The challenge of re-creating the story of Utah's most famous outlaw, Butch Cassidy (Robert Leroy Parker) lies in separating the man from the myth, pulling real life out of the legend.
Several movies based on Cassidy and his Wild Bunch have deepened the mystique and further confused the facts. In recent decades, efforts by several authors to "set the story straight" tend only to raise more questions.A biography by his sister, the late Lula Parker Betenson, may err on the side of tenderness, depicting the outlaw as an essentially good boy somehow gone temporarily sour.
Depending on the viewpoint, Cas-sidy was one of the most brazen and successful criminals in the West or a modern-day Robin Hood who robbed from the rich only to assist the poor.
Born April 6, 1867, in Beaver, he was the oldest of 13 children born to Maximilian and Ann Gillies Parker. The pioneer family lived in several Utah communities before settling in Circleville, Piute County.
Young Robert may have been turned against the religion because a property dispute went against the Parkers, depriving them of land they had homesteaded. He also was unjustly accused, at 13, of stealing. For whatever reason, his Sunday school training didn't take well. By 17, he was involved in cattle rustling.
On the day he left home, according to Betenson, his mother packed raisins and cheese and wrapped them in a blue blanket that his grandfather Parker had made.
Climbing onto his horse with a foal in tow, the teenage Parker promised, "I'll be home soon, Ma," and took off down a trail that led to many places, but never home until he was middle-aged and ready for a lifestyle change, Betenson said in her book, "Butch Cassidy, My Brother."
After spending some time around the booming Telluride, Colo., mines and participating in a horse-racing venture, young Parker (he didn't adopt the Butch Cassidy name until later) fell in with Mat Warner and Tom Mc-Car-ty, a couple of young men in a hurry to get rich. They decided to rob the San Miquel Valley Bank in Telluride, and they went about it methodically. They surveyed the area to plot a getaway route, made buckskin bags to hold the gold they anticipated stealing and strolled into the bank about noon on the appointed day. They left with about $31,000 in gold and beat a retreat to Robbers Roost, a hostile bit of central Utah that harbored dozens of outlaws of the era.
Warner eventually was caught and served time in Utah State Penitentiary for the holdup. Parker found it an opportune time to head for Wyoming. For a time he worked in a Rock Springs butcher shop, where he picked up the "Butch" part of his alias. The second name came from Mike Cas-si-dy, the man who initiated him into cattle rustling when he was still a teenager.
But the butchering game was too tame and it was too long between paydays for a young man who had had a taste of bigger money and more exciting pastimes. Cassidy had soon put together the original Wild Bunch and was raising havoc in Wyoming.
One of his most notable robberies, however, occurred April 21, 1897 when the Denver & Rio Grande train pulled into Castle Gate in Price Canyon. At 12:40 p.m., E.L. Carpenter, paymaster for Pleasant Valley Coal Co., with two assistants, stepped off the train and headed for the company offices above a local store. As the train pulled out for Helper, Cassidy and two of his gang accosted Carpenter, told him to throw up his hands, and relieved him and his aides of the money bags they carried.
Then the robbers left in the proverbial "cloud of dust," according to newspaper accounts. The company clerk took a rifle in pursuit, but it failed to fire. The telegraph wire to Price had been cut and despite a frantic effort to chase them down, the thieves romped off with most of their ill-gotten gain. They dropped one bag of silver because it was too heavy, but hung onto two bags of gold worth more than $7,000.
The Parker family in Circleville read about the robbery in the local news and grieved for their wayward kin, Betenson said. Her mother died at 58, she believed, of a broken heart.
For years, almost every robbery throughout the West was laid at the feet of Butch Cassidy and his bunch, and often enough the accusations were correct.
The Wild Bunch divided time between Robber's Roost and Brown's Park in the corner where Utah, Colorado and Wyoming meet. The latter was a convenient hideout because if the heat was on in one state, they simply crossed the line to another.
Ranchers in both areas appear to have welcomed the outlaws, whom they saw to be champions of the small guy against big business that was running them off the land. Cassidy himself later told his family he managed to escape capture because he had so many friends.
A Brown's Park resident later wrote that it wasn't unusual for Butch to ride into a ranch, shoot a couple of chickens and invite himself to dinner. But he always paid for the fowl, she said. When Butch was around, it was said, the wood pile was never low and the water buckets never empty.
By 1901, with Pinkerton detectives breathing down his neck and a feeling that the noose was tightening, Cassidy tried to make a deal with Utah Judge Orlando W. Powers to get amnesty for his many crimes. In exchange, he would become a guard for the railroad. When government representatives failed to show up at a scheduled meeting Cassidy was scared off and made other plans. He may never have known the people he was due to meet were delayed by a severe storm and arrived at the designated place shortly after he left.
With his partner in crime, the Sundance Kid (Harry Alonzo Long-a-baugh,) he decided it might be time to change residences.
After spending time in Argentina, where they applied for and were granted four square leagues of land in Cholilo, the partners moved on to Peru, then Bolivia. Although they were involved in several legitimate enterprises, they apparently couldn't break old habits and were soon back robbing trains and banks. In 1909, word came to the United States that both had been killed in a shootout with law officers near the Bolivian village of San Vicente.
In the years since, many reports suggest that Cassidy, in fact, survived the attack and returned to the United States. In his book, "In Search of Butch Cassidy," Pointer says the reformed outlaw was a successful businessman in Spokane, Wash., but that he was decimated by the Great Depression and died of cancer on the county poor farm in 1937.
Betenson says that in 1925 Parker-cum-Cassidy visited his father and family members in Circleville, frankly discussing the details of his life as a criminal. He then disappeared, dying in his 70s, she wrote. His burial place is a closely guarded secret in a family that sees him as a good boy who got caught in the coils of crime and simply couldn't find a way to escape.