Wild Bunch

The Wild Bunch is an outlaw band remembered in the novel through its association with Baggs and the exploits of Cassidy and his companions. Its reputation makes the town attractive to fugitives and aspiring bank robbers, while the local merchants’ welcome for outlaw money reveals the practical interests beneath Baggs’s reputation as a place that asked few questions.

Identity and Reputation

The novel identifies Baggs as a former hangout of the Wild Bunch, placing the band within a regional landscape of outlaw travel and refuge. Cassidy and his companions are associated with Brown’s Hole, from which they rode into Baggs when they wanted to go on a spree. The account gives no fuller roster or organizational structure; it presents the Wild Bunch chiefly through the name’s local history and the movement of its members between hideout and town.

Baggs and Outlaw Money

The Wild Bunch’s visits had an economic consequence. After Cassidy and his companions stayed in Baggs for a day or so, they left with lighter purses, while the town’s businessmen were richer. Baggs’s merchants were thus not merely passive witnesses to outlaw activity: their interest in the money brought by visitors helped explain why the town had a reputation for not probing a newcomer’s past. The band’s presence connected outlaw violence elsewhere to ordinary commerce in town, without suggesting that the businessmen shared its crimes.

Del Delaney’s View of the Band

Del Delaney hears about Baggs from former Wineglass riders who describe it as a place where people do not ask questions and where business owners welcome outlaw money. Seeking people who might join a bank robbery, he reasons that the town could bring him into contact with an outfit needing another man. The account does not establish that he meets or joins the Wild Bunch; its reputation instead shapes his expectations about Baggs as a possible refuge and source of criminal associates.

After walking Main Street, Del looks west toward the direction of Brown’s Hole and imagines the Wild Bunch’s earlier rides into town. He wishes he had arrived a few years sooner, when he might have seen Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and their companions. The recollection gives the band a particular force in Del’s imagination: it represents an outlaw past he can only approach through stories, even as he is deciding whether he himself is capable of that life.