A ROBBER & HIS ROOST: TOM CLAVIN'S BANDIT HEAVEN

Tom Clavin has become one of the most popular chroniclers of the old west. Since his book Dodge City showed us Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and their brotherhood of lawmen as young guns with with real stories as interesting as their legends, he has examined the relationship with the these historical figures and their place and time. With bandit Heaven, he looks at an end of those times, mainly through the life of the bandit Butch Cassidy.

As in Dodge City and Tombstone, Clavin uses a location as a major character as well. Instead of a town, it is a stretch of land on the Utah, Wyoming, Colorado border, The Hole In The Wall. Consisting of a large plateau where one could see a pursuer coming miles away and there were enough juts and crevices providing multiple escape routes, making it a natural wonder for the lawless, attracting those on the run for years. We get a mini-history of those who used it up to its most famous outlaw.

The book argues that Butch Cassidy couldn't have been anything but a bandit. Likable, smart, and charismatic, he drifted as a cowboy and it didn't take, even when those skills applied to rustling. This led to becoming a part of a bank robbery that had him on the run for a year. Another put him in prison. Instead of it reforming him, these two incidents pushed him to improve the art of robbery. he planned well and became an innovative criminal. Most jobs had little or no bloodshed. He gathered a crew of colorful characters, who often broke off into their own versions of The Hole In The Wall Gang.

Clavin also looks at two men who pursued Butch and his gang for The Pinkerton Detective Agency. The one who comes of the most admirable is Charles Siringo, the self titled "Cowboy Detective", who Nathan Ward recently wrote his admirable biography on. He doggedly trailed Butch and his gang for year applying his questioning skills and going undercover. Clavin views Tom Horn is a colder manner as he operates more as a traditional frontier bounty hunter. His methods appear darker than Butch's in his lawlessness. It becomes as an irony that Horn becomes arrested and hung before Butch and his buddy Sundance meet their fate in South America.

Bandit Heaven depicts the winding down of the old west, becoming less wild, but no less romantic. Through Butch Cassidy, those he robbed with, those who chased him, and even where he hid out, Clavin chronicles men struggling to adapt as a new century pushes out their old ways. Still, he proves even at its end, the era was exciting and entertaining.