Today marks the 149th anniversary of the birth of Butch Cassidy, the last of the legendary Wild West or Old West bank and train robbers, in Beaver in what was then the Utah Territory. Utah was admitted to statehood on Jan. 4, 1896. Beaver is 210 miles southwest of Salt Lake City and 220 miles northeast of Las Vegas, situating it about halfway between the two cities.
The first settlers came to Beaver from Parowan, about 35 miles to the southwest, in April 1856, a decade before Cassidy’s birth as Robert Leroy Parker, a son of Mormon parents who had answered Brigham Young’s call for young couples to help build communities of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints adherents.
Parker was the first of 13 children born to Max and Annie Parker.
On June 24, 1889, Parker, who had taken to using the alias George Cassidy, committed his first big-league crime, robbing a bank in Telluride, Colorado, of more than $20,000. It was while laying low afterwards, while he worked in a Rock Springs, Wyoming, butcher shop, that he earned the nickname “Butch” Cassidy, which would become one of the most famous criminal aliases in American history.
In 1894, Cassidy was arrested for horse theft in Wyoming. He served two years in the Wyoming Territorial Prison at Laramie. Upon his release, he quickly returned to a life of crime, putting together a gang of outlaws that became known as the Wild Bunch.
Cassidy’s most famous partner was Harry Longbaugh, better known as the “Sundance Kid.” Longbaugh’s nickname came in 1888 after his release from jail in the town of Sundance, the county seat for Crook County in the then Wyoming Territory, about 270 miles north of Cheyenne, where he had served time for horse theft. Wyoming was admitted to statehood immediately preceding Utah on July 10, 1890.
Other members of the Wild Bunch included Harvey Logan, alias Kid Curry; Ben “The Tall Texan” Kilpatrick; Harry Tracy, Deaf Charley Hanks and Tom “Black Jack” Ketchum.
The Wild Bunch specialized in holding up railroad express cars, and the gang was sometimes called the Train Robbers’ Syndicate.
The characters of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were, of course, forever immortalized in the 1969 film bearing their names, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy and Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid. The film won three Academy Awards in 1970.
As the 19th century came to a close, the Wild West was no longer quite so wild. In fact, Larry Schweikart, a professor of American history at the University of Dayton, and Lynne Pierson Doti, the David and Sandra Stone Professor of Economics at Chapman University in Orange, California, argue in their 1991 book, Banking in the American West from the Gold Rush to Deregulation, argue that at least in terms of bank robberies, most of what we believe to be true is really myth and there were in a 40-year period in the late 19th century, spread across 15 states and territories, including every state or territory west of the Missouri/Minnesota/Texas line, specifically, Arizona, California, Colorado, the Dakotas, Kansas, Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, maybe a dozen bank robberies including two major ones pulled by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In any event, the Old West was becoming both more populous and efficient in terms of law enforcement. The frontier was closing.
Tired of his robberies, railroad executives hired detectives to catch Cassidy and began placing mounted guards in railcars to pursue the Wild Bunch.
In 1901, Cassidy fled the United States for Argentina accompanied by his lover, Etta Place, and the Sundance Kid. The trio homesteaded a ranch at Cholila, though Place returned to the United States after several years. In 1904, Cassidy and Sundance learned that detectives had tracked them to South America. They abandoned the Cholila ranch and resumed a life of robbery in Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia.
While there is no conclusive evidence to prove it, Bolivian troops reportedly killed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the village of San Vicente in 1908.
The families of both men insist, however, that the men survived and returned to live into old age in the United States.
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