Before robbing trains in the States, the Sundance Kid was a cowboy in Alberta

Long before the first Calgary Stampede, the city attracted a different kind of cowboy.

Harry Longabaugh — better known as the Sundance Kid — is perhaps most famous for his daring bank and train robberies as part of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch. But the American outlaw’s short stint as a cowboy and businessman in southern Alberta is a lesser-known chapter of Wild West history.

Records suggest the Sundance Kid spent about three years in Alberta in the early 1890s. He reportedly worked as a ranch hand at the Bar U Ranch south of Longview, opened a saloon at Calgary’s Grand Central Hotel, and was arrested by the North-West Mounted Police for allegedly abusing animals.

“It was an interlude in this peripatetic lifestyle … of wandering around, ranching, cowboying, and occasionally robbing a train or a bank or a mine or something,” said American writer and researcher Daniel Buck.

Buck and his wife, Anne Meadows, author of Digging up Butch and Sundance, had been researching the outlaw duo’s time in South America — including trying to solve the mystery of whether or not they died in a 1908 shootout with Bolivian cavalry — when they heard in passing that the Kid had spent time in Canada.

Their research in the early 1990s brought to light everything from 1891 Alberta census records listing Longabaugh as a 25-year-old horse breaker at the Bar U Ranch, to a November 1901 article in the Calgary Herald mentioning that a "former Calgarian" by the same name was wanted for murder in Texas.

Buck’s findings surprised him, as while the Sundance Kid had been written about extensively in books and articles by that point, Longabaugh’s time in Canada had been glossed over for the most part.

“The history of Sundance in Canada was unknown to people in the United States,” Buck said.

He and Meadows published their findings in the winter 1993 edition of the Western Outlaw-Lawman History Association Journal.

Aside from being charged with animal cruelty in Calgary and having those charges dropped shortly after — which Buck says he was most likely framed for — the Kid stayed out of trouble during his time north of the border.

Much of Longabaugh’s life is shrouded in mystery.

Between his release from an 18-month prison sentence in Sundance, Wyo., for theft in 1889 to being suspected of taking part in a train robbery in 1892, there was practically no trace of him in the States. Records of his time in Canada help fill in those blanks.

Toronto Star crime reporter Peter Edwards, co-author of The Encyclopedia of Canadian Organized Crime, said coming to Canada was common for American outlaws, pointing out that infamous gangster Al Capone is rumoured to have hid out in Moose Jaw, Sask.

"American authorities couldn't pursue them,” Edwards said.