The Last Holdup on the Hi-Line:

Kid Curry and the Great Northern Train Robbery of 1901

Background: Phillips County and the Outlaw Landscape

In the summer of 1901, the stretch of Great Northern Railway track running through the Hi-Line of north-central Montana was one of the more remote corridors of the American railroad network. The towns strung along it — Malta, Wagner, Harlem, Havre — were small agricultural and ranching settlements separated by miles of short-grass prairie, coulee, and benchland. The region had only recently been organized as a functional county, with Chouteau County's vast northern reaches not yet subdivided into Phillips County, which would not be formally established until 1915. The land was well suited to cattle, wheat, and, as the events of July 3, 1901, would illustrate, fugitive outlaws with a knowledge of the terrain.

The Great Northern Railway had completed its transcontinental route in 1893 under the direction of James J. Hill, whose empire of rail and real estate made him one of the most powerful figures in the economic development of Montana. By 1901, the line through the Hi-Line carried a steady traffic of agricultural goods, passengers, and, crucially, financial consignments between eastern banking centers and the growing commercial banks of the region. It was this financial traffic that made the Great Northern Coast Flyer No. 3 an attractive target for a small, well-organized criminal outfit in the waning months of the Wild Bunch's operational life in the United States.

Harvey Logan: From the Little Rockies to the Outlaw Trail

The robbery of July 3, 1901, was not the first time that the Hi-Line had an encounter with the outlaw later known as Kid Curry. Harvey Alexander Logan was born in 1867 in Iowa and raised in Missouri, arriving in Montana sometime in the mid-1880s when his brother Hank and a partner named Jim Thornhill established a horse ranch at Rock Creek in what was then Chouteau County, now Phillips County. The ranch sat near the Landusky mining camp in the Little Rockies, a small range of isolated peaks rising out of the otherwise flat surrounding plains roughly forty miles southwest of Malta. Logan and his brothers ran cattle and horses and made themselves known in the local saloons. By all accounts, when sober, Logan was considered mild-mannered and capable, a competent rancher who worked hard and spent freely (Shelton, "Kid Curry and the Great Northern Train Robbery," Distinctly Montana, 7 Aug. 2025, www.distinctlymontana.com/kid-curry-and-great-northern-train-robbery, accessed 5 May 2026).

The event that set Logan on the outlaw trail had its origins in a feud with Pike Landusky, the miner and part-time lawman after whom the local settlement had been named. Landusky filed assault charges against Logan following an altercation in which Landusky believed Logan had been romantically involved with his stepdaughter, Elfie. Logan was arrested and held, then released on bond. On December 27, 1894, the two men encountered each other at a saloon in the camp. A fight broke out. Landusky drew a pistol; Logan drew his own weapon and shot Landusky dead. A coroner's inquest judged the shooting self-defense, but Logan, convinced the local judiciary was friendly to his opponent, skipped town before a formal trial could be convened. Landusky's stepdaughter would later admit the romantic entanglement had been with Logan's brother Lonny, not Harvey — a clarification that arrived too late to alter the course of events ("Harvey Logan," Legends of America, www.legendsofamerica.com/we-harveylogan, accessed 5 May 2026).

With Pinkerton detectives soon on his trail and a warrant outstanding in Montana, Logan gravitated south and west, riding briefly with the outlaw Tom "Black Jack" Ketchum before a dispute over stolen proceeds led the Logan brothers to part ways with that gang. Over the following years, Harvey Logan attached himself to the loosely organized network of outlaws centering on Robert LeRoy Parker, known as Butch Cassidy, and Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid. Logan adopted the alias Kid Curry, borrowing the surname from an associate named George Curry, an unrelated but like-minded fugitive. By the time the Wild Bunch reached its operational peak in the late 1890s, Logan had earned a reputation as the most violent of the group, held responsible for the deaths of multiple law enforcement officers in shootings across Wyoming, Utah, and Montana (Smokov, Mark T. "He Rode with Butch and Sundance: Was He the Deadliest Member of the Wild Bunch?" HistoryNet, 31 Mar. 2023, www.historynet.com/kid-curry-wild-bunch , accessed 5 May 2026).

