The Outlaw

Hugh and Charley Whitney didn't bother to put on masks when they held up the bank at Cokeville, Wyo. one hot afternoon back in September 1911. Downtown Cokeville consisted of five saloons, one Mormon meeting house, a mercantile store, a hotel and Old Lady Ryan's eating house. It had one automobile, 350 people and enough droop-eared, hitching-rack broncs to keep the flies moderately busy. Hugh was 23 and Charley was only 21.

Both were fine horsemen and were considered good, hard-working ranch hands, even though Hugh had killed a conductor on the Oregon Short Line Railroad earlier in the summer, and had a $1,500 price tag on his head. Bank Cashier A. D. Noblitt spoke carefully when they walked in on him and began waving their six-guns under his nose--he had to tell them that the time lock on the vault would not open for an hour and a half.

Over the Cigars. The brothers settled down to wait and passed the time by fleecing eleven men who wandered, one by one, into the white frame bank during the robbery. Hugh, the local paper reported later, "spying a box of Mr. Noblitt's cigars . . . passed them around to the held-up depositors, and bade them smoke, later bidding them cease in their enjoyment and throw the cigars away.

When a woman depositor came in, however, Hugh gallantly decided against holding her prisoner. Afraid she would spread the alarm after they told her to leave, the boys took what money they had collected --about $600 in cash--mounted their horses and galloped off. With the law hot on their tracks, they went first to Texas, then to Minnesota, and finally west again to the Little Rockies country of Montana.

Both decided to go straight. Hugh changed his name to George Walter Brown, Charley to Frank S. Taylor. They began ranching near Glasgow. Both enlisted in the army during World War I and fought in France. Afterward, as the years passed, they prospered. Hugh moved to British Columbia in 1935, but Charley stayed on in Montana. He served on a local school board, took part in community affairs, became widely known as a man of integrity, industry and honor.

A Mighty Debt. But the old holdup preyed on his conscience. Because of Hugh, who might have faced a murder charge, he kept silent for four decades. But when his brother died two years ago, Charley began settling his affairs. Then he told the Governor of Wyoming: "I have no incentive ... to continue this life of shame ... I am ready to pay my debt to society . . . [although Hugh and I] paid a mighty sum in remorse, tears, lonesomeness and regret." Last week, 62-year-old Charley Whitney pleaded guilty to bank robbery in a district court at Kemmerer, Wyo. "I can see no purpose in sending you to prison," said the judge, and sent him back home, a man with a name once more.

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