‘Thorny Rose’ shed her wild roots
KNICKERBOCKER — On a quiet afternoon in Memphis, Tenn., as I imagine the scene, a woman stands ironing in the living room of her modest red-brick home. The year is, say, 1950. Neighbors for whom she sews and takes in laundry have no idea that her quiet life is about as distant from her previous life as Memphis is from Wyoming. They could not imagine that the Cowboy State is where she and a gang of West Texas outlaws robbed trains, or that she rode with a couple of desperadoes called Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
She was born Laura Bullion in 1876 and came with her mother and two siblings to this little community near San Angelo to live with her mother’s parents, the Bylers, after her father disappeared. The settlement along spring-fed Dove Creek where Serena and Elliott Byler built a house and raised vegetables was not far from a ranch where four New Yorkers were trying to make a go of it raising sheep. The New Yorkers named their ranch headquarters after Washington Irving’s fictional character, Diedrich Knickerbocker.
By the 1880s, the town that
had grown up around the ranch boasted two saloons, three stores, a combination blacksmith/undertaker’s business and two hotels. Less than a quarter mile southeast was Rock Village, a Mexican community of 60 rock houses, as well as a Catholic church, a wool house and a blacksmith shop.
The Bylers were a churchgoing family, doing their best to raise Laura and her brother and sister, even when the children’s mother, Fereby, stayed gone for weeks at a time with a succession of boyfriends. In addition to their grandchildren, the Bylers raised sweet potatoes, including a 5½ pound giant, the San Angelo Standard Times reported in the summer of 1886. Five years later, the newspaper reported that Laura had made the sixth-grade honor roll with a 99 average. Her mother had died a year earlier.
Laura wasn’t content with raising potatoes, sweet or otherwise. At 15, she headed for the big city, San Antonio. Apparently seeking steadier work than she could find in Knickerbocker, the petite, dark-haired teenager took the name Della Rose and was soon one of the favorites at Fannie Porter’s Sporting House, a popular brothel on the southwest corner of Durango and San Saba streets. (Butch Cassidy may or may not have made his famous bicycle ride on the street out front.)
Laura stayed in touch with folks back home, including a gang of young cowboys who had determined that cattle rustling was more lucrative than cattle raising. Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum and his brother Sam, Ben “Tall Texan” Kilpatrick, Will “News” Carver and Dave Atkins soon graduated from rustling to robbing stagecoaches, banks and trains. They ranged across West Texas and the Panhandle into New Mexico Territory and points north. By 1895, these wayward sons of Knickerbocker had a girl riding with them.
Laura — aka Della Rose — didn’t just hold the reins of getaway horses while Black Jack and the boys dynamited the rail car or relieved passengers of their money and valuables. She could ride and shoot as well as they could. Dressed as a man, she was likely to be the masked bandit muttering “Stick ‘em up” at terrified passengers. She also fenced stolen goods.
Barbara Barton, a retired public-school teacher and a longtime Knickerbocker resident, has written several local histories, including one about the Knickerbocker Six called Den of Outlaws. “What was it?” I asked her by phone last week. “Maybe something in the water?”
Barton laughed. “They all came from families that really tried to do the right thing,” she said. “They just decided the outlaw life was a better way of making a living.”
And make a living they did, for a few years. In her book, Barton describes a Union Pacific train robbery near Tipton, Wyo., in 1900. The Texans rode off with $55,000 in their saddle bags.
Wyoming, of course, was Butch Cassidy country. The Knickerbocker gang not only rode with Cassidy and his Wild Bunch but also hid out with them behind the Hole in the Wall, the hidden gap in a red sandstone escarpment in Johnson County, Wyo. Legend has it that the Wild Bunch nicknamed Laura the Thorny Rose during a winter’s stay at the hideout. That’s also where she met Etta Place, the beautiful woman who traded her life as a schoolteacher to be with Harry Longabaugh, alias the Sundance Kid.
With local lawmen and Pinkerton detectives hot on their trail, the Knickerbocker outlaws one by one met their demise. Black Jack Ketchum was among the first. He got shot up during an attempted train robbery in Union County, N.M., in 1899. Arrested and confined to prison in the New Mexico State Penitentiary in Santa Fe, he swallowed pins trying to commit suicide and had his bullet-mangled arm amputated by prison doctors. New Mexico hanged him in 1901.
Laura Bullion’s lawless years came to an end that same year. Planning to spend their share of a $110,000 take from a Great Northern Railway robbery in Montana, she and Ben Kilpatrick traveled to St. Louis, where they checked into the Laclede Hotel as Mr. and Mrs. J.D. Rose. The couple spent some of the bank notes they had stolen in a jewelry store, and the notes ended up in a St. Louis bank. The Pinkerton detectives pounced. When they arrested Laura, they found $8,500 in bank notes in her valise.
In a Nov. 13, 1901, story complete with hand-drawn illustrations, the Houston Daily Post reported that Kilpatrick — the authorities initially identified him as Harry Longabaugh (the Sundance Kid) — would be charged with forging signatures on bank notes and having in his possession stolen bank notes. A Great Northern fireman came to St. Louis and recounted how Kilpatrick clambered over the coal tender and into the locomotive, where he brandished two revolvers.
The Post story doesn’t mention Laura, although the drawing shows her with short hair and wearing a man’s suit and hat.
She spent nearly four years behind bars in Jefferson City, Mo.; Kilpatrick spent a decade in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. When she got out, she moved to Atlanta to be near him and, according to Barton, bought an interest in a boarding house. Not allowed to visit her friend, she wrote a letter, noting that she intended “to live and make an honest living and live down as much of the past as possible.” Not yet 30, she kept her word for the next five decades.
Kilpatrick went back to robbing trains after he was released, until he was shot through the eye by a Wells Fargo agent near the far West Texas town of Dryden in 1912. Laura spent time in Texas and in Birmingham, Ala., before settling in Memphis in 1924.
A woman stands ironing. I wonder whether, on long afternoons, she wondered, staring down at a blouse on the board before her, making sure the hem is straight, how she came to be the girl she once was. Maybe the loss of her mother at an early age affected her more than anyone could know. Maybe she just hated sweet potatoes. She died on Dec. 2, 1961, at age 85.
The little town Laura fled began its decline long ago — “with the advent of the automobile and improved road systems,” says the historical marker across the road from the venerable community center. Today, it’s a San Angelo bedroom community of ranchettes and comfortable ranch-style homes. Nothing is left of Rock Village.
Knickerbocker doesn’t commemorate Laura Bullion and her train-robbing pals. In Den of Outlaws, Barton includes a picture of her tombstone in a Memphis cemetery. The inscription reads:
Freda Bullion Lincoln Laura Bullion The Thorny Rose 1876-1961