A photo of the elusive Hole-in-the-Wall outlaw Harve Ray has just been officially verified by historian Michael Bell after more than a year of research.
Ray was known to be a cattle rustler and was involved in at least two major heists – the Belle Fouche Bank robbery and the Wilcox train robbery.
“For the first time ever, we have a photograph of this Wyoming outlaw,” Bell told Cowboy State Daily. “Harve Ray, had he lived longer, would have been as famous as Flat-nosed George Curry, Butch Cassidy, and Harvey Logan.”
Instead, Ray disappeared and, more than a century after his mysterious disappearance, has all but faded from public memory.
“Maybe he got the memo that said outlawry is not a good thing to do, and he just dropped out completely, like a smart man,” Bell said. “We know that Al Hainer, Butch Cassidy's partner, disappeared in 1903. There's quite a few folks in the Wyoming Outlaw circles who just vanished.”
The 1887 photograph is in the Wyoming State Archives and most of the men were identified by their full name when the photo was taken. Bell spent over a year researching each person in the photograph and proved their identities conclusively.
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