Editor's note: Columnist Lee Benson is bicycling the length of Utah along U.S. 89, a k a State Street, starting at the Arizona-Utah line and ending at the Idaho-Utah line. His columns will chronicle what he sees, hears and avoids along the way.
CIRCLEVILLE — The house where Butch Cassidy was raised is unmarked.
And so, if you believe the locals, is his grave.
I arrived at the Circleville city limits early on a morning washed clean by thunderstorms the night before. As a rooster crowed nearby, I pulled into the parking lot of Butch Cassidy's Hideout Cafe, where the eggs were already cooking inside. I asked a friendly teenage waitress named Ashley the obvious.
"So where's Butch's place?"
Ashley answered without a flinch. "Just before you come into town is the house where he grew up," she said. "It's just off the highway; you can go see it if you want."
So I did, retracing my route two miles just beyond mile marker 156 on Highway 89, where sure enough, about 100 yards across a hay field stood an old wooden house with mud mortar between the planks.
I approached the structure cautiously even though Utah's most notorious outlaw has been dead for more than half a century. I didn't want no trouble. I just wanted to look at the one-room house, all 400 square feet of it, where Annie and Maximillian Parker moved after their son, Robert LeRoy Parker, was born in Beaver. Robert spent his boyhood here with his family, before moving on to organize the Wild Bunch, rob banks and travel to Bolivia with the Sundance Kid, all under his alias, Butch Cassidy.
Who'd have thought this would lead to that?
I rode back to the cafe and asked Ashley if any of Butch's kin might still be in Circleville, and she referred me up the road to a gas station and convenience store called The Station. "You'll get more details there," she said.
She was right. Kirk Fullmer was behind the counter, and not only did he verify that the wooden shack on the outskirts of Circleville is the old Parker place, but he was a wealth of additional information. He said he is old enough to remember when Butch's sister, Lula Parker Betenson, was still alive.
"I talked to Lula when I was a boy," he said. "She's the one who wrote the book about Butch never dying in Bolivia like they said. When he heard that he was dead, he just came back here and laid low. Which was fine with him. He worked for a while as a security
guard in Nevada and then died of natural causes."
Kirk's voice dropped a notch as he added conspiratorially, "Lula said she could walk from here and put her hand on his grave — but she wouldn't tell anyone where that was, not even her own children."
Even if she had, they're not around either. The last of Butch Cassidy's relatives living in the Circleville area — his nephew John Betenson — died earlier this year.
All that leaves is the talk — and that old wooden house people drive past night and day not knowing what it is.
Kirk nodded toward a man getting a fountain drink at the end of the store and said, "Want to meet the man who owns the house?"
He introduced me to Afton Morgan, a local farmer who, it turns out, bought the property that contains the old Parker homestead from Mark Betenson, John's brother, 24 years ago in 1982.
Afton said that he at first thought he might do something with the Butch Cassidy property.
"We were going to fix it up, maybe put in a trailer park and a museum," he said, "I gave a guy $20,000 to get started. Then he skipped the country with the money. After that I said the heck with it."
Not wanting the house to fall into complete disrepair, Afton said that a few years ago he paid another man to come in and shore up the foundation and partially restore the house's walls and ceiling.
"It's not falling over any more," he said.
"And the cows aren't walking through it," added Fullmer.
A likable man quick with a smile, Morgan said he used to have some signs up that announced it as Butch's old home. "But people either tear down the signs or steal 'em," he said. "So now it's unmarked. But I'm fine if people want to walk down and take a look. Just be respectful."
The plain old wooden house is the only physical evidence remaining that Butch Cassidy once slept here.
All that anyone knows about, that is.
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.