The Disappearance of Abe (Abram) Gill — Little Rockies / Landusky, c. 1906

At the turn of the 20th century the Little Rockies and the lands around Landusky, in what is now Phillips County, Montana, were a patchwork of newly claimed ranches, mining camps, and feuds. Into that volatile frontier came Abram “Abe” Detmar Gill — a man who, by many accounts, arrived from the East, partnered with local ranchers, and then vanished into the folklore of a place where the line between outlaw and settler was thin.

From Brooklyn to the Little Rockies

Genealogical reconstructions place Abram Detmar Gill’s birth in Brooklyn, New York, on March 26, 1873. By the first decade of the 1900s he had made his way west and is recorded in local family histories and cemetery listings as having lived in the Little Rockies / Landusky area until his death in 1906. A modern memorial and family tree entries reproduce a death date of October 4, 1906, and record that he is buried in the Landusky Cemetery — facts that anchor the story in time and place. 

Those bare facts — a birth in Brooklyn, a grave in Landusky — leave open the question of how a man from New York ended up in a remote Montana basin. Local family histories and crowd-sourced genealogy suggest Gill came west to seek opportunity: ranching, mining, or the precarious prosperity that attracted thousands of migrants to Montana’s nascent counties. These user-contributed narratives provide names, dates, and links to contemporaries; but because they are compiled from family memory and secondary sources, they must be treated as leads rather than documentary proof. 

Partner, witness, or neighbor: Gill’s ties in the Little Rockies

Multiple local histories tie Abram Gill to ranching partnerships and to at least one violent episode that rattled the Little Rockies in the early 1900s. The region’s story-line of feuds, cattle conflicts, disputed water rights and saloon brawls provides the setting. One recurring association in the lore is a connection between Gill and the partner of a murdered rancher, Jim Winters — accounts say Gill was Winters’ partner or close associate and that, after a series of ambushes and disputed killings in the Little Rockies, Gill suddenly sold out and prepared to leave Montana. Before he could do so, however, local memory says he “mysteriously disappeared.” 

The precise facts behind that “mysterious disappearance” are elusive. The different retellings conflict on whether Gill was a target of retribution, a frightened witness who fled, or simply a man who packed up and left but who never reconnected with his family in the East. That ambiguity — where oral recollection, partisan newspaper mention, and genealogical memory intersect — is typical for frontier cases more than a century old.

Kid Curry and the shadow of outlaw retribution

Into the Little Rockies story steps a figure whose name amplified local violence into legend: Harvey “Kid Curry” Logan, one of the Wild Bunch’s most notorious members. Curry’s early years as a Montana cowboy and his later career as a train-robber and outlaw are well documented in outlaw histories; his presence in and near the Little Rockies is a recurring piece of local lore. Some accounts tie the Winters ambush, other killings, and subsequent disappearances to Curry and his associates — casting them either as direct perpetrators or as the chaotic backdrop that made violent retribution more likely. 

Several modern summaries of Kid Curry’s Montana years recount episodes of feuding with local men (for instance a notorious altercation involving a man named Powell “Pike” Landusky) and suggest that acquaintances and associates from the Little Rockies later resurfaced in larger Wild Bunch operations. In that climate, a ranch-partner who sold his stake, packed his goods, and “mysteriously disappeared” could easily be folded into a narrative of outlaw intimidation — whether or not the facts support such a dramatic cause. The historical record, in this case, offers suggestive proximity rather than a conclusive chain linking Curry’s gang to Gill’s fate. 

What the documentary record actually shows

When we separate verifiable records from retellings, a small number of firm points remain:

Genealogical memorials and cemetery records list Abram (Abe) Detmar Gill — b. 26 Mar 1873, d. 4 Oct 1906 — buried in Landusky Cemetery. That marks him as a real person with a fixed death date and burial place in Phillips County. 

Local newspapers and opinion pieces published more than a century later treat Gill’s case as an unsolved local mystery tied to early-day ranching conflicts and the folklore of outlaws; those pieces synthesize oral histories and regional story lines rather than present archival case files. 

Historical treatments of Kid Curry confirm the outlaw’s presence and violent activity in the region and provide context for why locals might associate mysterious disappearances or threats with the Wild Bunch — even where direct documentary proof linking Curry to a particular disappearance is lacking. 

In short: Gill’s death and burial are recorded in modern genealogical repositories; the surrounding narrative — disputed partnerships, sudden sales of property, and a “mysterious” vanishing — derives primarily from local history reconstructions and frontier lore.

How disappearances become legend

Frontier communities left few formal paper trails. Courts, coroner records, and newspapers sometimes reported killings and inquests — but many incidents were handled locally, quietly, or not at all. Over decades, the people who told the story (neighbors, descendants, newspaper columnists) tended to fix on vivid motifs: the partner who “sold up” and left; the outlaw who passed through; the ranch feud that ended in blood. Those motifs make for compelling retellings but also produce contradictions in date, motive, and agency.

Abram Gill’s story conforms to that pattern. Family histories, cemetery entries, and a modern regional newspaper column converge on the outline (a man from Brooklyn ended up in Landusky and is said to have vanished amid local violence around 1906), but they diverge when asked who killed him, whether foul play was involved, or whether he simply left and later died elsewhere. The inclusion of Kid Curry’s name — a dramatic and well-documented outlaw whose Montana biography overlapped the Little Rockies — further intensifies the tale even where a direct paper trail is missing. 

Final assessment

Abe (Abram) Gill is not purely a phantom; his name appears on cemetery records and genealogical reconstructions, with a death date in 1906. Beyond those anchors, however, the story of his “disappearance” is woven from the threads of local memory, contested retellings, and the notorious presence of the Curry-era outlaws in the Little Rockies — a pattern that turns plausible frontier outcomes into legend.

Sources (selected, interpreted with caution)

WikiTree — Abram Detmar Gill profile (user-contributed genealogy; birth and death dates; burial). https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Gill-4489?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Find a Grave — Abram Detmar Gill memorial and Landusky Cemetery listing (burial record). https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/154367660/abram-detmar-gill?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Phillips County News — “Opinion” column referencing the “Unsolved Murder / Disappearance of Abe Gill” and summarizing local versions of the story. https://www.phillipscountynews.com/story/2021/11/10/opinion/phillips-county-museum-news-for-wednesday-november-10-2021/12211.html

Klitz family history / “Searching for Abe Gill” — local family-history essay that compiles recollections and genealogical detail about Gill in the Little Rockies. klitzfamilyhistory1.homesteadcloud.com

Treasure State Lifestyles / historical roundup on Kid Curry — context on Kid Curry’s Montana years and why his name features in Little Rockies lore. 

Landusky, Montana — background on the town and region that frames where Gill lived and is buried.