Few photographs are as dumbfounding as the famous image supposedly taken at Hunter’s Hot Springs, Montana. Dated 1883, the picture is often a supposed once-in-a-lifetime gathering of frontier legends: Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, Judge Roy Bean, Butch Cassidy, and Theodore Roosevelt, just to name a few of the lawmen and outlaws lined up on the same hotel porch. This photo could be one of the neatest group pictures in Western history… Which is exactly why it’s so suspicious.
It is worth remembering that photo manipulation is almost as old as photography itself. Long before Photoshop and FaceTune, people were altering photographs using scissors, glue, ink, pencils, paper cutouts, double exposures, and lots of imagination. For example: the famous Cottingley Fairies photographs of 1917, in which two young girls appeared to be posing with fairies. The images fooled many people, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes series. The tools may have changed, but visual deception is as present as ever.
The Hunter’s Hot Springs photograph, however, doesn’t appear to be a case of photographic trickery. It seems to be exactly what it looks like: a picture of fifteen men standing and sitting together somewhere in the American West during the 1880s. Researcher Jason Leaf, who spent years studying the image, concluded that it is a genuine nineteenth-century photograph. So the real question is not whether the picture exists, but whether the men in it are actually who the annotations claim they are. Of course, if you put a long coat, a waistcoat, and a magnificent mustache on anybody, print the image on faded paper, and practically anyone could look like Wyatt Earp. Still, it’s hard not to be intrigued by the possibility.
In the image, fifteen men are arranged along the steps of a hotel, and despite the summer heat, they’re dressed with the formality of the era: waistcoats buttoned, ties neatly knotted, hats carefully chosen. One man lounges confidently against a step behind him, another sits with crossed legs and a posture suggesting he has opinions on proper table manners. The group gives off an air of toughness: these look like men who have met dangerous people and concluded that they were more dangerous. They’re men who don’t think they’re cool, they know they’re cool. The photograph supposedly includes names like Wyatt Earp and his brothers, Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, the Sundance Kid, and even Theodore Roosevelt, who would later become President of the United States. Imagine that guest list.
The story claims that the men gathered to celebrate the opening of a new railroad line. At the time, railroads were transforming the West, carrying settlers, goods, money, and opportunity across vast distances. Following close behind came every variety of entrepreneur, lawman, outlaw, gambler, and drifter imaginable. It’s a compelling story. The railroad did arrive in Billings, Montana three years prior, and then expanded to Butte and beyond between 1881 and 1883, with Hunter’s Hot Springs being right in the middle of the two towns.
There is just one small problem: Morgan Earp, who is identified in many versions of the photograph, was murdered in 1882. That makes his appearance in a 1883 photograph somewhat inconvenient. Additionally, Bat Masterson is known to have participated in the Dodge City War of 1883, taking place from April to June – would he have been present in Montana that same summer? The only one listed who without a doubt, in my opinion, was at Hunter’s Hot Springs would’ve been Albert A. Rich, as he and his wife moved to a ranch nearby in 1882 – but is it truly him in the picture? Another amusing tidbit involves Theodore Roosevelt. In the photograph’s annotations, he’s identified as “Teddy Roosevelt.” The problem is that he wasn’t commonly called “Teddy” until after the Spanish-American War in 1898 – more than a decade after the photo was supposedly taken. It’s a small detail, but one that raises questions about when the labels were added and how reliable they are.
Wild Bunch (Butch Cassidy’s notorious gang) expert and author Dan Buck described the image as “as authentic as the jackalope and as verifiable as the legend of the vanishing hitchhiker.” His comment highlights the central issue: there is no solid evidence proving the identities attached to the photograph. Buck and others have suggested that the men may simply have been local ranchers, businessmen, or community leaders photographed somewhere in the West during the late 1880s.
Yet the mystery refuses to die because some of the details are surprisingly plausible. For one thing, the location is most likely as listed. When cross referenced with other pictures of the hotel, the porch appears to be the same (although after 1900 the stairs have been removed). Many believe the photograph was actually taken later than 1883, perhaps around 1886. That year solves several problems at once. In 1886, Theodore Roosevelt was on a hunting trip in Montana, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were known to be working within roughly a day’s ride of Hunter’s Hot Springs, “Liver-Eating” Johnson frequently visited the area, and Ben Greenough didn’t make his way out West until the age of 17 in 1886 (he did brush his shoulders with other famous names though, hauling firewood with Calamity Jane, breaking horses for Buffalo Bill Cody, and earning the nickname “Pack Saddle Ben” from Liver-Eating Johnston). The Northern Pacific Railroad also passed within a mile of the resort, making it a convenient gathering place for travelers. The scenario starts sounding a little less impossible. As Jason Leaf said, “The West was really a very small place;” a sentiment that has become more and more obvious to me over time, and yet never ceases to amaze me. We often think of the frontier as a vast, oftentimes lonely, landscape, but many of its most famous personalities traveled the same routes, visited the same towns, and knew many of the same people. The circles overlapped more than what you might think. And that, ultimately, is what makes the photograph so intriguing.
So let’s review: we know it’s a genuine photograph from the era. We know it could depict some of the people claimed. We know several of them were in Montana around the same time. We also know that some of the identifications appear questionable, and that at least one listed man presents a serious chronological problem. In other words, the image is in a fun territory somewhere between history and tall tale.
Maybe it really does capture a remarkable moment when some of the most famous figures of the Old West happened to gather on a hotel porch and pause long enough for a picture. Or maybe it’s simply a photograph of fifteen forgotten men whose identities were gradually transformed by decades of fantastical storytelling. Either way, the mystery has endured for more than a century, and perhaps that’s the real reason people continue to study it.
For those of you interested in reading more on the extensive research behind the photograph, researcher Jason Leaf has documented his work on his website, where he examines the evidence, dates, and theories surrounding the image.
Happy hunting,
Mountain Girl
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