Planning the Job

In early 1901, the Wild Bunch was fraying. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, accompanied by Longabaugh's companion Etta Place, had quietly departed New York for Buenos Aires in February, effectively removing themselves from the American scene. William Carver, another core member of the gang, was shot and killed in April 1901 in Sonora, Texas, by Sheriff Elijah Briant. With the gang reduced and the Pinkerton Detective Agency maintaining sustained surveillance on known associates, the remaining members faced mounting pressure. Logan, undeterred, assembled a small crew for one more operation on familiar Montana ground.

The plan centered on Great Northern Express train No. 3, known informally as the Coast Flyer. Logan had reason to know the route well, and there was intelligence suggesting a substantial financial shipment was aboard. A consignment of unsigned National Bank Notes — printed but not yet countersigned by bank officers — was being transported by the United States Treasury from Washington to the National Bank of Montana in Helena, charter 5671, which had only received its charter in January 1901. The shipment consisted of $40,000 in large-format notes: $24,000 in ten-dollar denominations and $16,000 in twenty-dollar denominations, printed in uncut sheets of four notes per sheet, three tens and one twenty (Van Ryzin, Robert R. "Bank Notes Forever Tied to Wild Bunch." Numismatic News, 16 May 2016, www.numismaticnews.net/paper-money/bank-notes-forever-tied-to-wild-bunch, accessed 5 May 2026).

Logan's crew for the job included Ben Kilpatrick of Texas, known as the Tall Texan, who had ridden with the Wild Bunch in prior operations, and Orlando Camillo Hanks, called Deaf Charley, who had recently completed a six-and-a-half-year sentence in a Wyoming prison for an earlier train robbery. A fourth individual held horses near the bridge that would serve as the gang's rendezvous point; some accounts identify this person as Laura Bullion, Kilpatrick's companion, traveling disguised as a man, though this detail remains disputed by historians (Enss, Chris. "Wild Women of the West: Laura Bullion." Cowgirl Magazine, 27 Jan. 2021, www.cowgirlmagazine.com/wild-women-of-the-west-laura-bullion, accessed 5 May 2026). The Pinkerton Agency's July 1901 wanted circular initially named Cassidy and Longabaugh as suspects, but this was an error — both men were in Argentina at the time. The actual participants at the scene, according to the agency's later analysis, were Logan, Kilpatrick, Hanks, and the unidentified horse-holder (Wild West History Association. "Wild Bunch Circulars Issued by the Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, 1900-1907." Wild West History Association, 4 Oct. 2022, wildwesthistory.org/2022/10/04/wild-bunch-circulars-issued-by-the-pinkertons-national-detective-agency-1900b1907, accessed 5 May 2026).

The Robbery

The Great Northern Coast Flyer No. 3 pulled out of the Malta station late on the evening of July 3, 1901, heading west toward Wagner. Kilpatrick purchased a passenger ticket and boarded with the regular passengers. Logan concealed himself in the baggage car. When conductor Smith detected something irregular and attempted to stop the train, Logan moved quickly to the engine cab, where he covered engineer Thomas Jones with his pistol and ordered the train to continue moving until it reached the prearranged location near a bridge over Exeter Creek, roughly five to six miles east of Wagner. Kilpatrick, watching from the passenger car as the conductor and a deputy sheriff moved purposefully toward the front of the train, opened fire. A brakeman was struck and wounded, losing his arm but surviving. Hanks, waiting at the bridge with horses, joined the operation once the train halted. Logan and Kilpatrick fired from the train windows to discourage passengers from looking out or intervening (Shelton, "Kid Curry and the Great Northern Train Robbery").

The express messenger, C. H. Smith, was ordered to cooperate. According to an account preserved in secondary literature drawing on Pinkerton files, Logan told Smith that the gang had no interest in harming anyone — they wanted only Jim Hill's money, a pointed reference to Great Northern Railway founder James J. Hill (Van Ryzin, "Bank Notes Forever Tied to Wild Bunch"). The robbers made multiple attempts to blow the safe before finally succeeding. They removed the consignment of uncut National Bank Notes along with a bag of silver coins, a bolt of green silk fabric, and a package of watches. The audited loss, confirmed by Great Northern Express officials several days after the event, came to $41,500, with all but $300 attributable to the Treasury consignment (Enss, "Wild Women of the West: Laura Bullion"). Initial press reports placed the take as high as $83,000, a figure that proved unreliable. The Boston Herald of July 5, 1901, quoted a Havre-datelined dispatch describing the robbery as "one of the boldest that ever occurred in the West" (Van Ryzin, "Bank Notes Forever Tied to Wild Bunch").

