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Butch
Cassidy is Wyoming's Robin Hood, the outlaw everyone loves. Many of
Wyoming's outlaws such as Tom Horn or Harvey Logan -- a member of Cassidy's
Wild Bunch -- were calm, mysterious and deadly. Others were just mean
and deadly, such as Slick Nard, who was suspected of murdering two young
women and is known to have tracked down and killed his friend and partner
Jack Bliss. Others were amusing bunglers such as Edward Trafton, who
spent a day in Yellowstone Park in July 1914 robbing fifteen stage-coaches
as they passed Shoshone Point. He had a great time, hurting no one and
even encouraging some pretty young ladies to hide their baubles in their
stockings. He ought, however, to have been paying attention to the
three tourists who took photos of him and the fourth who sketched him.
Those bits of evidence soon landed him in Leavenworth.
In contrast, Butch Cassidy was apparently a paragon of Wyoming virtues.
He was a hard worker, a good cow hand, and a loyal friend who prided himself
on always keeping his promises. He was fun-loving and fond of
practical jokes. A competent outlaw, Cassidy was famous for his
shooting skills, his horsemanship, and his ability to plan robberies, carry
them out, and then vanish. Like Robin Hood, he robbed only from the
impersonal "rich" -- cattle barons, trains, and banks. Stories abound
of his generosity to widows, friends, and children. He completed his
outlaw career without killing anyone, although he once attempted to shoot
the chair legs out from under a sleeping friend and accidentally hit the
man's leg instead. One friend asserted that he'd never known a man who
didn't like Butch, but then reflected that he didn't know any bankers.
A Lander man who knew him in his outlaw days said years later, "If he rode
in here tomorrow, I'd hide him up again." Although the Butch Cassidy
legend has almost certainly grown with time, the real man was apparently a
man worth knowing.
Robert LeRoy Parker was born in Utah in 1866, the oldest of thirteen
children. Both of Roy's parents had, as children, walked through
Wyoming in Mormon handcart companies, and his mother was a survivor of
Martin's handcart company. His father's attitude toward church
activities was negative, however, and Roy followed in his footsteps.
When Roy was thirteen he rode into town to buy a pair of pants.
Finding the store closed, he broke in and took the pants. Although he
left an IOU behind, the store owner signed a warrant for his arrest.
This was Roy’s first contact with the legal system, and may have influenced
his attitude toward the institutions of civilized society. When a
Mormon bishop allowed a neighbor to take part of his father's ranch, the
Parker family was thrown into poverty and Roy's trust in "the system" was
further shaken.
As a teenager, Roy was befriended by Mike Cassidy, an older ranch hand who
introduced Roy to a variety of cowboy skills, including small time rustling.
In 1883 Roy was arrested for stealing a saddle but never convicted, and when
he left home for good in 1884 he was fleeing charges of horse theft.
Twenty-year-old Roy left his legal name behind with the family, taking the
name George Cassidy in honor of his mentor.
Cassidy drifted for the next few years, working for various ranches
including the enormous Swan Land and Cattle Company. He made friends
all over the west who remained extremely loyal to him in the years that
followed. One cowboy lent Cassidy $25 in 1886 to help him get to
Butte, Montana. Apparently Cassidy used the money to go elsewhere. In
the fall of 1887 the cowboy received a hundred dollar bill and a short note
from Cassidy saying, "If you don't know how I got this, you will soon learn
someday." Cassidy had almost certainly gotten the money from helping
the McCarty gang rob the train in Grand Junction, Colorado. It was his
first major crime. He remained with the McCartys for several years,
participating in other robberies. The McCarty gang spent the winter of
1889 in remote Star Valley where the outlaws pretended to be wealthy Montana
cattle ranchers. They opened the valley's first saloon and according
to legend, papered its walls with bank notes.
Sometime during the last half of 1889, Cassidy left the McCarty gang and
returned to cowboy life in Wyoming, renewing and extending his network of
friends. He and Al Hainer settled on a homestead on Horse Creek near
present day Dubois, and were frequent and popular visitors in Lander, where
Cassidy had a sweetheart named Mary Boyd. Cassidy and Hainer spent
Christmas 1889 on Jakey's Fork with their nearest neighbors the Simpsons,
where Cassidy was a big hit with the children. Later that winter, he
made a 120-mile nonstop round trip on horse back to Fort Washakie to get
medicine for a Simpson child who was sick.
In the early 1890's, the conflicts between powerful cattle barons and small
ranchers were rapidly escalating toward the Johnson County War.
Cassidy joined the Powder River Roundup of 1890 and made friends with a
group of small ranchers and rustlers located in the Hole-in-the-Wall
country. He and Hainer developed a small ranch in the area before
selling out to a neighbor and leaving quietly in December 1890, returning
west to their homestead in the Wind River Valley. Because of their
Hole-in-the-Wall connections, Cassidy and Hainer had an automatic enemy in
Otto Franc, a cattle baron of German origin whose cattle ranged throughout
the Big Horn Basin. When Cassidy and Hainer bought three horses
without legal paperwork from a known outlaw, Franc had them arrested for
horse theft. Two trials and several years later, Cassidy was convicted
although Hainer was declared innocent. Cassidy was convinced that his
apparent friend had collaborated with Franc to entrap him. (Between
his arrest and eventual conviction, Cassidy had worked in a Rock Springs
butcher shop for a period of time, earning the nickname “Butch.”)
