Butch Cassidy facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Butch Cassidy |
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Cassidy c. 1900
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| Born | Robert LeRoy Parker April 13, 1866 Beaver, Utah Territory, U.S. |
| Died | November 7, 1908 (aged 42) Bolivia |
| Cause | Gunshot wounds |
| Alias(es) | Butch Cassidy, Mike Cassidy, George Cassidy, Jim Lowe, Santiago Maxwell |
| Allegiance | Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch |
| Charge(s) | Horse theft, cattle rustling, bank and train robbery |
| Conviction(s) | Imprisoned in the territorial prison in Laramie, Wyoming for horse theft |
| Penalty | Served 18 months of a two-year sentence; released January 1896 |
| Occupation | Farm hand, cowboy, butcher, thief, robber, gang leader, outlaw |
Robert LeRoy Parker (April 13, 1866 – November 7, 1908), better known as Butch Cassidy, was an American train and bank robber and the leader of a gang of criminal outlaws known as the "Wild Bunch" in the Old West.
Parker engaged in criminal activity for more than a decade at the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century, but the pressures of being pursued by law enforcement, notably the Pinkerton detective agency, forced him to flee the country. He fled with his accomplice Harry Longabaugh, known as the "Sundance Kid", and Longabaugh's girlfriend Etta Place. The trio traveled first to Argentina and then to Bolivia, where Parker and Longabaugh are believed to have been killed in a shootout with the Bolivian Army in November 1908; the exact circumstances of their fate continue to be disputed.
Parker's life and death have been extensively dramatized in film, television, and literature, and he remains one of the most well-known icons of the "Wild West" mythos in modern times.
Contents
Early life
Robert LeRoy Parker was born on April 13, 1866, in Beaver, Utah Territory, the first of 13 children of English immigrants Maximillian Parker and Ann Campbell Gillies. The Parker and Gillies families had converted to the Mormon faith while still living in the United Kingdom. Maximillian Parker was 12 years old when his family arrived in Salt Lake City in 1856 as Mormon pioneers. Ann Gillies was born and lived in Tyneside in northeast England before immigrating to the U.S. with her family in 1859 at age 14. The couple were married in July 1865. Robert Parker grew up on his parents' ranch near Circleville.
Parker fled his home as a teenager and, while working on a dairy ranch, met cattle thief Mike Cassidy. He subsequently worked on several ranches, in addition to a brief apprenticeship with a butcher in Rock Springs, Wyoming, where he got his nickname (by the word "butcher", which morphed later into "Butch"), to which he soon added the last name Cassidy in honor of his old friend and mentor.
Escape to South America
Cassidy and Longabaugh fled to New York City, feeling continuous pressure from the numerous law enforcement agencies pursuing them and seeing their gang falling apart. They departed from there to Buenos Aires, Argentina aboard the British steamer Herminius on February 20, 1901, along with Longabaugh's companion Etta Place. Cassidy posed as James Ryan, Place's fictitious brother. They settled in a four-room log cabin on a 15,000-acre (61 km2) ranch that they purchased on the east bank of the Rio Blanco near Cholila, just east of the Andes in the Chubut.
Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia references a letter Butch wrote from Cholila to Elza Lay's mother-in-law in Utah, dated August 10, 1902. The letter cites "our little family of 3" living in a 4 room house with 300 cattle, 1500 sheep, and 28 horses. Chatwin states the letter resides with the Utah State Historical Society.
1905
Two English-speaking bandits held up the Banco de Tarapacá y Argentino in Río Gallegos on February 14, 1905, 700 miles (1,100 km) south of Cholila near the Strait of Magellan, and the pair vanished north across the Patagonian grasslands. Cassidy and Longabaugh sold the Cholila ranch on May 1, fearing that law enforcement had located them. The Pinkerton Agency had known their location for some time, but the snow and the hard winter of Patagonia had prevented their agent Frank Dimaio from making an arrest. Governor Julio Lezana issued an arrest warrant, but Sheriff Edward Humphreys, a Welsh-Argentine who was friendly with Cassidy and enamored of Place, tipped them off. The trio then fled north to San Carlos de Bariloche, where they embarked on the steamer Condor across Nahuel Huapí Lake and into Chile; they returned to Argentina by the end of the year. Cassidy, Longabaugh, Place, and an unknown male associate robbed the Banco de la Nación Argentina branch in Villa Mercedes on December 19, 400 miles (640 km) west of Buenos Aires, taking 12,000 pesos. They fled across the Andes to reach the safety of Chile.