A local sheepherder named John Cunningham came upon the scene as the outlaws were loading their horses. He attempted to ride to Malta to raise the alarm. Kilpatrick and Hanks fired at him, nicking his horse on the hip; Cunningham reached Malta wounded but alive and spread word of the robbery ("Double Trouble from Notorious Kids: Sundance and Curry." HistoryNet, 19 Oct. 2016, www.historynet.com/double-trouble-from-notorious-kids, accessed 5 May 2026). By the time organized posses formed, the robbers had melted into the breaks of the Missouri River country to the south — terrain Logan knew intimately from his years ranching in the Little Rockies. Chouteau County law enforcement, reportedly so confident of capture that a coroner and a set of caskets accompanied one posse, found nothing (Enss, "Wild Women of the West: Laura Bullion").

The Investigation and the Gang's Collapse

The Pinkerton Detective Agency, whose St. Paul office took operational lead on the case, moved quickly to issue circulars containing physical descriptions of suspects and, crucially, the serial numbers of the stolen bank notes. It was this financial forensics — the systematic tracking of unsigned currency through the banking system — that ultimately dismantled what remained of the Wild Bunch.

The first break came in October 1901, when Logan's companion, known by the name Annie Rogers or Della Moore, attempted to exchange a bundle of ten-dollar notes at the Fourth National Bank of Nashville, Tennessee. Bank teller McHenry consulted a Pinkerton circular, matched the serial numbers, and summoned police. Rogers was arrested with $550 in stolen notes on her person (Van Ryzin, "Bank Notes Forever Tied to Wild Bunch"). The Pinkerton circular of July 30, 1901, had offered a $6,500 reward for the three identified suspects, naming Logan, and eroneously naming Cassidy and Longabaugh as well (Wild West History Association, "Wild Bunch Circulars"). The Nashville arrest confirmed Logan's movements and gave investigators a geographic focus.

On November 5, 1901, Ben Kilpatrick was arrested in St. Louis, Missouri, after detectives traced stolen notes he had been attempting to exchange through a hotel near the waterfront. A search of a second hotel room led to Laura Bullion, who was found with a suitcase containing additional forged notes. Bullion admitted to having forged the countersignatures of the National Bank of Montana cashier on the notes in her possession, though she denied any knowledge of the robbery itself. She was tried separately, became a minor sensation in the press — the Anaconda Standard of December 12, 1901, called her "one of the most remarkable woman criminals of whom there is any record" — and served time in a federal penitentiary (Enss, "Wild Women of the West: Laura Bullion"). Kilpatrick received a fifteen-year sentence for forgery of the bank notes. He served nearly ten years and was killed in 1912 attempting another train robbery in Sanderson, Texas.

Hanks, less careful with the money he had sewn into his clothing, was shot and killed by Pinkerton detectives in April 1902 at a brothel in San Antonio, Texas. He still had stolen currency on his person at the time of his death ("Double Trouble from Notorious Kids: Sundance and Curry").

Logan himself evaded capture the longest. Before leaving Montana following the robbery, he used the interval to settle an old score. On July 26, 1901, he rode to the ranch of James Winters, a man Logan held responsible for the killing of his brother John in an earlier feud. Logan shot Winters in cold blood outside his cabin door. Pinkerton records noted that Winters had been cooperating with authorities in tracking Logan, which Logan regarded as the motivating grievance (Shelton, "Kid Curry and the Great Northern Train Robbery"). Logan then moved south to Tennessee, where the arrest of Rogers had already set investigators on his trail. In December 1901, he shot two Knoxville police officers in a gunfight and escaped. He was captured in late 1902, tried, and sentenced to twenty years of hard labor. He escaped from the Knox County jail in June 1903 and remained at large until June 1904, when he was wounded by a posse during a botched train robbery near Parachute, Colorado, and died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Whether the man who died at Parachute was in fact Logan has been disputed by some historians, though investigators who had interacted with Logan during his Knoxville imprisonment identified the body from photographs (Smokov, "He Rode with Butch and Sundance").

