BANDIT HEAVEN

Of Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and other bad actors on the Western frontier.

The glory days of the cowboy bandit lasted from about 1875 to 1905. Their turf extended from Canada to Mexico, “connected,” pop historian Clavin writes, “by what came to be known as the Outlaw Trail.” In this territory, Clavin’s heroes and antiheroes plied their trade, a particularly favorite spot being a plateau that bordered Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado, allowing for easy escape from one jurisdiction to another. Clavin’s cast of characters includes any number of figures who are well known to Western buffs, including Charles Siringo, the Pinkerton agent who, though he would later turn on the firm (and it him), spent years chasing after the Butch Cassidy-Sundance Kid gang; the hired gun Tom Horn, who cleaned out plenty of outlaws from their hiding places in the mountains, only to cross over into outlawry himself (and, notes Clavin, who wrote letters warning his intended victims that he was coming for them—“perhaps he still believed in fair play”); and the very bad Kid Curry, a stone killer who eluded capture while meting out death on lawmen and innocents alike for years. Some of Clavin’s Western history is by the numbers, but to his credit he places the action in the larger context of social change: Butch and Sundance disappeared into the wilds of South America—and have never been definitively found in all the years since—because, Clavin writes, the Wild West had run out of time, while “the few outlaws who remained…were gradually driven or drifted out by bolder and more numerous lawmen, replaced by ranchers glad for new territory.”

Clavin’s shoot-’em-up yarns don’t break much new ground, but Western buffs will enjoy them all the same.