Matt Warner's Firsthand Account of the Telluride Robbery

The life of Matt Warner is certainly a dichotomy.   Born as Willard Erastus Christensen, in Utah, Warner’s parents were Mormon missionaries that immigrated from Denmark.  Accounts of his early life indicate that Warner was a bad hombre.  Along with bank robbery, he was convicted of murder.  Accounts from her family and newspapers claim he kidnapped his first wife (Rosa) when she was thirteen or fourteen.  In his later years, Warner served as a lawman for Price, Utah.  All indications are that Matt Warner was a respected community member.

I will discuss Matt Warner later.   For now, he provides a first-hand account claiming to be and identified as an accomplice in the robbery.

The following are excerpts from The Last of the Bandit Riders by Matt Warner and Murray King, 1940

…

Soon after, Butch Cassidy and I ran into Tom McCarty, and we were all so surprised and happy we drank a saloon in Cortez dry, treating each other and the crowd. I hadn't seen Tom since we parted at Deseret. He had a cabin hide-out eight miles out of Cortez and made us come out there and rest up.

 

We had spent most of our money and didn't have a thing to do but talk about our next move. It ended up by our planning a daylight robbery of the main bank in Telluride Colorado. I had studied that bank and knew the layout. It was only thirty miles from Telluride to the Mancos Mountains, where we decided to go for our hide-out. Instead of having a relay or two of fresh horses hid and waiting for us on the run, we rode our fastest, toughest nags and planned to make the run without relays.

 

We cantered into town all dressed up. We had silver-studded bridles, spurs, saddles and artillery. We wore five-gallon hats, red bandannas, flashy Shirts, chaps and high-heeled cowboy boots. When we got to the bank no one was there but the cashier. We made him go into the vault and hand us a couple of sacks of greenbacks. It was more money than Butch and me had ever seen before. We herded the cashier out of the bank, ahead of us, with his hands still up in the air. Some people on the street saw us and yelled "Bank robbers!”

 

“On your horses!" yells Tom. I have both sacks of money in my hands but take my horse in a flying leap. Down the street we thunder, expecting to see the whole town explode In our faces. But it don't happen. The crowd just looks paralyzed and helpless. We learn a lesson about crowds that is valuable to us in our future operations as robbers.

 

We roar out of town and strike across open country toward the Mancos Mountains. "They can’t foller us!" Tom yelled. "They don't know who we are." But we came to a road right then that we had to cross, and something happened that wouldn't happen once in a thousand years. We were seen by a cowboy who knew us.

 

"Hell's fire;" says Butch, "that feller will turn our names In as soon as he hears about the robbery! That little accident made all the difference in the world to us the rest of our lives. It gave ‘em a clue they could trace us. And right there we became real outlaws, with no way to live but by stealing.

 

We made the run from Telluride to the Mancos in two and a half hours. When we counted the money we got from the Bank, thinking it would make us all rich, there was only $31,000 --a little over $10,000 apiece.

 

Every dollar I have ever stole has gypped me out of more than two dollars I would otherwise have made, I figure. Crime has always brought me bigger losses than gains.

  

This is a snippet of a further account of the robbery given By Matt Warner just before his death (Dec 21, 1938) as reported in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, Sept 2, 1938.

 

...

Now 73 years of age, Mr. Warner is one of the few living gun fighters of the old west.  He has vivid memories of the picturesque period of American history when he, Butch Cassidy, Tom McCarty Elza Leigh, Bill Rose and similar characters terrorized frontier communities with banidit activities.

 

On the Tuesday night program, the former outlaw dramatized the notorious holdup of the Telluride Colo. band and how Mr. Cassidy, McCarty and he captured a pursuing sheriff and sent him home without his trousers.

 

The sheriff's long pants, Mr. Warner recalled, were hung on a tree beside a well-traveled road, with a sign saying "Sheriff Tom Farer never goes back without his man, but sometimes he goes back without his pants."

Fitting in with the story by Mr. Warner, who has long since renounced his career of banditry and became one of Price's leading civic figures, was the invitation to attend the Robbers' Roost Roundup extended by Mr. Kelly.

 

Commentary

Matt Warner’s posthumous book was released in 1938.  At the same time, Charles Kelly released his book The Outlaw Trail: A History of Butch Cassidy and His Wild Bunch.  Kelly also “re-released” Tom McCarty’s Biography claiming he found it published in a Manti, Utah newspaper.  I have scoured Manti and all papers in the Utah Digital Papers and have failed to find the published work.  Where did it come from?  Kelly said the original was with Tom McCarty’s son.   It is not clear where Kelly found the writings or even if they are original.  It is a shame that Charles Kelly was involved with all three documents.

Matt Warner’s accounts are boisterous and inconsistent.  Even Charles Kelly thought Matt Warner was full of malarky.  Within a two-month period (book release and interview), Warner confuses the Telluride robbery and his later escape into Brown’s Hole.  Sheriff Tom Farer was a Salt Lake City officer and his actions had nothing to do with Telluride.  I am going to hold back before I call Matt Warner a liar.  I will present additional research as the topic fits.  We will address Matt Warner’s book details after we visit Robert Leroy Parker’s background up until the Telluride robbery.

I have already posted a portion of Tom McCarty’s autobiography.  I will post it in its entirety shortly.  The document is well past copyright expiration.