P a g e 7 G h o s t T o w n s a n d H i s t o r y o f M o n t a n a N e w s l e t t e r Valley County, and Fort Benton, county seat of old Chouteau County. The holdup had occurred practically on the county line with Glasgow some 75 miles to the east and Fort Benton, still farther to the west. Good planning, it would seem. There was some difficulty in forming a posse in Malta and several hours elapsed before men and horses were brought by train from Glasgow. Another posse started off from Fort Benton, but there was sufficient time for the holdup men to get safely out of the county. There were reports of horses being commandeered at various ranches, the exhausted steeds being left in place of fresh horses. Some people who have written books or magazines, and there have been thousands of words printed about the Curry boys and the “Wild Bunch,” maintain that Kid Curry never did return to the Little Rockies. But again, Bill Kellerman claimed that he had played poker with The Kid in a Landusky saloon in 1903. “The Kid was being hunted all over the west, but some of the time he was safely hidden in the Curry ‘hideout’ south of the mountains,” he said. “Several of us were in a game in Landusky, run by the school teacher whose name was Finch. The Kid came into the saloon and bought a drink. We all knew him, of course, but no one spoke his name. He strolled over to the poker table and asked Finch if he could join the game. He bought a $10 stack of chips, lost the pile and walked out saying we were too tough for him. The Kid always wore two guns with rings in the butts and everyone knew the guns. Sometimes he would wear a mustache and the next time you saw him he would be clean shaven.” After the disappearance of Abram Gill about 1905, the Pinkertons endeavored to link up his disappearance with the “Wild Bunch.” Gill had sold the ranch he had inherited from his half brother, Jim Winters, to the Coburn Cattle Company. He left the Coburn ranch with a $10,000 check. He and his white horse vanished somewhere between the ranch and Landusky. His wealthy family in the east spent a great deal of money trying to find some trace of him. The missing check was made good. Tales of Kid Curry’s death in widely separated areas, including South America, have appeared in newspapers and magazines over the years. Whether he actually did die in a gun fight in Bolivia or whether he returned to the United States and lived to a peaceful old age, is as much a mystery as the disappearance of Gill. The stories persist. The mining camps of Zortman and Landusky knew him well, some of the citizens of the camps knew him as a friend and some, as foe.... —Courtesy of the Eastern Montana Outlaw News in Cooperation with Missouri River Country. To learn more about all the adventures awaiting you in
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