Butch Cassidy
Authors: W. C. Jameson
Butch Cassidy
Butch Cassidy
Beyond the Grave
W.C. Jameson
Taylor Trade Publishing
Lanham • New York • Boulder • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
Published by Taylor Trade Publishing
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Copyright © 2012 by W.C. Jameson
All rights reserved
. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jameson, W. C., 1942–
Butch Cassidy : beyond the grave / W.C. Jameson.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-58979-739-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58979-740-6
(electronic)
1. Cassidy, Butch, b. 1866. 2. Outlaws—West (U.S.)—Biography. 3. West
(U.S.)—Biography. I. Title.
F595.C362J35 2012
978'.02092—dc23
[B]
2012019750
™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Butch Cassidy remained standing next to the Ford coupe, his heart beating fast and heavy with anticipation. For four decades, he had stayed away from his family for fear the presence of an outlaw in their home would bring them shame and they would be ostracized by their neighbors.
After all this time, Cassidy now found himself staring into the face of his beloved father, and the moment filled with certain terror. He wondered if he should just climb back into the car and drive away.
In spite of his fears, Cassidy grinned at the man standing before him. Maxi Parker immediately recognized his firstborn. The two men approached each other and embraced for a long time. With tears in their eyes, they entered the house together.
The outlaw Butch Cassidy had not perished in an alleged South American shootout. He lived to return home to his family.
Contents
Chapter 4: Enter Butch Cassidy
Chapter 7: Enter the Sundance Kid
Chapter 8: Growth of an Outlaw Reputation
Chapter 10: Winnemucca Bank Holdup
Chapter 13: The San Vicente Incident
Chapter 14: The San Vicente Incident Revisited
Chapter 16: Return of the Outlaw, Butch Cassidy
Chapter 17: Enter William T. Phillips
Introduction
In a variety of ways, the life and times of the outlaw Butch Cassidy remain among the most compelling and mysterious of all of America’s Western bad men.
For one thing, Cassidy’s outlawry did not result from general meanness or shiftlessness as was often the case with many other notorious crooks of the time. Cassidy’s sister, Lula Parker Betenson, once offered the opinion that her brother was not a product of social or personal conflict as were noted outlaws such as Jesse James, the Younger Brothers, the Daltons, and, as some claim, Billy the Kid. Cassidy’s lawbreaking activities might have been borne of equal parts mischievousness and youthful boisterousness along with a well-developed disgust and resentment of the manner in which large corporations—banks, railroads, and ranchers—grew wealthy at the expense of the common man and others who possessed little in the way of power, prestige, or money. Cassidy’s disgust might have led to a desire for revenge, or perhaps at the very least a perceived need to remind the moneyed interests from time to time that they could be thwarted.
A certain level of idealism likely pervaded Cassidy’s thoughts and actions. To many, he was perceived as the Robin Hood of his time—taking from the rich and distributing the booty among those who needed it. Such romantic images are often attached to outlaws but are seldom true. In Cassidy’s case, however, there might indeed be some element of truth to this notion, although it is well known that this interesting bandit enjoyed spending money on himself as well.
One Cassidy researcher, Lula Parker Betenson, wrote that Butch may have perceived himself as a small-time cattleman or horseman and regarded the large cattle corporations, banks, and railroads as threats to his way of life. Betenson stated that Cassidy was “a product of the great land, the big sky, the wide open spaces” and that he just as easily could have been a congressman or senator.
Betenson’s romantic inclinations aside, it is possible that Cassidy simply delighted in robbing banks, trains, and payrolls, not only because he achieved some sense of revenge, but also because he enjoyed and profited from the fruits of such activity. As Butch Cassidy grew proficient at his chosen occupation, there is little doubt that he continued to rob because he needed or wanted money. Cassidy’s outlaw activities were generally associated with cattle rustling, horse theft, bank robberies, train robberies, and payroll robberies. In virtually every case, however, his targets were large corporations. While he made a living taking money from them, most believe he derived greatest satisfaction from creating difficulties for these economic entities.
The fact remains, Cassidy could have accomplished such goals in far less risky ways than taking on members of the American Bankers Association, the Union Pacific Railroad, and large cattle empires in Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado.
It appears as if Cassidy was simply determined to create as much misery and as many problems for the big corporations as possible. That his activities were against the law did not seem to faze him, as his respect for the law had been deeply wounded.
There is also abundant evidence that Butch Cassidy’s disappointment and disgust for power and authority was also directed at the Mormon church because of the injustices it inflicted on his family.
With regard to Cassidy’s Robin Hood image, there exists indisputable evidence that he often went out of his way to help those less fortunate than he, and the tales of him delivering medicines to the sick and providing help for the elderly and infirm are legion.
Unlike many outlaws, the evidence is clear that Cassidy, though successful at his chosen field of outlawry, never visited physical harm on a single soul. During the commission of his bank and train robberies, the customers and passengers were never molested and their valuables never taken from them, at least not by Cassidy himself. In one case, Cassidy is known to have admonished a gang member for harming an innocent bystander. Hurting someone, stated one of his acquaintances, was simply not a part of his character.
Cassidy, the person and the outlaw, remains enigmatic. While there is no denying that he perpetrated a number of major bank and train robberies, as well as other depredations, it is likely he has been given far more credit for such activities than he deserved. Research shows this is true with most famous outlaws.
After Cassidy’s name became a household word in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah during the 1890s, nearly every misdeed committed in the region was subsequently attributed to him, even when it was proven he was far away from the crime scene at the time. The same is true relative to his stay in South America. Many of the Western-style robberies that took place in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile between 1904 and 1908 were attributed to Cassidy and his companions. Where there is ample evidence that he did commit several holdups, many, if not most, of those reported were the work of others emulating techniques employed by Cassidy and the Wild Bunch. Though guilty of breaking the law on numerous occasions, a number of the deeds attributed to Butch Cassidy carry with them no solid evidence whatsoever that he was actually involved.