Public sentiment was strongly supportive of Cassidy, and his reputation was
such that Lander's law enforcement allowed him out of jail the night before
his departure for the penitentiary in Laramie, on the strength of his word
that he would return. Cassidy showed up in time to travel to Laramie
to serve out part of his two-year sentence before public pressure encouraged
the governor to pardon him.
Cassidy left prison in January 1896 determined to take up the outlaw's life
as a career. He traveled to the Hole-in-the-Wall, then down to Brown's
Hole, an outlaw hideout in the southwestern corner of Wyoming, where he
organized his gang, the Wild Bunch. The Wild Bunch was credited with a
series of bank, train, and payroll robberies for the next five years.
After successful heists, the Wild Bunch celebrated in remote towns such as Baggs, where the gang riddled the Bull Dog Saloon, but later supposedly gave
the owner a silver dollar to cover each bullet hole. The famous
picture of the nattily dressed gang was taken in Fort Worth, Texas during
another celebration. In between thefts, the gang members either holed
up in remote locations or scattered, with Cassidy working as a cowhand for
friends or incognito for unsuspecting ranchers. His Robin Hood
reputation carried over to the gang in general, and there were very few
Wyoming citizens interested in the reward money offered. Instead, many
aided and abetted, preferring to base their actions on their personal
opinions of Cassidy as a man.
Although the Wild Bunch had only eight to ten core members, as many as 100
outlaws may have spent brief periods with them. Core members included
Harry "Sundance Kid" Longabough, who remained with Cassidy until their
reported deaths in South America in 1909; Harvey "Kid Curry" Logan, an
extremely dangerous outlaw who killed at least nine men; Elzy Lay, who
reportedly helped Cassidy plan their heists; and others. At least two
women traveled as part of the gang -- Della Rose, who was associated with
member Bill Carver until his death, then became the common-law wife of
another member, Ben "Tall Texan" Kilpatrick. The strikingly beautiful
Etta Place was a Texas prostitute who apparently formed a permanent
association with the Sundance Kid and fled to South America with him and
Cassidy when the gang disbanded.
The Wild Bunch committed two train robberies in Wyoming in the summers of
1899 and 1900. At Wilcox Siding between Medicine Bow and Rock River
they used dynamite to open the train's safe when the express messenger
guarding the money refused to cooperate. They collected about $30,000
on the job and blew up a bridge before escaping. When a posse led by
Converse County Sheriff Joe Hazen caught up with them several days later on
the Powder River, Logan shot and killed the sheriff before the gang jumped
into the river and escaped. The next summer they stopped a train at
Tipton, half way between Rawlins and Rock Springs, and somehow managed to
get the same express messenger they had encountered at Wilcox Siding.
He was persuaded to open the safe this time, though estimates of the gang’s
takings vary widely. One source says $54, another $5,000, another
$45,000 to $55,000.
At any rate, the outlaws’ days were numbered. Civilization continued
to encroach, with its better communications and relentless Pinkerton agents.
After a last robbery in Wagner, Montana in July 1901, the Wild Bunch
disbanded and Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and Etta Place left for South
America to start a new life. Cassidy's timing was good -- by 1902 the
rest of the gang members were either dead or serving long prison sentences.
Apparently, Cassidy and Sundance tried ranching, robbery, and even mining in
South America before their reported deaths at the hands of federal agents on
the Bolivian-Argentinean border in 1909. They had returned briefly to
the U.S. only once -- when they brought Etta Place, stricken with
appendicitis, to Denver for surgery.
The story of their deaths has long been disputed in Wyoming, however, and
some people assert that Cassidy never left for South America at all, but
remained in Wyoming. In his book, In Search of Butch Cassidy,
researcher Larry Pointer offers strong evidence that Cassidy remained in
South America until 1908. He then returned to the U.S. as William T.
Phillips, married, adopted a son, and settled down as a machinist in
Spokane, Washington. Phillips' unpublished, handwritten “biography” of
Butch Cassidy contains inside information about Cassidy's outlaw career, and
even offers an explanation for their reported deaths in 1909. The mine
manager who identified the bodies was a personal friend of Cassidy and
Sundance whose life they had saved on several occasions. He had talked
with Cassidy and Sundance about the impossibility of escaping their criminal
past and in Phillip's opinion, had deliberately misidentified the dead
outlaws in an effort to give them a clean start.
In the two decades that followed, Phillips returned repeatedly to Wyoming,
especially to the Lander area. He dropped in on old friends and
searched for a cache of gold he had supposedly buried near Mary's Lake in
the Wind River Mountains. Phillips also visited his siblings in Utah
and was reunited with his Lander sweetheart. Shortly before his death
from cancer in 1937, he sent her a Mexican fire opal ring inscribed Geo C to
Mary B.
The evidence of Cassidy's survival is a satisfying end to Wyoming's Butch
Cassidy legend. A heart-warming symbol of frontier Wyoming, “our boy
Butch” managed to slip through insurmountable barriers to survive in the
civilized twentieth century, while maintaining ties to the most important
aspects of his past. In that sense, every Wyoming native wants to be
like Butch Cassidy.
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