Here's the thing about the Wild Bunch — they made robbing a train look easy.
It's past midnight, June 2nd, 1899. A mile outside Wilcox Station, a lantern swings on the tracks. The big Union Pacific overland slows, screeches, stops. Six men climb aboard. No shouting, no panic. They've done this before, and you can tell.
They cut the locomotive and the express car loose, run them up onto a bridge, and blow the bridge behind them with dynamite — so nobody can come up at their backs. Then they get to the safe. The messenger won't open it. Fine. They pack it with dynamite and light it — and they use way too much. The blast doesn't just crack the safe. It blows apart the whole express car. Money everywhere, banknotes drifting down into the dark grass.
And the haul was huge for the time: somewhere around $30,000 to $60,000. So the whole country came after them. The railroad, the express company, even the U.S. government each put up $1,000 a head — dead or alive. By the next day there were nearly 100 men in the saddle, Pinkerton detectives and bloodhounds among them.
Nobody was ever convicted. But the nerve, the dynamite, the way they just vanished? Everyone knew. It was Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch — Kid Curry and the Sundance Kid likely riding with them — gone like smoke into the canyons.