“Wildest of the Wild Bunch” Kid Curry Escapes Knox County Jail
Part One:
Kid Curry Captured
When sober, Harvey Logan, a.k.a. Kid Curry (member of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch and killer of 40 men) was mild-mannered, likable, and loyal. Problem was, Kid Curry didn’t particularly like to be sober much. He preferred alcohol and women (as evidenced by the fact that Kid Curry was credited with as many as eighty-five children by prostitutes throughout the country). As might be expected with a man of his interests, money did not stay in his possession for long. He would often return from a train or bank robbery, get drunk and lay up with prostitutes until his share of the take was gone. And that’s more or less what brought him to Scruffy City on that fateful day.
Following the July 3, 1901 robbery of a Great Northern train near Wagner, Montana that left a sheriff cold and stiff, Harvey Logan was able to avoid arrest for more than five months by heading east, all the way to Knoxville, Tennessee.
On December 13, 1901, as usual, Logan was passing out bills from his most recent heist, this time in an Old City saloon. His merrymaking soon went south though, after he picked a fight with a patron and shot a couple of deputies who tried to break it up. As was his modus operandi, the notorious outlaw made his escape out the back window. Alas, two days later, Logan was captured outside town and brought back beaten and bloodied to Scruffy City’s jail. It is said that more than 5,000 people (mostly women) visited the handsome outlaw in jail in the months that followed.
After eleven months, on November 21, 1902, after hearing the testimony of thirty-four witnesses, Judge Clark found Logan guilty on ten counts of counterfeiting, forging, and passing stolen bank notes and sentenced the hardened outlaw to twenty years of hard labor at the penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio, United States Attorney William Wright contacted the Department of Justice and voiced concern, “I am just in receipt of a communication from Pinkerton Detective Association… The defendant is a very bad man and dangerous prisoner and this jail… is not sufficiently secure to retain him … and in view of his record and the fact that the jail at this place is not so safe, and the fact that Sheriff J. W. Fox is very anxious to get rid of him … it is very important that the defendant be sent on…” Then as now, the delays in the legal system continued and Kid Curry bided his time and schemed in Knoxville’s jail.
On June 27, 1903, Curry finally did indeed escape… and under mysterious circumstances at that… by snagging a guard with a wire lasso, stealing two guns and forcing the jailor to let him out. He was last seen riding Sheriff Fox’s stolen horse across the Gay Street Bridge, waving at children in their yards along the way. It was rumored that Kid Curry escaped to South America and rejoined Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
But that’s not the whole story, here is what we think we know…
Part Two:
Kid Curry Escapes
Escaping from jails wasn’t something new to Harvey Logan (aka Kid Curry of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch fame). Back in June, 1897, after robbing a bank, he’d been caught and held in the Deadwood, South Dakota jail, where he and his gang overpowered their jailer and escaped. And he was no newbie to hiding out either, as he’d spent many a night with Butch and Sundance and the boys after they’d eluded various posses, held-up at Hole-in-the-Wall.
An interesting Knox County “reference,” in one of Kid Curry’s many run-ins with the law, a posse led by Huerfano County, Colorado Sheriff Ed Farr cornered his gang near an area called Turkey Creek, which resulted in two gun battles over a period of four days. The sheriff and deputy were shot dead, one of Curry’s gang was killed, another received a life sentence… and Curry escaped, traveling to San Antonio to Madame Fannie Porter’s brothel (a regular hideout for the Wild Bunch gang), where he met prostitute Della Moore (also known as Annie Rogers or Maude Williams), with whom he became romantically entangled. This love story also has a regional connection. In October of 1901, Della Moore, who was now traveling with Kid Curry between hold-ups, was arrested in Nashville, Tennessee for passing money from an earlier robbery involving her beau.
Despite being pursued by Pinkerton agents and other law enforcement officials, Curry returned to Montana, where he shot and killed rancher James Winters, who was responsible for the killing of one of his brothers, Johnny, years before.
Then, on December 13, 1901, Kid Curry, who was probably not in a good mood after the arrest of his gal and deaths of his brothers in various gunfights (after which he’d avenged his brothers by murdering the lawmen responsible)– anyway, Curry shot Knoxville, Tennessee policemen William Dinwiddle and Robert Saylor in an Old City pool hall and escaped out the back window. Shortly thereafter, Curry was captured after a lengthy physical fight with lawmen and brought back to a solitary cell on a floor of his own near Market Square to face the consequences.
It should come as no surprise to hear that local law enforcement officials were nervous about having the notorious outlaw and killer of 40 men in their Knox County Jail. Logan was housed on the second floor, where the second-floor cells were arranged in two parallel rows of six, separated by a wide corridor that was closed at both ends by iron bars. This cellblock was surrounded on all four sides by another narrow corridor. Special guards employed by the Great Northern Express Company used this outer corridor to keep a twenty-four-hour watch on the desperado. At the rear of the jail was a house that served as the sheriff’s residence, and the rear of this house and the rear of the jail formed two sides of an enclosed courtyard that opened onto Prince Street (nowadays Market Street).
Kept locked up for many months in a small cell, Logan complained that the close confinement was bad for his health. Since he was the only prisoner kept on the second floor, he asked to be allowed to use the inner corridor. The guards had gotten used to him by this time and felt comfortable allowing his request (perhaps a bit too comfortable, considering they were living with a cold-blooded charmer).
