Will Carver Checks Out
The outlaw buys it during a visit to the store.
Categories: History
By: Mark Boardman 11/01/2007
He was supposed to be taking just a little trip to Sonora, Texas, on a cool April night in 1901. He planned to check out the bank, map the best routes out of town—and buy some grain for the horses.
But for outlaw Will Carver, shopping was a killer.
The tale of how Carver shopped until he dropped is told in Jeffrey Burton’s remarkable new book, The Deadliest Outlaws, the most comprehensive look at the Ketchum Gang (and the most thorough account of Carver’s death). The outfit—which included Black Jack Tom Ketchum and his brother Sam, Elzy (or Elza) Lay, Dave Atkins and Will Carver—wreaked havoc in the southwest during the late 1890s and early 1900s. The boys also associated with Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch.
By 1901, the Ketchum Gang was kaput. Sam was dead. Black Jack was waiting to be fitted for a hemp collar. Lay was in prison. And Atkins ... well, he’d gotten the heck out of Dodge and made his way to South Africa where he worked as a gun for hire in the Boer War.
Carver rode with Cassidy’s boys—in fact, he was included in the famous Fort Worth Five photograph of Butch, the Sundance Kid, Harvey Logan (Kid Curry) and Ben Kilpatrick, which was taken months before his visit to Sonora. Butch and Sundance took off for South America in February 1901, while Carver continued on the outlaw trail with Kid Curry and Ben Kilpatrick, along with Ben’s little brother George.
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