Long before the first Calgary Stampede, the city attracted a different kind of cowboy.
Harry Longabaugh — better known as the Sundance Kid — is perhaps most famous for his daring bank and train robberies as part of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch. But the American outlaw’s short stint as a cowboy and businessman in southern Alberta is a lesser-known chapter of Wild West history.
Records suggest the Sundance Kid spent about three years in Alberta in the early 1890s. He reportedly worked as a ranch hand at the Bar U Ranch south of Longview, opened a saloon at Calgary’s Grand Central Hotel, and was arrested by the North-West Mounted Police for allegedly abusing animals.
“It was an interlude in this peripatetic lifestyle … of wandering around, ranching, cowboying, and occasionally robbing a train or a bank or a mine or something,” said American writer and researcher Daniel Buck.
Buck and his wife, Anne Meadows, author of Digging up Butch and Sundance, had been researching the outlaw duo’s time in South America — including trying to solve the mystery of whether or not they died in a 1908 shootout with Bolivian cavalry — when they heard in passing that the Kid had spent time in Canada.
Their research in the early 1990s brought to light everything from 1891 Alberta census records listing Longabaugh as a 25-year-old horse breaker at the Bar U Ranch, to a November 1901 article in the Calgary Herald mentioning that a “former Calgarian” by the same name was wanted for murder in Texas.
Buck’s findings surprised him, as while the Sundance Kid had been written about extensively in books and articles by that point, Longabaugh’s time in Canada had been glossed over for the most part.
“The history of Sundance in Canada was unknown to people in the United States,” Buck said.
He and Meadows published their findings in the winter 1993 edition of the Western Outlaw-Lawman History Association Journal.
Aside from being charged with animal cruelty in Calgary and having those charges dropped shortly after — which Buck says he was most likely framed for — the Kid stayed out of trouble during his time north of the border.
What brought the Kid to Canada?
Much of Longabaugh’s life is shrouded in mystery.
Between his release from an 18-month prison sentence in Sundance, Wyo., for theft in 1889 to being suspected of taking part in a train robbery in 1892, there was practically no trace of him in the States. Records of his time in Canada help fill in those blanks.
Toronto Star crime reporter Peter Edwards, co-author of The Encyclopedia of Canadian Organized Crime, said coming to Canada was common for American outlaws, pointing out that infamous gangster Al Capone is rumoured to have hid out in Moose Jaw, Sask.
“American authorities couldn’t pursue them,” Edwards said.
Edwards said the Sundance Kid’s travels took him as far as southern Saskatchewan, where he and fellow outlaws would flee the scene of their robberies and hide out in places like Big Muddy and Big Beaver, located just north of the border.
Longabaugh is said to have partnered with Frank Hamilton to open a saloon in Calgary’s since-demolished Grand Central Hotel toward the end of his time in Alberta. Edwards said it’s unlikely a young cowboy would have made enough money legitimately to make an investment like that.
To Edwards, the ability of the Sundance Kid to live a double life north and south of the border — a criminal in the States and a respectable worker in Canada — is fascinating.
“He had a separate life in Alberta,” he said. “He kind of had his respectable life, and sometimes he’d go up there when the heat was big in the States.”
Edwards said he would use multiple names.
Butch Cassidy didn’t work in Alberta like the Sundance Kid did, but according to a 1970 Glenbow Journal article, he reportedly visited Longabaugh north of the border at least once in the early 1890s.
By all accounts, Longabaugh was a hard worker and a good cowboy.
How exactly the Sundance Kid got into crime — before and after his time in Canada — remains a mystery to researchers like Buck.
“The vast majority of cowboys were not outlaws,” he said. “It’s hard to explain why, among the hundreds and hundreds of cowboys out west, Sundance was one of the few to get into this sort of wandering life of cowboy and occasionally outlaw.”
It likely came down to the thrill, as well as the lucrative nature of being a successful bank and train robber, Buck said.
“Truth be told, you’re going to die poor if you spend your life as a cowboy in those days,” he said.
Following nearly a decade of robberies across the United States, the Sundance Kid fled to South America in the early 1900s alongside Butch Cassidy and his romantic partner, Etta Place.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are believed to have perished in Bolivia in 1908, though that claim has been contested. Place is said to have disappeared without a trace.
As Vicky Kelly wrote in the 1970 issue of the Glenbow Journal: “While such tales seldom involved Western Canada, the Sundance Kid’s three years of peaceful residence in Alberta … provide an interesting link with the American frontier.”
