry men. 

“I told them how that scene of a hanging man would be before them always,” Hanna said. “They began to cool off and, after talking it over, decided to escort Buck out of the country.”

The committee went to Martin’s cabin and told him of their decision. He was told very plainly that if he ever came back, he was doomed for the gallows.

The men hitched his team to the wagon, put all his belongings in it, told him to get in and drive, which he did. T

wo men were detailed to guide him to the Montana line 30 miles north. That was the last the townfolk ever heard of Buck Martin. 

“I was told by the good citizens that had I not arrived just when I did and made that talk about the grand jury and the law, they surely would have hung him,” Hanna said.

OP Hanna inset 3 Buffalo 1883 Early bridge over Clear Creek and Occidental Hotel Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum 6 6 26

<title>When Frontiersman OP Hanna Stopped A Lynch Squad From Hanging A Man For A Killing A Mule | Cowboy State Daily</title>

After serving on Johnson County’s first grand jury in 1881, OP Hanna suddenly developed a respect for the law, talking a lynch squad out of hanging a man for killing a mule. “Had I not arrived just when I did ... they surely would have hung him,” he said.

When Frontiersman OP Hanna Stopped A Lynch Squad From Hanging A Man For A Killing A Mule

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily reporter, Dale Killingbeck

Dale Killingbeck

The snowmelt from a long, strong winter 50 years ago seemed to mean a new eastern Idaho dam and reservoir on the Teton River to supply private canals and enhance the region’s agricultural base would be filled more quickly than anticipated.

By June 3, 1976, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Teton Dam project was considered completed, but contractors still needed to apply an anti-corrosion coating to its “water conveyance features in the outlet tunnel,” said Erika Lopez, a Bureau of Reclamation spokesperson.

The reservoir contained 234,259 acre-feet of water when the dam failed, sending a deluge downriver.

Those who lived through that flood a half-century ago still remember it as “one of the scariest days” of their lives.

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A 1996 Bureau of Reclamation report on the project 20 years after the historic flood caused by that failure states that on June 3, 1976, two small springs were discovered below the 305-foot-high dam. 

One was 600 feet and the other 900 feet away. They were considered “normal” for an embankment dam, an engineer reported.

Two days later, a construction worker inspecting the dam around 7:30 a.m. found muddy water flowing out of the dam’s right abutment, 15 feet above the stream bed. 

The flow increased, and then another leak was discovered. 

A whirlpool developed in the reservoir indicating water quickly escaping through the dam, the report states.

Warnings were issued downstream telling people to evacuate.

Heroic efforts by bulldozer operators on top of the dam failed to plug the leak and by 11:57 a.m., the potential disaster became a real one.

“Unfinished Teton Dam Collapses,” The Idaho Statesman reported on June 6, 1976. “Floods Sweep East Idaho Towns.”

The surging water hit Wilford, Sugar City, and Rexburg. 

Before the day was over, 11 people were dead, 112,000 acres of farmland under water, 20,000 livestock lost, 32 miles of railroad track destroyed, 4,000 homes flooded, 250 businesses impacted, 3,500 farm and ranch buildings damaged, and 65 canal systems for irrigation disrupted.

Those who were in the water’s path that day remember it well.

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Barbara Smith, 70, of Archer, Idaho, was a 19-year-old newlywed of three weeks and living in Rexburg. 

She had gone to a construction site to pick up her husband at noon. The day before, he had enlisted in the U.S. Army.

“It was one of scariest days of my entire life,” she said. “Certainly the people who lived through it, it is the turning point of their life. 

"Even my little sisters, who thought it was such an adventure, have stated that they did not know that their lives would change irreversibly that day.”

Smith said when she picked up her husband, he told her about the dam collapse and the evacuation orders.

The couple then drove to her parents home in Rexburg. 

They also had heard the news, but while her mother advocated for moving their vehicles to the top of a hill and taking stuff out of the basement, her dad thought there would only be a few inches of water.

