Posted Sunday morning, October 18, 2020.
Sundance stalks down the tracks from the engine of the train he’s just stopped at gunpoint. The fireman jumps from the cab to follow him. He’s excited that his train is being robbed by the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. Sundance gives him a look. “Just want to watch,” the fireman says. “Bring the kids, why don’t you?” the Kid says. They continue down to the mail car where Butch and the rest of the gang are gathered. Butch is arguing with someone on the other side of the locked and barred car door.
Sundance: “What’s going on?”
Butch: We got ourselves a patriot.
Fireman: That’s young Woodcock. He’s awful dedicated.”
Butch: Woodcock?
Woodcock (talking through the car door): Yes, sir?
Butch: You know who we are?
Woodcock: You’re the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, Mr Cassiday, I understand that. But you got to understand that Mr E.H. Harriman himself, of the Union Paciic Railroad, gave me this job, and I’ve got to do my best, don’t you see?
Butch: Your best don’t include getting yourself killed.
News Carver: Dynamite’s ready, Butch.
Woodcock: Mr E.H. Harriman had the confidence in me…
Butch: Open the door or that’s it! You think E.H. Harriman would get himself for you, Woodcock?
Woodcock (as he ducks behind a crate): I work for Mr E.H. Harriman, of the Union Pacific Railroad, and he entrusted me…
Dynamite: Ka-BOOM!
Butch and Sundance and News scrambled up through the blasted doorway. News and Sundance head right for the safe. Butch stops to check on Woodcock who is lying by the door, bloodied and dazed. He props Woodcock up and decides he’ll be ok.
Butch: Whatever Harriman’s paying you ain’t enough.
---from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”.
I’m in the middle of reading “Showdown”, Wil Haygood’s absorbing account of the Congressional fight over Thurgood Marshall’s nomination to the Supreme Court. You probably figured that out. (See here, and here.) I’m reading it along with twenty other books I have going. I always have twenty books going. A concerned reader once suggested it was a symptom of undiagnosed ADD. He may have been onto something. At any rate: Along with those twenty other books is “Empires of Iron: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America” by Michael Hiltzik. I was predisposed to like it before I started, because of the subject matter, because I’ve read Hiltzik’s previous book, “Big Science”, a biography of physicist Ernest Rutherford, and liked that a lot, because I’m a fan of Hiltzik’s columns in the L.A. Times, and because Michael and I follow each other on Twitter. (That was the requisite full disclosure, for those of you keeping score.) But I was taken with it from the opening paragraph which introduces as a character not a robber baron or even an employee of a railroad, but a young and not-yet-famous Scottish writer:
For two weeks in [the] deep summer [of 1879], westbound passengers on a Union Pacific train, encountered a tubercular Scot whose conversation, dripping with literary grandiloquence, had earned him the nickname “Shakespeare.” Pale, thin, and wracked by coughing fits, he seemed not long for this world. Generally, he could be found seated at one end of a car, propping open the door with his feet as though hoping the rush of air might soothe his unremitting fever.
That would be Robert Louis Stevenson, who was making the trip across the Great American Desert to San Francisco, taking notes that he’d turn into a travel book called “Across the Plains”.
Robber Barons follow Stevenson soon after. One of them is Ned Harriman. Edward Harriman. Edward H. Harriman. E. H. Harriman. Mister E.H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad. And whenever I come across Harriman’s name anywhere, I immediately begin to replay in my head that scene from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and hear the voice of the great and much missed character actor George Furth, who played poor but dedicated Woodcock, saying, “I work for Mr E.H. Harriman, of the Union Pacific Railroad....” Harriman is a major character in “Iron Empires”, its chief hero and villain, in fact, so I’m going to be hearing Furth/Woodcock a lot.
The movie is mentioned in the book. I checked the index and skipped ahead. Hiltzik doesn’t quote Woodcock, and he doesn’t spend many words on Butch and Sundance. In the passage that mentions them, his main focus is on what’s known to fans of the film as the “super-posse”:
One of Harriman’s pioneering initiatives would be turned into legend by Hollywood. This was his effort to end train robberies on the Union Pacific. The railroad’s route through Wyoming “had long been a Mecca for outlaws”...That stretch of track was especially vulnerable to [robberies] because the roadbed was hemmed in by mountains on both sides, affording robbers “opportunities for the ‘get-away’ which is essential to the highwayman’s profession.” Typically, the raiders would strike in early evening and safely on their way to the canyon-etched foothills known as the Hole-in-the-Wall country before a posse could be assembled.
The members of the protean community of outlaws, Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Longabaugh, AKA Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, have been credited with the longest string of successful...robberies of the period. They would be immortalized in a 1969 film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, as was Harriman’s solution to the repeated robberies [on his line]: the creation of a team of special agents to be shuttled along the Union Pacific tracks on their own train and supplied with horses that could a hundred miles in a day. The presence of a rapid-response brigade, superbly equipped and trained, discouraged raids on the Union Pacific and prompted robbers to concentrate their attentions on competing lines.
I couldn’t help read that passage without hearing Butch/Newman’s refrain as he and Sundance repeatedly failed to throw the superposse off their trail: “Who are those guys?”
The outfitting and the employment of the superposse didn’t cost Harriman much compared to what it saved him but in the movie---and maybe in real life---Butch can’t believe that. When he hears that Harriman has put the best lawman and tracker on his payroll, Butch is aghast, “That crazy Harriman,” he exclaims, “if he’d just pay me what he’s spending to make me stop robbing him, I’d stop robbing him!”
Ok, time for me to get back to “Iron Empires”. Or “Showdown”. Or one of the nineteen other books on my stack. Meantime, I thought you’d enjoy having Woodcock’s voice stuck in your heads too...
Comments