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Several miles later, the train stopped. With the entire event taking too long, Cassidy and his crew had to forget the mail car and get into the express car, which contained two safes. They could not know that the plan would go awry in another way, one that would result in a death. Worse, the dead man would be Josiah Hazen, the sheriff of Converse County. He would receive one of the largest funerals the area had ever seen, presided over by J. DeForest Richards, the governor of Wyoming.

News of the sheriff's murder and burial in the Pioneer Cemetery made headlines across America, which in turn inspired a push by lawmen to once and for all round up the gangs who called Bandit Heaven home. The famous Pinkerton National Detective Agency was part of that effort. It assigned the best man it had, Charlie Siringo, to track down Butch Cassidy, Kid Curry, the Sundance Kid, and the others.

For now, though, the thieves had no idea what lay in store. They had a train to rob. Cassidy ordered the man inside the express car to open up—and received another refusal. There was no time for persuasion. Instead, it was time for more dynamite. The explosion sounded especially loud in the dark night. Maybe the darkness combined with smoke explained why, when the dazed messenger was pulled out of the express car covered in soot and debris, it looked like he was covered in blood.

ACT I

HEAVEN ON EARTH

CHAPTER ONE

MAVERICKS

Many people might view the "creation" of the preCivil War American West—though to the Indigenous residents, of course, it had been created a long time ago—as the steady and relentless migration of people looking for land west of the Missouri River on which to settle and raise crops and livestock. However, this was not true for most of the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery expedition that set off from St. Charles, Missouri, in 1804 was, as its name indicates, about finding what was in the 828,000 square miles that President Thomas Jefferson and the U.S. government had purchased from France the year before. For decades, there had been tales that the land beyond the Missouri River was inhabited by fantastic creatures, such as woolly mammoths and giant sloths, and some maps labeled much of the vast, uncharted territory the Great American Desert. Some people believed that it was all one big, lush garden, a utopia to be enjoyed. In any case, when Lewis and Clark returned to "civilization" in 1806, their extraordinary tales only intensified curiosity.

But those who ventured forth after them were not looking for a place to live. There were mapmaking forays, the most prominent one led by the army lieutenant Zebulon Pike. And then there were the fur trappers. Adventure and discovery were inevitably part of the journeys to the Rocky Mountains and beyond, but the main impetus was money. Beaver was the prize, with prices for pelts soaring thanks to the fervor for fur hats and garments back east and in Europe. From 1822 until 1840, when a combination of falling prices and depleted stocks ended the era, the trappers scoured the plains and mountains and valleys for beaver and any other animals that would provide food or cash. For these restless men, wearing viscera-stained buckskin and toting long rifles and blood-flecked knives, the end of one expedition was an invitation to begin the next one.

Following the fur trappers were those who viewed much of the American West as not a destination but a route. The Oregon Trail and the Santa Fe Trail were ways to get from here to there. As they lumbered along, the columns of covered wagons left behind hastily dug graves, decaying buffalo carcasses, and discarded furniture and other litter. The Mormons changed that equation. When Brigham Young and his followers aimed their wagons west, it was to find a place to dig in and farm. They found it in the Salt Lake Valley. Very soon after stopping there in July 1847, they found that farming would not work, at least not on a scale to feed them all.

The dry land of the West would not sustain some of the crops grown back east. However, the land did grow grass that was good for grazing. Gone was the dream of raising an array of crops; it was replaced by the practice of raising livestock, which could be done pretty much yearround. Over the years, when a landowner prospered, it was not from farming but from having expanding herds of horses and cattle.

There were pockets of communities, such as the Mormon one, before and during the Civil War, but four years after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, there was a dramatic change in the American West. On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Point in Utah, the last spike was pounded in to complete the transcontinental railroad. The iron horse made it much easier for thousands of men and women to seek new homes a thousand miles or more away from their old ones. Some of them went to work at ranches or brought along enough capital to start their own.