The wild bunch Rides again!

The Wild Bunch is assembled for treat time.   You can see the newest member of the bunch, Gracie, on the left, behind Emma.   Gracie is fitting in just fine.   We were told she would be a little shy around new dogs, but she is taking it all in.   Day two of the Wild Bunch reunion is going fine.    We had three children over to play with us Saturday.  We had a wonderful time running with them, chasing tennis balls, and getting attention from six friends that just stopped by to get a much needed golden fix.  The Wild Bunch lived up to our name, we played hard and entertained everyone.   But we have a big legend to live up to.  Here is part of the legend!

Our dad has told us tales about the Wild Bunch when Butch Cassisdy and the Sundance Kid hid out in the Hole-in-the-Wall near Kaycee in Northern Wyoming.   He is obsessed with the Hole-in-the-Wall.   Everytime he went to the old family home nearby, he would do an off road trip into the Hole-in-the-Wall.   I have gotten to run there several times and it is great.  No fences, no boundaries.  I can be out of sight and only be 10 feet away.  They made me stay close, too many rattlesnakes and too many places where a flat trail skirts a 1,000 ft drop into a black hole.  Once I barked at a bear that was only 500 feet away, but it was across a chasm on the opposite edge of a cliff.   It would have taken us a day to travel around the canyon, or a day to climb down one side of the cliff and up the other side. 

He says that Historians have gotten the story wrong, the real story isn't about Butch Cassidy, it should have been about the place.  The Hole-in-the-Wall is about 10 square miles of impossible canyons and rock cliffs, places that you can not even imagine can exist.  It is where Chief Little Wolf and Chief Dull Knife led their band of Cheyenne and Arapaho after fleeing the Custer Battle in 1876, the band of 300-600 hid from the 6th Calvary and remnants of the 7th Calvary for three months before escaping out the west side.   The rugged land is the reason the Wild Bunch could hide out from hundreds of lawmen so easily and for so long.  So he named us the Wild Bunch in memory of his child hood when he would climb the rocks and ride horseback with his father up the network of cliffs and canyons of the Hole-in-the-Wall.

There is an even more compelling story about his trips into the Hole-in-the-Wall to join a search for a friends daughter who's murdered body is hidden in the wild canyons and impassible rock cliffs of the Hole-in-the-Wall.  Over 400 searchers spent months in the mountains and along the cliffs.  They found several bodies, some thought to be from the Wild Bunch gang, but even now they have not found the young lady.   He had started a book on the lost lady and tried to interest Ann Rule into taking up the mystery as a book.  It is just one more testament to the labyrinth that is the Hole in The Wall.  And a story waiting to be told.

Mogley G. Retriever