He also shrugged off the various orders coming from law enforcement about evacuation.

“When we’d say, ‘Dad, dad are we going to leave?’ He’d say, ‘They cannot make us evacuate, but they can keep us from coming back — and we’re not leaving,’” she said. “He had a business on his property with a lot of machinery and equipment.”

Within two hours, Smith and the others watched the waters coming down the street where her parents lived, covering the gutters and then taking down a fence that surrounded the property. 

By the time it reached into their home they had witnessed logs, cows, machinery and tires floating past the house.

Smith said her parents’ home stood on a stone foundation while waters rose to be about 2.5 feet deep inside and about 5 feet deep on the outside, she said. 

They lost their vehicles. Her dad lost some of the equipment he rented as part of his business.

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Smith and her husband later that day took a canoe ride to the basement apartment in town where they were living. 

The water reached to the shelf in their closet a couple of feet from the ceiling. Everything had to be washed and cleaned repeatedly as they tried to salvage what they could.

“Here it is 50 years later and I have a bookcase that still has flood mud on the back of it even though it has been washed and scrubbed,” she said. “It was really fine and silty and it is just a reminder.”

Smith said the empty lots created after the flood washed away homes are fewer now in Rexburg, but some remain.

Jacob Haeberle, dean of General and Transfer Education at the College of Eastern Idaho in Idaho Falls, said he was a 4-year-old with his family trying to get back to their home in Rexburg when they were stopped by state police at a roadblock.

“We were coming back from a wedding in California, and we’d heard some stuff on the radio as we were coming into Idaho but nothing concrete,” he said. “We got stopped in Idaho Falls by the state police at a roadblock and the officer asked us where we were going and we told him we were going to Rexburg. 

"And he said, ‘It’s not there anymore.’”

Haeberle said the officer was mistaken, but they learned two other towns were destroyed. Rexburg was hit hard, but because some of the town was up on a hill it “wasn’t fully wiped off the map,” he said.

Haeberle said when his family got into town, they found their home that stood on a little hill was untouched, though floodwaters claimed their garage. A car the family owned and had at a repair facility in town also became a casualty.

“It was found two days later underneath two pickups,” he said.

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Lopez said for the 50th anniversary of the flood, the Bureau of Reclamation’s Columbia-Pacific Northwest Region Snake Field Office on June 5 sponsored a commemoration ceremony in collaboration with Teton Recreation Coalition partners.

“The overlook site got a brand new look,” she said. “It’s really beautiful.”

Interpretive panels placed by the Bureau of Reclamation now tell the story of the dam collapse and the cost to the communities below. 

The site also includes a new vault toilet, picnic area, and designated vehicle turnaround.

Fifty years after the disaster, Haeberle agrees that the impact and stories of the flood remain alive in the local region.

“The closer you are to Fremont County and Madison County in Idaho the bigger a deal it is,” he said. “But even in Idaho Falls there will be ‘before the flood’ and ‘after the flood’ dates in a person's life.”

Haeberle said the flood gets referenced often, and “every once in a while” there is talk about rebuilding the dam, but that “gets shouted down pretty quickly from people who remember what it was like.”

In some of older buildings and homes in Rexburg, the smell of the flood still remains and it “takes you right back to that time,” he said.

Smith said that while growing up, her parents often would mention “when they move back to Wyoming” because they had roots in Casper and had come to Idaho “by a turn of events.”  

The flood for them became the trigger to make the move, and her father sold his business and other properties. With her mom and younger sisters, they bought a ranch in the Cody area.

“My mom said that my dad never worked a day in his life after that because farming and ranching was such a joy,” she said. “He was a happy man and it was all because of the flood.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Another Dam"}]

It was June 5, 1976, whe a dam on the Teton River collapsed, sending a torrent of water into the Idaho towns below. “It was one of scariest days of my entire life,” said a survivor, adding that 50 years later, the memories of the disaster are still vivid.

Leo Wolfson For Cowboy State Daily

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