Collected Stories 14

The following is part of the papers in the Oscar Hoback collection as collected by Edna Greet.

     The Hole-in-the-Wall first gained a national notoriety through the train robbery at Wilcox, Wyoming, on June 2, 1899, The robbers left the Union Pacific railroad and headed north to Casper. Crossing the Platte on the Casper bridge, they headed toward the Hole-in-the- Wall and eventually escaped into Montana. This robbery attracted wide attention, and newspaper men all over the Union were smitten with the spell of the name of ” Hole-in-the-Wall.” Paragraphers and joke-smiths roped and hogtied it in record time. Following this, every fugitive from justice in the Rocky Mountain region was reported in Chicago and New York papers to be “headed for the Hole-in-the-Wall.” Escaped convicts in New Mexico and embezzling cashiers from Denver were said to be en route for the capacious Hole. One nauseated writer on a Chicago paper asked why Wyoming did not fill up the Hole with dirt. He suggested fresnos and wheel scrapers as a remedy for police inefficiency. The name “Hole-in-the-Wall” is such a hint and help to a lurid imagination that a famishing literary hack seizes on it with a fiendish avidity.

     It is scarcely necessary to once more announce to our Deadwood Dicks and Nick Carters that the fearsome Hole is no hole at all. It is a wide and beautiful canyon by which a stream finds its way through a remarkable ridge about thirty miles long, known as the Red Wall. This wall of red earth and sandstone parallels the Big Horn mountains for many miles on their southern extremity in Natrona county. Between the ridge and the mountains lies a broad valley through which flows Buffalo creek. On the upper waters of this creek lies the old Houck and Mahoney ranch, one of the oldest in the county and now owned by the Buffalo Creek Cattle company. The creek winds eastward between the Big Horns and the Red Wall, seeking a chance to break through, but does not find it until the break in the wall is found near the border of Natrona and Johnson counties. Here the creek escapes into the lower country and gives to the world the name of “The Hole-in-the-Wall.” Who first gave the canyon this name is not known. There is a probability that it came through the group of Englishmen headed by the two Frewens who in 1878 located a ranch on the Middle and North forks of Powder river. These men had birth, money and brains. Yet, with all three, they failed to make a success of the range cattle business.They built a fine log ranch house with fire places and mantels reminiscent of the stately homes they had known in England. They gave names to many localities. A great castled rock on Castle creek is called “Frewen Castle,” after Mr. Mortimer Frewen, one of the party. They also gave Castle creek its name. Their native isle was a land of castles. There was a spot in London known as the “Hole-in-the-Wall.” As early as 1722, Mr. Tom Brown, a well known writer of that day, says: “Address me at Mr. Seward’s at the ‘Hole-in-the-Wall,’ in Baldwin’s Gardens.” Some of these Londoners at the Frewen ranch in the early eighties probably christened the canyon with its unforgetable name.

Hole In The Wall

     A cowboy battle near the Hole-in-the-Wall in July, 1897, gave the locality its first bit of state-wide notoriety. In this fight Bob Smith was killed, while his brother-in-law, Al Smith, and Bob and Lee Devine were wounded. Peace held her reign for two years and then, in 1899, came the Union Pacific train robbery at Wilcox. The sensational escape of these bandits to Montana through the Hole-in-the-Wall region drew the eyes of the whole nation to this canyon and hung the picture of its rugged beauties in the Hall of Fame among other immortal cavities. The name of the Red Wall was also lurid and suggestive enough to please. Perched on its liver-colored rimrocks a morbid imagination could run wanton and youthful bandits could stalk precociously. We will write of these two battles in their chronological order.

Photo by me of the Red Wall, 2014.

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