It’s Butch and Sundance – but not as you know them
They weren’t best pals, they took the coward’s way out and Butch didn’t really live up to his name. Fifty years after the iconic film, a new book sets the record straight
‘Butch’s parents nicknamed him Sallie, sparking questions about his sexuality’
IT’S BEEN 50 years since Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid roared into British cinemas with guns blazing. Featuring the million-dollar smiles and wry humour of devilishly handsome stars Paul Newman and Robert Redford, the Wild West adventure won four Oscars and became an enduring classic.
The film smash-and-grabbed a fortune at the box office and transformed the longforgotten bank robbers into legendary figures of the fading cowboy era.
But an enthralling new book, Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw, by Charles Leerhsen, shoots holes a-plenty in the Hollywood mythology.
Movie lovers won’t be shocked to learn that Butch Cassidy probably never went bicycling through fields with Sundance’s girlfriend on the handlebars – and certainly not to the tune of Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head.
But many will be surprised to hear that Sundance wasn’t even Butch Cassidy’s closest friend.
Butch and Sundance never leaped into a waterfall to escape a pursuing posse.
And the duo were not killed in a shootout with troops while on the run in South America, but instead died in a murdersuicide when trapped in a house with no escape, historians now believe.
The part-time cattle rustlers and horse thieves were not even that notorious in their day, lacking the murderous reputation of Jesse James or Billy the Kid. And, perhaps most surprising: Butch may have been gay.
Butch was born Robert LeRoy Parker on April 13, 1866, in Beaver, Utah Territory, the eldest of 13 children in a family of Mormons.
His parents had emigrated from England 10 years earlier.
A rustler when he wasn’t working as a cowboy on cattle ranches, Butch graduated to bank robbery at the age of 23 in Telluride, Colorado, with outlaws Matt Warner and Tom McCarty. He had little schooling, but Butch was smart, innovating techniques that helped him become one of the most successful bank robbers of the Wild West.
“They painstakingly laid out an escape route in advance, bolstered by relay teams of fresh horses,” easily outrunning pursuers, wrote historian Richard Patterson. “Butch and his pals also constructed special leather bags to carry the loot.”
There is heated debate over how he acquired the name that went on to adorn Wanted posters across two continents, but historians believe Parker took his last name from cowboy Mike Cassidy, who taught him cattle rustling, and Butch from employment he found in Wyoming.
“I took a job in Rock Springs in the butcher shop when I needed to lay low for a while,” he told a friend. “Matt Warner nicknamed me Butch – he thought it was a big joke.”
But Cassidy was also a jester, “a big dumb kid who liked to joke”, according to friend Josie Bassett.
After languishing for 18 months behind bars for stealing a $5 horse, in 1896 Butch joined up with Harry Longabaugh, nicknamed The Sundance Kid after the Utah town where he once stole a horse.
Together with a rotating group of outlaws alternately calling themselves the Wild Bunch and the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, Butch tore through a succession of bank and train robberies, netting an average of $35,000 per heist, worth about £856,000 today.
One detail the movie had right: Butch disliked killing.
A “gentleman bandit”, he never shot anyone during his robberies, and victims were only occasionally pistolwhipped to ensure compliance, or injured when Butch blew
‘The duo are now believed to have died in a murder/suicide trapped by the cavalry’
train carriage doors off with explosives. But while he had a gift for planning heists, he wasn’t above making the odd stupid mistake when off duty.
When the Wild Bunch were visiting brothels in Texas they posed for a formal portrait at a photographer’s studio – an image that was soon on Wanted posters across the West, with a $1,000 bounty on his head.
And Sundance was not even Butch Cassidy’s best friend. That honour went to Wild Bunch outlaw William Ellsworth “Elzy” Lay. The two met in 1889 working at a Utah ranch, and together robbed banks and trains.
Despite the Hollywood myth, Butch did not even lead the Wild Bunch. Harvey “Kid Curry” Logan and Will “News” Carver were the gang’s likely leaders, historians believe.
Perhaps most surprisingly, Charles Leerhsen writes: “Some outlaw historians have wondered about his sexual orientation.” Butch’s parents had nicknamed him “Sallie,” sparking more questions about his sexuality. Hounded by the Pinkerton detective agency hired by railroad barons in 1900, Butch robbed the First National Bank of Winnemucca, Nevada, to get enough money to escape to South America.
At the time, Pinkerton detective Charlie Siringo called Butch “the shrewdest and most daring outlaw of the present age”.
The Wild West had by then become a shattered dream. Railroads had opened up virgin territory, ranches fenced vast acreages, lawmen were everywhere, and cowboys’ days were numbered.
In Hollywood’s version the two robbers head to Bolivia, but in 1901 Butch and Sundance actually went to Argentina, buying a ranch in Cholila under assumed names, joined there by Sundance’s lover: the sometime prostitute Etta Place.
“Another of my uncles died and left $30,000 to our little family of three,” Butch wrote tongue-in-cheek to a friend about his new home. “This part of the country looked so good that I located, and I think for good.”
Despite his intelligence and sharpshooting skills, Butch spent his fortune as fast as he stole it. He and Sundance were soon back robbing banks in Argentina and fleeing through Chile. But if they thought that South American police would be slow to hunt them, they were much mistaken.
After robbing the payroll from a mining company in San Vicente, Bolivia, Butch and Sundance were pursued by a troop of Bolivian cavalry, who surrounded their hideout.
After a day’s siege soldiers heard voices raised in argument inside the house, followed by two gunshots. Hours later the soldiers dared enter the home, finding Butch and
Sundance both dead with gunshots to the head. They were buried in an unmarked grave at a local Indian cemetery, and largely forgotten – until the movie made them household names.
Even if Butch and Sundance didn’t meet a glorious Hollywood ending, outnumbered and outgunned facing a hail of bullets, their deaths remain clouded in mystery.
Leading forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow exhumed two bodies believed to be Butch and Sundance from the Bolivian cemetery in 1991, but the remains proved not to be them.
There were alleged sightings of the duo for decades after their supposed deaths.
Butch’s friend Josie Bassett claimed to have met him again in the 1920s, and insisted: “He was an old man when he died. He had been living in Oregon, and back east for a long time, where he worked for a railroad.”
Some believe Butch changed his name to William Phillips, returned to America, married and worked until his death from cancer in 1937. Others claim he died in France, Mexico and Uruguay.
Butch’s youngest sister Lula insisted that he lived until the late 1930s.
“Where he was buried, and under what name, was a family secret,” said Lula’s greatgrandson Bill Betenson, who does not want his famous relative’s bones exhumed.
“He was chased all his life and now he had a chance to finally rest in peace – and that’s the way it must be.”