Wild Bunch gang leader Butch Cassidy (real name Robert LeRoy Parker) and cohort the Sundance Kid (Harry Alonzo Longabaugh) are known for having robbed trains and committed various other crimes without killing anyone. Not so Wild Bunch member Kid Curry, born Harvey A. Logan in Iowa in 1867. In my 2012 book He Rode With Butch and Sundance: The Story of Harvey “Kid Curry” Logan I note that Curry has generally been credited with eight or nine killings, some sources stating the figure as high as 40. But such figures are unreliable. “The only killing that can definitely be attributed to Curry, arguably in self-defense, was the result of his saloon brawl with miner ‘Pike’ Landusky in Montana,” I wrote back then. “Still there are modern writers who persist in placing him at the scene of nearly every suspected Wild Bunch killing, even when it can be shown that time, distance and other circumstances make this highly unlikely if not impossible.”
In retrospect, that doesn’t preclude the possibility Curry killed more than once. Two contemporary sources suggest a realistic toll, while the available evidence offers up the most likely candidates for consideration as Curry victims.
The first assertion comes from one of Curry’s avowed enemies—Robert A. Pinkerton, who operated out of the New York office of his father’s Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Pinkerton appeared to ignore the apocrypha about Curry when wiring the chief of police in Knoxville, Tenn., after the Kid’s capture east of town on Dec. 15, 1901: “Send you and all concerned hearty congratulations on important arrest made. Logan is one of the worst criminals in the West. He is a leader of train and bank robbers, and as such has no equal. He has committed three murders and is an expert jail breaker. Suggest that you put guard on him day and night.”
The second source of Curry’s possible kill count is the outlaw himself. The Kid spent much of the week before his capture drinking and shooting pool in the “bite the dust.” One might assume Curry, when drunk and bragging, would have been inclined to claim a more impressive figure. But as he stated a more credible toll of three, a number that happens to agree with that quoted by Pinkerton, it stands to reason the Kid was telling the truth, or something very close to it.
