Butch Cassidy

Criminal

• Born: April 13, 1866
• Birthplace: Beaver, Utah
• Died: Possibly November 7, 1908
• Place of death: possibly San Vicente, Bolivia

American bank robber and horse rustler

Cause of notoriety: Cassidy and his Wild Bunch Gang were responsible for countless robberies and thefts, becoming folk legends in the process.

Active: 1894-1896

Locale: American West and Southwest, Argentina, and Bolivia

Early Life

Robert LeRoy Parker, who would later come to be known as Butch Cassidy (CAS-ih-dee), was born in Beaver, Utah, on April 13, 1866. Known as Roy as a child, Cassidy was the oldest of thirteen children born to Mormon pioneers from England. During his childhood, the Parkers spent much of their time in Circleville, Utah, as homesteaders. As a teenager, Roy worked on ranches throughout western Utah. It was while working on such ranches that he came under the tutelage of an unscrupulous rancher named Mike Cassidy; Roy would later adopt Cassidy’s last name. Originally taking the name George Cassidy, Roy would later be labeled with the nickname “Butch” as a result of his work with local Utah butcher Charlie Crouse. It has been largely speculated that Roy assumed a new identity to avoid bringing shame to his family name.

Roy’s first run-in with the law came at a young age, when he let himself into a closed shop in order to steal a pair of pants (legend has it that he left an “IOU” note, promising to return and pay the merchant). Cassidy began his more consistent criminal activity as a cattle rustler. He disliked the manner in which larger ranchers would drive small-time ranchers out of business and began his criminal career rustling from the larger ranches. As his actions were initially designed to hurt the substantial landowners and help the small ones, he was labeled the Robin Hood of the West. Cassidy was convicted for horse theft on July 4, 1894. He received a two-year sentence in the prison at Laramie, Wyoming, and was released on January 6, 1896.

Cassidy robbed his first bank in June, 1889, when he and three partners held up the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride, Colorado. While fleeing with their twenty-thousand-dollar bounty, Cassidy and his gang were among the first to make use of the Outlaw Trail, a long, dangerous route running through Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and Montana. The trail linked together a series of hideouts, including the infamous Robbers’ Roost in Utah and Wyoming’s Hole-in-the-Wall.

After his time in prison between 1894 and 1896, Cassidy returned to the rustler’s life along the Arizona-Utah border. At this time, he began to assemble what would become his most renowned gang, the Wild Bunch—a group of seasoned cowboys, robbers, and rustlers. Membership often changed and rarely exceeded ten people, but the gang’s more prominent members included Flat Nose George Curry, Harvey “Kid Curry” Logan, Bill Carver, Elzy Lay, and Harry “Sundance Kid” Longabaugh.

On August 13, 1896, the Wild Bunch made off with seven thousand dollars from a bank in Montpelier, Idaho. Cassidy and his gang then robbed the Pleasant Valley Coal Company payroll of eight thousand dollars. Known for intricate planning, the gang would set up check points with new horses to replace their tired horses after a heist. Thus, law enforcement officers would be chasing fresh horses on their own tired horses.

Following the Coal Company holdup, the gang began bringing in larger sums of money in robberies throughout South Dakota, New Mexico, Nevada, and Wyoming, including an estimated seventy thousand dollars from a train robbery near Folsom, New Mexico. However, by this time, the Wild Bunch had an array of law enforcement officers on their trail wherever they traveled. Operatives of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency were specifically tracking Cassidy, known to be the leader of the gang.

In 1900, the gang is said to have asked Utah governor Heber Wells for amnesty in exchange for mending their criminal ways. When this idea failed, the band disbanded under the heat of law enforcement pursuit, and the members went in separate directions. After the gang disbanded in 1902, Cassidy traveled to England and then met up with Longabaugh (the Sundance Kid) and his girlfriend, Etta Place, in Fort Worth, Texas. The three then traveled to Argentina.

After farming for a time, Cassidy and Sundance went back to robbing payrolls and trains in Argentina and Bolivia until they were supposedly killed by soldiers in San Vicente, Bolivia, on November 7, 1908. However, the exact circumstances of their deaths remain unknown. In one account, two polite American bandits robbed a coal-mine payroll in early November, 1908, and hid in San Vicente, where they celebrated their success. Three days later, they were surrounded by Bolivian soldiers and killed in a gunfight. The bandits were buried in unmarked graves and assumed to be Cassidy and Sundance. Another legend has it that Cassidy put Sundance out of his misery after he was seriously wounded and then turned the gun on himself. Yet another legend has it that it was not Cassidy and Sundance whom soldiers killed but two other bandits. This legend concludes with Cassidy traveling to Europe, later returning to the United States as William Phillips and marrying a woman named Gertrude Livesay. The Phillips family is said to have lived a law-abiding life in Arizona and then in Washington. William Phillips, after nearing bankruptcy and returning to Utah and Wyoming to look for some buried caches from the Wild Bunch days, was diagnosed with cancer and died on July 20, 1937.

Impact

Butch Cassidy’s legend has had more influence on American perceptions of the Old West than perhaps any other. Known as the Robin Hood of the West, Cassidy, for right or wrong, became known as a gentleman criminal. His image was that of the working-class hero standing up for the little guy against larger ranchers. As a holdup man and bank robber, Cassidy was known to be polite and as gentle as possible. This mode of operation, along with what has been viewed as his general good nature, has made Cassidy the Old West’s quinessential “good guy” criminal. His legend was solidified in film in 1969 with the release of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman as Cassidy and Robert Redford as Sundance.

Further Reading

Kelly, Charles. The Outlaw Tail: A History of Butch Cassidy and His Wild Bunch. Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Kelly weaves together the lives of Cassidy and his contemporaries. The historical analysis includes depictions of both the famous Hole-in-the-Wall and Robber’s Roost hideouts.

Meadows, Annie. Digging up Butch and Sundance. Lincoln, Neb.: Bison Books, 2003. After finding out that Butch and Sundance had lived for several years in their beloved Patagonia, the author and her husband set out to trace the final days of the pair. The couple unearthed documents, followed leads, and analyzed DNA evidence in an attempt to trace the demise of the two outlaws. Eventually, they traced their deaths to San Vicente, Bolivia, in 1908. This, for many, has become the accepted location in which Cassidy and Sundance Kid were finally shot and killed.

Patterson, Richardson. Butch Cassidy: A Biography. Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Devoted to the life and times of Cassidy.