First, Not Last

Harry Tracy was hardly the “last survivor of Cassidy’s Wild Bunch,” as mentioned in the April “Matters of Fact” column. The twenty-seven-year-old Tracy was found dead, an apparent suicide, on August 6, 1902, in a field near Creston, Washington, after leading dozens of lawmen on a bloody two-month chase through Oregon and Washington, following his escape from the Oregon State Penitentiary.

Whether Tracy was even a Wild Bunch member is a matter of some dispute. In any event, he died, boots on, before most of the gang, including Cassidy (d. 1908?), the Sundance Kid (d. 1908?), Kid Curry (d. 1904?), Ben Kilpatrick (d. 1912), Matt Warner (d. 1938), Elzy Lay (d. 1934), Bub Meeks (d. 1912), and Walt Punteney, the last survivor of the Wild Bunch, who died in his late eighties in Pinedale, Wyoming, on April 19, 1950.