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The 100th anniversary of our most-famous jailbreak

by Jack Neely

It was an embarrassing time to be a desperado, the inmate must have mused as he stared out the barred windows with his guard, Frank Irwin. The wild years were over. People were already driving around in automobiles, watching motion pictures. Butch and Sundance were gone to South America. Buffalo Bill, and even Sitting Bull, had become vaudevillians, traveling circus routes, entertaining chubby businessmen and their snotty-nosed kids.

As he could see in the papers strewn around his cell, even Cole Younger and Frank James had their own Wild West Show. It had been here in Knoxville, at the old fairgrounds out East Jackson Avenue, just last week. In each of two well-attended fandangos, Frank James was cheered by middle-class crowds. A Minnesota parole-board order constrained Cole Younger from performing, and he discreetly stayed out of the arena, but loitered near the gate, "where he could be seen by the curious." Fellow Confederate veterans were anxious to shake his hand. That was about all Cole Younger did these days, shake hands.

Was that any life for an outlaw? Knoxville's most famous prisoner surely wondered and considered his own fate. Here he was, a fearsome murderer and train robber, a member of Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch, known to "kill a sheriff now and then, to make them respect you." And he'd been languishing for a year and a half in a jail in downtown Knoxville. He'd been here ever since his capture after shooting a couple of Knoxville cops in a saloon down on the Bowery, three blocks from this jail. For the Montana train robbery, he'd just gotten a federal sentence of 20 years.

About the only thing going on outside that Saturday afternoon was the ball game at Baldwin Park, out Asylum Avenue, where the Knoxville Reds were playing the Knoxville All Stars. Crowds were light that season, the Reds' manager complained.

That weekend Chilhowee Park was hosting a lecturer, the "world-renowned phrenologist, Professor W.T. Marsh."

Beyond that, the sensation in Knoxville was Elmore Carter's freak chicken. It had hatched just yesterday, with "four perfectly developed legs and four perfectly developed wings." The brown leghorn might have seemed a poultry farmer's dream. Alas, "the freak...found that it was not fitted for the duties of this life and gasped a few times, then died." Carter put the feathery corpse on display at the family grocery on North Broadway.

The jail that held the prisoner longer than any other ever had was at the southeast corner of Prince and Hill, just behind the courthouse. If you were to go to exactly the same spot today, you'd be standing at the main entrance to the Knox County Jail. The building is very different, but there is a continuity to things.

He'd escaped from jails before. With Harry Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid, his fellow convict on a train-robbery charge, he'd escaped a South Dakota jail on Halloween, 1897. By some accounts, he'd also escaped a penitentiary in Montana and jails in Arizona and Wyoming. It was considerate of him to have stayed in jail here for so long.

But enough was enough, and as the guard gazed out the window at the river, the moment arrived. The inmate drew out a long wire noose he'd unwound from a jail-cell broom, sneaked it around Frank Irwin's neck, and yanked hard. With Irwin's neck garroted to the bars, the inmate used strips of burlap, torn from his cell hammock, and tied the guard's hands behind him. He drew out a hidden nine-foot crook he'd made out of molding from a window, and snagged a shoebox containing the jailkeeper's pistols, a .38 and a .45, carelessly left a few feet from his cell. Then he waited for the jailer, Tom Bell who, upon arriving on his 4:30 rounds, found Knoxville's most famous shut-in pointing a pistol straight at him. "Open up, Tom," said Harvey Logan, better known to some as Kid Curry. "Open those doors, and go in front of me through the jail, and don't try to monkey, for I will kill you if you do, Tom."

Tom knew he meant what he said. With the assistance of an ex-convict employed by the jail—an Italian immigrant called Robert whose last name is variously spelled "Swanee" and "Swansy"—Harvey Logan saddled the sheriff's favorite mare, pulled his hat down low over his eyes, and, for the first time since 1901, rode.

A little girl on Hill Avenue recognized him, and he gestured that it would be better if she stayed quiet. Then he turned right and galloped across the Gay Street Bridge.

Some claimed they saw him riding down Martin Mill Pike, then farther south, on Brown Mountain. Some thought he was headed toward the mountains and North Carolina; others were sure that he wasn't.

A wanted poster went up across South America for "Harvey Logan...se escapo el 27 de Junio de 1903 de la carcel del Condado de Knox, Knoxville, Tenn." He was sighted down there, allegedly having rejoined his old pals Butch and Sundance. He was also sighted, dead, in Colorado: a desperado who killed himself before being taken alive. The fact is, after he crossed the Gay Street Bridge, no one's completely sure what happened to Harvey Logan.

A book called Harvey Logan In Knoxville, by Sylvia Lynch, includes many more particulars, including some startling photographs.

This Friday is the 100th anniversary of the escape of Harvey Logan. The Gay Street Bridge is still there, under renovation. If only it were finished, I'd propose a reenactment.