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FeedThe Sundance Alternative
How the recession of 1887 led a Phoenixville lad to infamy.
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In January 2009, one of every 488 houses was in foreclosure. Personal bankruptcies were up by one-third in 2008. Seven percent of U.S. workers was unemployed, with predictions of 10 percent.
So what will all those homeless, broke and jobless Americans do? A few will do what Harry Alonzo Longabaugh did.
In 1887, five years after moving from Phoenixville to Colorado to work as a horse wrangler, Longabaugh found himself out of work and broke. No 20-year-old who’s tasted freedom wants to move back in with his family, so Longabaugh did what he had to do—and then he did it again and again until, finally and inevitably, he was killed doing it.
He stole a horse, a saddle and a revolver from the VVV Ranch, a “corporate” operation near Sundance, Wyo., that was owned by English investors. Longabaugh and his partners attacked banks, railroads and mining interests. They never robbed working people. Arrested a couple of months later, he spent nearly two years in the Sundance jail, where he tried repeatedly to escape. This rambunctiousness drew attention to “the kid.”
The Sundance Kid.
Despite the escape attempts—including one in which Longabaugh and a fellow prisoner attacked the jailer who brought their dinner—the county prosecutor requested a pardon for Sundance, which was granted. Wyoming Gov. Thomas Moonlight wrote in 1889: “He is still under 21 years of age, and his behavior has been good since confinement, showing an earnest desire to reform.”
Born into a family of German origin, Sundance was the youngest of Josiah and Annie (Place) Longabaugh’s five children. The first of the line had been Josiah’s grandfather, Conrad Langebach, who’d arrived in Philadelphia from Rotterdam in 1772 as an indentured servant and fought in the Revolutionary War. Conrad eventually acquired a farm at New Hanover, but some of his descendants did less well. Sundance’s branch of the family could be considered part of the working poor.
“Josiah and Annie moved frequently, never owned property and always stayed near Phoenixville, where their families lived,” wrote Donna B. Ernst, a Sundance relative and author of Sundance: My Uncle. “Josiah was a common laborer, often hiring out for farm work.”
Young Sundance attended the First Baptist Church of Phoenixville, where his grandfather, Harry Place, was a deacon. The extended Longabaugh family got together regularly for picnics and birthdays. But Sundance’s relatives remembered him as an “unsettled spirit,” with wanderlust and little interest in family.
Perhaps pinched circumstances weakened his family bonds. According to Ernst, he was mothered primarily by an older sister, Samanna, and, by the age of 13, had already moved out on his own. The 1880 census listed Sundance as a “hired servant,” boarding with Wilmer Ralston, a West Vincent farmer.
By the summer of 1882, Sundance had begun to look elsewhere. In June, Samanna recorded his search in her husband’s business ledgers, where she sometimes made marginal notations of other events. “Harry A. Longabaugh left home,” she wrote, “to seek employment in Philadelphia and from their (sic) to New York City, from their (sic) to Boston, and from their (sic) home on the 26 of July or near that date.”
Apparently, he found nothing.
Meanwhile, out in Illinois, a cousin, George Longenbaugh, had decided to homestead in Colorado with his pregnant wife and 2-year-old son. They would go in a covered wagon, and would need help. Fifteen-year-old Sundance—just returned from his unsuccessful job-hunting trip—was probably delighted by the Longenbaughs’ offer to join their adventure. He jumped on it.
In August, Samanna made a record of Sundance’s departure: “Harry A. Longabaugh left home for the West.”
Colorado in 1882 was still not much past its frontier days. Before the Mexican War, the entire state had been the territory of the Ute tribe, visited only by a few white trappers. With the end of the war, the U.S. government had agreed to honor Ute rights. But citizens weren’t so scrupulous. Settlers filtered in, and the discovery of gold in the 1850s attracted tens of thousands of prospectors. An 1868 treaty pushed the Utes onto a reservation comprising roughly the western third of the state. But after the 1879 Meeker Massacre—in which the Utes killed an Indian agent trying to turn them into Christian farmers—the tribe was evicted to a much smaller reservation in Utah.
