Knoxify

Hol­ly­wood, the Old West, the coun­try of Bolivia, and most impor­tantly Knoxville, TN. What ties them together here is a movie and a man and if you guessed Butch Cas­sidy and the Sun­dance Kid, then you’ve guessed the movie.

But if Paul New­man or Robert Red­ford come to mind, then guess again.

Strangely enough nei­ther the major actors in the motion pic­ture, nor the well-remembered his­tor­i­cal play­ers they por­tray, hold the dis­tinc­tion we have in mind here. No, it was a minor actor play­ing an ill-remembered char­ac­ter, whose real life story was far more excit­ing and sig­nif­i­cant for Knoxville than the movie or mem­ory have depicted. The character’s name was Har­vey Logan, a.k.a. Kid Curry to those who knew him in real life, and the actor’s name was Ted Cas­sidy, a.k.a. Lurch from The Addams Fam­ily TV show to those of us who have no idea who Ted Cas­sidy is.

While the char­ac­ter of Har­vey Logan lasts not even the first five min­utes into the movie — Lurch is no match for Cool Hand Luke’s fast talkin’, fast foot to the groin’ that ends the knife fight over who’s the real leader of the gang — the his­tor­i­cal Har­vey Logan proved far more for­mi­da­ble in life than he ever was in art. In fact, it’s not too bold to claim that it was Kid Curry, not the dynamic duo of Butch Cas­sidy & the Sun­dance Kid, who was the real out­law of the Wild Bunch.

To put this in per­spec­tive, nei­ther Butch nor Sun­dance had any con­firmed kills, and shared only a hand­ful of gun­fights between them. The Kid, on the other hand, was respon­si­ble for killing nine law enforce­ment offi­cers in five sep­a­rate shootouts, two civil­ians under other cir­cum­stances, and numer­ous other skir­mishes with local posses and bounty hunters. William Pinker­ton, the famous detec­tive who even­tu­ally brought the Wild Bunch to jus­tice, once said of Kid Curry that, “He’s the only crim­i­nal I know of who has not one sin­gle redeem­ing fea­ture.” Small won­der that those who knew him and knew of him referred to him as the “Wildest of the Wild Bunch.”

Yet why Kid Curry chose to come to Knoxville in the late sum­mer of 1901 is not entirely clear. Nor was the ulti­mate pur­pose of his visit. At the very least he wanted to lie low in the after­math of the $40,000 heist he and Wild Bunch cronies had just taken off the Great North­ern Express out­side Wag­ner, Mon­tana. And for a few quiet months he succeeded.

Call­ing him­self William Wil­son, he soon began court­ing a woman named Laura Cross, of a respectable Knoxville fam­ily. He intended to marry her, pur­chase a farm, and live qui­etly off the pro­ceeds he claimed he’d made in “the rail­road business.”

Yet this would-be idyl­lic dream came to an abrupt end on the evening of Decem­ber 13, 1901, when offi­cers from the Knoxville Police Depart­ment answered a call to Ike’s Knoxville Saloon near Cen­tral Av. and Com­merce St. Expect­ing a bar­room brawl, they instead found them­selves under fire from an irate Kid Curry, who seri­ously wounded two offi­cers before escap­ing out the back door.

And though the law cap­tured him two days later near Jef­fer­son City, it was not the end of the story for Kid Curry. Think­ing they had him, the KPD even­tu­ally dis­cov­ered that what they really had was more than they could handle.

…To Be Continued…

Photo by: bobster855

The Knox­ford Files shed light on Knoxville his­tory that is filled with all kinds of awe­some­ness. Want more of Knoxford’s Chuck Allen? Fol­low him or friend him.