Early Day Outlaws

The panel calls the stolen banknotes unsigned and worthless, and the second word did not hold. The bills, bound for Helena banks, lacked only signatures. In November 1901 they surfaced in St. Louis, and Ben Kilpatrick was arrested there on November 5; Laura Bullion was stopped at the Laclede Hotel with a suitcase of the notes and admitted forging the signatures. On December 13 Kid Curry was arrested at Knoxville, Tennessee, and later convicted of uttering Wagner notes on which the signatures had been forged. The money the panel dismisses is what undid them.

What the plaque says

Early Day Outlaws The old West produced some tolerably lurid gunslingers. Their hole card was a single-action frontier model .45 Colt, and their long suit was fanning it a split second quicker than similarly inclined gents. This talent sometimes postponed their obsequies quite a while, providing they weren't pushed into taking up rope spinning from the loop end of a lariat by a wearied public. Through choice or force of circumstances these parties sometimes threw in with the "wild bunch"-rough riding, shooting hombres, prone to dis- regard the customary respect accorded other people's cattle brands. Kid Curry's stomping ground in the 1880's was the Little Rockies country about forty miles southwest of here. On July 3, 1901, Curry and his partners, Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and Deaf Charlie, pulled off a premature Independence Day celebration by holding up the Great Northern Railway's No. 3 passenger train and blowing up the express car safe near this point. Montana's most famous train robbery netted the crooks a bag of gold coins and $40,000 in unsigned and worthless banknotes. Soon after, Curry and his gang departed Montana.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Great Plains Dinosaur Museum — 9.4 mi
  Home of Leonardo, the duckbill that kept its skin for seventy-seven million years, found in the breaks north of Malta in 2000.

More markers nearby

• Cattle Brands — 11 mi