“Bandit Heaven: The Hole-in-the-Wall Gangs and the Final Chapter of the Wild West” by Tom Clavin c.2024, St. Martin’s Press $30.
00 304 pages You’re home now, safe. Shut the door. Lock it behind you.
The world is entirely outside your four walls but you can pretend that it’s not. All the danger, all the worries that send you scurrying are far away. Everything you need is home but as in the new book, “Bandit Heaven” by Tom Clavin, you can only hide there for just so long.
Under normal circumstances, John Chapman was an easy-going man. Easy-going, to a point: Chapman settled down in 1878 on a ranch of his own in northwest Wyoming, to raise cattle and horses. Because of that, rustlers like Butch Cassidy were mighty interested in Chapman’s ranch.
Chapman, tired of theft of his animals, was interested in catching Cassidy. Born to Mormon parents in the spring of 1866, Bob Parker was given the nickname “Butch” as a young man, possibly when he worked for a butcher. Around then, he hung out with a man named Mike Cassidy, who taught Bob to be a good cowboy and a marksman.
Bob figured out the cattle rustling thing by himself when he realized how easy it was to siphon off a horse here or a beef there while working for someone else. At some point in the 1880s, Bob and Mike Cassidy parted ways, and Bob was alone. If, says Clavin, you were a drifter-bandit in Wyoming and Utah back then, there were three main spots for you to hide, all connected by the Outlaw Trail; Bob fi.