Kaycee: Butch Cassidy's Hole-in-the-Wall Country

Kaycee, Wyoming sits at the gateway to one of the most famous outlaw hideouts in American history. The Hole-in-the-Wall, a narrow red-walled gap in the Big Horn foothills to the west, served as a sanctuary for the Wild Bunch, the gang led by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the eighteen nineties and early nineteen hundreds. The name Kaycee comes from the KC Ranch, a cattle operation established here on the Middle Fork of the Powder River in the eighteen eighties.

The KC Ranch was also the site of the first killings in the Johnson County War of eighteen ninety-two, when the invading Wyoming Stock Growers gunmen killed two small ranchers, Nate Champion and Nick Ray. Cassidy's Wild Bunch used the Hole-in-the-Wall terrain between train robberies, relying on the canyon's single defensible entrance. The area remains remote country in the Big Horn foothills.