At about 4:30 PM, on the afternoon of Saturday, June 27, 1903, guard Frank Irwin was standing at the south end of the outer corridor looking out the window at the Tennessee River when Logan suddenly reached through the bars and snagged a wire lasso around his neck. “Frank, I don’t want to kill you, but with me, it is a case of life and death, and I don’t care which.”
Holding the wire lasso with one hand, Logan used his other hand and his teeth to tie Irwin’s hand to the bars with rope. Logan then went into the bathroom and returned with an eight-foot-long stick made of spliced pieces of window molding lashed together with a metal hook attached to one end. He thrust the stick between the bars, snagged a box that contained the guards’ two loaded pistols at the corner of the cell block, which he dragged to his cell door.
Taking a bottle, Logan began rapping on the bars. When jailer Tom Bell came up the stairs, Logan complained of being sick. Unaware that Irwin the guard was tied at the opposite end of the cellblock, Bell approached Logan and found himself staring down the barrel of a loaded pistol. Having turned the tables, jailor Logan told his new prisoner Bell to open the combination lock to the cellblock, “Now don’t make any slip, Tom, or I will kill you.”
The linked men made their way down the steps to the basement. There, Logan ordered the jail’s helper R. P. Swanee to “fall in line” and marched both men through the rear door to the stable, where Logan told Swanee to saddle a mare that belonged to Sheriff J. W. Fox.
Logan had Bell walk ahead of him and open the Prince Street Gate, where Sheriff Fox stepped out onto the back porch of his residence and asked, “What’s the matter, Tom?”
Tom Bell replied, “You’ll soon find out what the matter is.” Seeing the matter with his own eyes, Sheriff Fox stepped quickly back into his residence, while jailor Bell opened the gate for outlaw Harvey Logan to make his escape on the sheriff’s stolen horse.
Part Three:
Kid Curry Wanted Dead or Alive
On Saturday afternoon, June 27, 1903, infamous outlaw Harvey Logan, aka Kid Curry rode Sheriff Fox’s stolen horse south on Prince Street, turned east on Hill Avenue, and then south across the Gay Street Bridge onto Martin Mill Pike. Meanwhile, Sheriff Fox was hurrying to notify law enforcement in the surrounding counties of the daring escape of his murderously-tempered prisoner (member of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s Wild Bunch) from the Knox County Jail.
As news spread, folks began to gather on streets, in homes and at saloons. By Sunday morning a crowd of thousands lined the streets around the jail. In the excitement, Sheriff Fox gave tours and showed Knoxville’s prominent citizens how Harvey Logan had escaped. Kid Curry’s daring escapade set the record for sales of newspapers in Knoxville, crushing the previous record set after the shooting of President McKinley. Meanwhile, by noon Sunday, Logan’s pursuing posse had returned, without Logan. And the sheriff’s stolen mare also returned, without her saddle.
On Monday, the Pinkerton Detective Agency arrived in Knoxville to find Sheriff Fox and his guards fending off accusations of complicity with the famous outlaw. Detectives soon discovered that some of Knoxville’s prominent citizens had carried souvenirs away during their tours of the jail with Sheriff Fox. Through the newspaper, Pinkerton detectives asked that the persons who had taken the wire lasso and the ropes used in the escape of Harvey Logan please return them because they were needed in the investigation.
In the midst of all the chaos, the Pinkertons learned that Logan had returned to Knoxville for a prearranged meet-up with a fellow desperado named Sam Adkins on the night of his escape. The pair of criminals then made their way to Black Oak Ridge in North Knoxville, caught a freight train and rode it north to Coal Hill, (now Lake City) Tennessee. From Coal Hill, the detectives followed their trail north and then east as the fugitives traveled by rail and on foot into North Carolina. From there they turned southwest, following the chain of mountains that lay along the border of Tennessee and North Carolina.
An eye witness to Logan’s fugitive movements along the Tennessee border stated to the detectives that he was made to carry Logan’s guns, lantern and a half-sack of flour to a mountaintop cabin hideout. When they stopped to rest and Logan pulled off his boots, the man stated that he saw that Kid Curry’s feet were badly swollen and covered with blisters from his flight. When warned by Logan’s cohort not to lead a posse to their hideout, Logan interrupted and said that if it was just one or two officers to “show them on up.”
Three weeks later, on August 28, Logan was reported to have been one of three men who attempted to hold up a Great Northern train near Malta, Montana and was later reported to be ahead of a pursuing posse as he made his way toward the Bear Paw Mountains.
Rumors spread that a deputy or Sheriff Fox himself had received a massive $8,000 bribe to allow his escape. Letters found later written by Logan said, “William Pinkerton says it was a clear case of bribery that got me out of the Knox Co Jail. That is one more of his many lies.”
Although he was rumored to have rejoined his old gang, The Wild Bunch with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Bolivia, we know this for sure: Harvey Logan was a man of iron nerve and lead determination who was determined to escape from his jailors or die trying and was willing take the life of others to gain and keep his freedom.
Just one of many lost tales from Knoxville’s colorful history — Get your copy of Lost Tales Of Scruffy City today!