As an outlaw, Cassidy’s mannerisms and demeanor were unlike those of other noted outlaws. He has never been described as vicious, vengeful, mean, a killer, or even a particularly bad man. On the contrary, when acquaintances and contemporaries of Cassidy were asked to describe him, mostly they offered adjectives such as intelligent, generous, pleasant, outgoing, friendly, happy-go-lucky, charming, boyish, well mannered, and polite, as well as having a fine sense of humor.
As mysterious and elusive as his life was, the death of Butch Cassidy is considerably more so. The popular and traditionally accepted belief is that Cassidy, in the company of Harry Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid, was killed in a shootout with soldiers in the small Bolivian town of San Vicente in 1908, a few days following the robbery of a mine payroll. The original inspiration for this version of the demise of Cassidy was published in a magazine some twenty-two years
after
the event by a writer who got his information secondhand from a man who was not present at the event and who was subsequently suspected of making such a claim in order to protect Cassidy, who was his friend.
This perception that Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were killed in a Bolivian shootout has been perpetuated over the years, in large part as a result of the 1969 William Goldman film,
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
, starring the charismatic Paul Newman as Cassidy and Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid. A significant number of researchers and investigators who have studied the events surrounding Cassidy’s alleged demise in South America have concluded that it simply did not happen.
There are some who still cling to the unsubstantiated notion that Cassidy, along with the Sundance Kid, died in Bolivia in 1908. Regardless, there is neither conclusive nor substantive evidence that it happened. In addition, and correlatively, there remains no conclusive evidence that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid participated in the payroll robbery attributed to them; there is no clear documentation that it was Cassidy and Longabaugh who arrived in the small Bolivian town of San Vicente where they were allegedly gunned down; there is no solid evidence that Cassidy and his friend were killed in San Vicente at all or, for that matter, in South America; there exists no significant evidence that the two bandits were buried in the local cemetery, as claimed by some.
Efforts to determine the validity of any of the aforementioned claims have never resulted in the accumulation of any logical or compelling evidence for such, much less proof.
On the other hand, there exists some compelling and hard-to-dismiss evidence that the outlaw Butch Cassidy survived his South American adventures and returned to the United States to visit family and friends and, according to at least one researcher, settled down with a wife and adopted child in Spokane, Washington.
Many maintain that the evidence for Cassidy’s return to the United States after his alleged death is far more convincing than the somewhat questionable evidence associated with his demise in South America. As much as is practical, prevailing arguments for both will be presented in the following pages so that the reader may be in a position of making a determination one way or the other, or neither.
As with many efforts associated with the search for truth as it relates to outlaws of the American West, the researcher is often confronted with confusing, conflicting, contradictory, partially valid, and sometimes fanciful accounts. Myths and folklore regarding outlaw figures are far too often accepted as truths, much of which gets published and generally accepted by the public. For example, the popular image of the outlaw Billy the Kid is known to most through dime novelists and the largely erroneous biography penned by Sheriff Pat Garrett and his friend, Ashmon Upson.
Other obstacles confronting the serious researcher include overt resistance from hobbyists, enthusiasts, and history buffs, as well as a few credentialed historians, to any change in the popular version of Cassidy’s death. For the most part, many of them appear to be quite rigid in their adherence to the popular mythology and have manifested reluctance to even consider evidence to the contrary.
One of the earliest books about Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch was penned by Charles Kelly in 1938. Much of what was contained in Kelly’s book,
The Outlaw Trail: A History of Butch
Cassidy and His Wild Bunch
, has since been found to be in error or highly questionable. As a Butch Cassidy researcher, Kelly has long been discredited. In his favor, Kelly accumulated a great deal of Cassidy information and conducted a number of important interviews. Unfortunately, Kelly did little to separate fact from fiction—it was clear that he, like many enthusiasts, simply lacked the necessary investigative and analytical skills to do so. Unfortunately, subsequent writers and filmmakers relied heavily on Kelly’s work. In spite of the truths that have been revealed since its publication, many still rely on
The Outlaw Trail
.
In recent times, some of the most impressively researched works on Butch Cassidy have been conducted by Ann Meadows (
Digging Up Butch and Sundance
, 1996) and Larry Pointer (
In Search of Butch Cassidy
, 1977).
Butch Cassidy: A Biography
by Richard Patterson (1998), though often criticized, is a solid, comprehensive work that includes many facets of this interesting and noted outlaw.
In the following pages, the reader will be introduced to the traditional Butch Cassidy, the theoretical Butch Cassidy, and the man who “became” Butch Cassidy after 1908. Cassidy’s origins and youth, as well as information relative to his ventures into outlawry and related motives, will be presented. As much as is possible when treating data and information that is, in some cases, well over a century old, this book provides nuances of the Cassidy personality as it has been attested to by family and friends, a personality that might figure heavily into explaining things such as his penchant for robbing banks and trains, as well to several aspects of his alleged return.
Thanks to the efforts of a number of competent researchers, a great deal of information relating to Cassidy’s life and times in South America is presented herein, particularly his life leading up to the so-called San Vicente shootout.
The evidence for and against Cassidy’s survival of the South American episode and his alleged return to the United States is examined.
Finally, this book evaluates the man many Cassidy researchers believe was the famous outlaw who returned to the American West.
Did Butch Cassidy, noted outlaw of the American West, survive his alleged death at the hands of Bolivian soldiers in 1908 and return to friends and family in the United States? The evidence that suggests he did is impressive and not easily dismissed, but how he lived and which identity he assumed are still being debated.
Read for yourself and decide.
