It's said the young ladies of Panguitch used to love to dance with Robert Parker. And Parker loved to dance with the ladies.
But the dance-hall antics of young men clamoring for the attention of young women often led to rivalries. And rivalries often led to fistfights and even bloodshed."One night, he and this other fellow got into a fight over a young woman and he (Parker) broke the guy's jaw with his six-shooter," said Wallace Ott, a local history buff and former Garfield County commissioner. "He thought he'd killed the guy."
Thinking a posse would soon be after him, Parker jumped on his horse and raced for the labyrinth of canyons near Bryce Canyon. While he hid near Red Canyon, the posse tracked him down.
Parker yelled out: "I don't want to hurt anyone, but if you don't turn around and go back I'll blow your heads off."
The bluff worked for a while. But then the posse regained its courage and re-entered the canyon. "That's when he (Parker) stepped out from behind a rock and began shooting over their heads. After that, they all took off running."
Parker later found sanctuary at the Bill Lee ranch in Cannonville. But he always kept a horse saddled in case the posse came looking for him again. "One morning, they did," Ott said.
Parker fled into the canyons of the Paria River, but soon found himself cornered in a box canyon seemingly with no way out. As the posse moved up the canyon on foot, Parker found a narrow crack in the canyon wall.
Leaving his horse behind, "He crawled to the top, stole a horse from the posse and was on his way again," Ott said. Eventually, he made his way to the Robber's Roost country in eastern Utah and "made quite a name for himself."
The name he made, though, was not Robert Parker. It was Butch Cassidy - probably Utah's most famous home-grown outlaw.
Ott says he's not just recounting local "Butch Cassidy-slept-here" folklore. He says he heard the story from Butch Cassidy himself - in the 1930s long after most folks thought the outlaw had been shot to death in Mexico or South America.
"There was an old Texan rancher lived in Tropic named Elijah Moore who had been good friends with Butch. They ran some cattle together on the old Chisom Trail. One day Elij' comes by an' says, `Wallace, you want to meet Butch Cassidy?' "
"He's dead, isn't he?" Ott said.
"That's what people think, but he's sitting in my living room right now. I've known him for years and that's him."
Ott and his brother-in-law spent the entire morning visiting with Butch Cassidy, looking through old photographs Cassidy carried in a small suitcase and listening to stories of when the Old West was the Wild West.
"There's no doubt, none whatsoever, that it was Butch Cassidy," Ott says. "He had photographs of places he'd been and photographs of people he'd run with. And he knew the stories as only someone who'd been there could tell them."
And he knew all the local names and histories as only someone who had grown up locally could have.
Ott, 79, recalls his visit with Cassidy fondly, calling him "well-preserved for a fellow in his 80's." Cassidy was traveling with an attractive woman and drove a nice car. He claimed to have a home in San Diego.
"He didn't think he'd done anything seriously wrong in his life. His philosophy was to take from the rich and give to the poor. He looked at himself as a thinker, not a gunslinger."
One example, Ott said, was when a bank official was about to evict a widow from her ranch in eastern Utah. Cassidy gave her the gold to pay off the mortgage and instructed her to have the bank official pick it up at the ranch. The official picked up the gold, released the mortgage and rode off.
"That's when Butch held him up and got his gold back. The lady got her ranch and Butch got his gold. That's the way he looked at things."
One of Ott's favorite Butch Cassidy stories is about Cassidy's "last" holdup - a bank job in Winnemucca, Nev. After the job, the gang fled to Texas where they dressed up in fine clothes and had a portrait taken.
"They sent the photo to the bank thanking them for the money," Ott said.
After that holdup, Butch Cassidy went his own way, working his way into Mexico for a while and even helping with Pancho Villa's revolution. He later lived a peaceful life in South America.
"As he got older, he decided he wanted to come back to America. So he bought a two-story home in San Diego. He was content to live the quiet life."
Ott, whose storytelling is in demand by radio stations across the country, has described his meeting with Cassidy to a lot of people, including skeptics who believe the popularized version that Cassidy was killed in South America with the Sundance Kid.
Ott says those researchers who have checked Ott's story against historical facts find they always check out. One historian actually claims to have found Cassidy's home in San Diego. He then traced Butch from there to Spokane, Wash. where he died and is buried, Ott said.
"The story's true just as I'm sitting here," Ott says.