Aftermath and Historical Significance

The Wagner robbery is generally regarded as the last major action of the Wild Bunch on American soil and one of the most operationally successful train robberies in the history of the northern plains. True West Magazine's November 2002 retrospective on the Wild Bunch placed the gang's operational arc precisely from the Montpelier bank robbery of 1896 through the Wagner train robbery of 1901, describing the Montana robbery as the concluding act of what had been the most storied train-robbing career in the Rocky Mountain West (Hatch, Thom, and others. "The Wild Bunch." True West Magazine, Nov. 2002, www.truewestmagazine.com/article/the-wild-bunch, accessed 5 May 2026). From a strictly financial standpoint, the gang succeeded: they obtained tens of thousands of dollars in what was, at the time, a substantial sum relative to regional wages and bank deposits.

Yet the very nature of the stolen currency — unsigned, serial-numbered, traceable National Bank Notes — made it nearly impossible to spend without detection. The outlaws' inability to wait before attempting to circulate the notes proved their undoing. The Pinkerton system, which had refined its use of financial documentation and national networks of informants over two decades of pursuing the Wild Bunch and its predecessors, was able to track the currency across multiple states and identify participants through a combination of note serial numbers, bank informants, and criminal records. The Wagner case is thus historically notable not only as a dramatic episode of frontier lawbreaking but as an early demonstration of the effectiveness of coordinated federal financial surveillance in dismantling criminal organizations.

The site of the robbery, at Exeter Creek approximately five miles east of Wagner along the Hi-Line, is marked today by a historical roadside marker erected by the Montana Department of Transportation on U.S. Highway 2 near milepost 467 in Phillips County, which identifies the event as Montana's most famous train robbery. The marker acknowledges the complexities of identification that characterized news coverage at the time, reflecting the persistent confusion between the robbery's actual participants and the more famous names of Cassidy and Longabaugh — a confusion the Pinkerton Agency itself briefly shared (Historical Marker Database. "Early Day Outlaws Historical Marker." Hmdb.org, www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=142883, accessed 5 May 2026).

The Great Northern train robbery near Wagner belongs to a specific and well-documented chapter of Montana's territorial and early statehood history — a period in which the rail corridor across the Hi-Line represented both economic integration and vulnerability. The men who carried it out were products of the same ranching and small-town economy that the railway was designed to serve, and their story illuminates the uneasy coexistence of frontier economic development and the persistence of organized criminal violence in the years immediately preceding the consolidation of modern law enforcement in the northern plains.

Works Cited

Enss, Chris. "Wild Women of the West: Laura Bullion." Cowgirl Magazine, 27 Jan. 2021, www.cowgirlmagazine.com/wild-women-of-the-west-laura-bullion. Accessed 5 May 2026.

"Harvey Logan, aka 'Kid Curry' — The Wildest of the Wild Bunch." Legends of America, 13 Jan. 2020, www.legendsofamerica.com/we-harveylogan. Accessed 5 May 2026.

Hatch, Thom, et al. "The Wild Bunch." True West Magazine, Nov. 2002, www.truewestmagazine.com/article/the-wild-bunch. Accessed 5 May 2026.

Historical Marker Database. "Early Day Outlaws Historical Marker." Hmdb.org, www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=142883. Accessed 5 May 2026.

"Logan, Harvey — Double Trouble from Notorious Kids: Sundance and Curry." HistoryNet, 19 Oct. 2016, www.historynet.com/double-trouble-from-notorious-kids. Accessed 5 May 2026.

Shelton, Joseph. "Kid Curry and the Great Northern Train Robbery." Distinctly Montana, 7 Aug. 2025, www.distinctlymontana.com/kid-curry-and-great-northern-train-robbery. Accessed 5 May 2026.

Smokov, Mark T. "He Rode with Butch and Sundance: Was He the Deadliest Member of the Wild Bunch?" HistoryNet, 31 Mar. 2023, www.historynet.com/kid-curry-wild-bunch. Accessed 5 May 2026.

Van Ryzin, Robert R. "Bank Notes Forever Tied to Wild Bunch." Numismatic News, 16 May 2016, www.numismaticnews.net/paper-money/bank-notes-forever-tied-to-wild-bunch. Accessed 5 May 2026.

Wild West History Association. "Wild Bunch Circulars Issued by the Pinkerton's National Detective Agency, 1900–1907." Wild West History Association, 4 Oct. 2022, wildwesthistory.org/2022/10/04/wild-bunch-circulars-issued-by-the-pinkertons-national-detective-agency-1900b1907. Accessed 5 May 2026.