On June 30, 1906, Place decided that she had enough of life on the run, so Longabaugh took her back to San Francisco. Cassidy obtained honest work under the alias James "Santiago" Maxwell at the Concordia Tin Mine in the Santa Vera Cruz range of the central Bolivian Andes, where Longabaugh joined him upon his return. Their main duties included guarding the company payroll. The two traveled to Santa Cruz in late 1907, a frontier town in Bolivia's eastern savannah, still wanting to settle down as respectable ranchers.
Death
A courier was carrying the payroll for the Aramayo Franke and Cia Silver Mine on November 3, 1908, near the small mining town of San Vicente in southern Bolivia, when he was attacked by two masked American bandits believed to be Cassidy and Longabaugh. Witnesses saw them three days later in San Vicente, where they lodged in a small boarding house owned by miner Bonifacio Casasola. Casasola became suspicious of them because they had a mule from the Aramayo Mine, identifiable from the company's brand. He notified a nearby telegraph officer, who notified the Abaroa cavalry regiment stationed nearby. The unit dispatched three soldiers under the command of Captain Justo Concha, and they notified the local authorities.
The soldiers, the police chief, the local mayor, and some of his officials all surrounded the lodging house on the evening of November 6, intending to arrest the Aramayo robbers. As they approached the house, the bandits opened fire, starting a gunfight which lasted for several hours into the evening and the night. At around 2:00 am, during a lull in the fighting, the mayor heard a man scream three times inside the house, then two successive shots were fired from inside the house.
The authorities entered the house the next morning, where they found two bodies. The Tupiza police identified the bandits as the men who robbed the Aramayo payroll transport, but the Bolivian authorities did not know their real names, nor could they positively identify them.
They were buried at the small San Vicente cemetery, near the grave of a German miner named Gustav Zimmer. American forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow and his researchers attempted to find the graves in 1991, but they did not find any remains with DNA matching the living relatives of Cassidy and Longabaugh. In 2017, a new search was launched for Cassidy's grave, which zeroed in on a mine outside Goodsprings, Nevada. The dig found human remains, but they did not match the DNA provided.
Rumors of survival
John McPhee's Annals of the Former World repeats a story that Dr. Francis Smith told to geologist David Love in the 1930s. Smith stated that he had seen Cassidy, who told him that his face had been altered by a surgeon in Paris, and he showed Smith an old bullet wound that Smith recognized as work that he had done.
Josie Bassett claimed in 1960 that Cassidy came to visit her in the 1920s "after returning from South America," and that he "died in Johnnie, Nevada about 15 years ago." Residents in Cassidy's hometown of Circleville, Utah, claimed in an interview that he worked in Nevada until his death. Western historian Charles Kelly observed in his 1938 book The Outlaw Trail: A History of Butch Cassidy and His Wild Bunch, "it seems exceedingly strange" that Cassidy never returned to Circleville, Utah, to visit his father if he were still alive. According to his great nephew, Bill Betenson, he did return to Utah to visit his family in Circleville many times.
Bruce Chatwin, in his classic travel book In Patagonia, says, "I went to see the star witness; his sister, Mrs. Lulu[sic] Parker Betenson, a forthright and energetic woman in her nineties ... She has no doubts: her brother came back and ate blueberry pie with family at Circleville in ... 1925. She believes he died of pneumonia in Washington in the late 1930s."
An episode of the television series In Search of... (1978) examined the claims and possible evidence for Cassidy's return to America during the 1920s in a series of interviews with residents of Baggs, Wyoming, a popular destination for the Wild Bunch during their raiding years. Residents claimed that Cassidy had visited for several days in 1924, driving a Ford Model T. Betenson stated that he returned to the family home in Circleville during this period, and picked up his brother Mark in a Ford, then drove to their father's home, where she also lived. Her father allegedly said to her, "I'll bet you don't know who this is. This is your brother Robert LeRoy." She stated that Cassidy was full of regrets, particularly at having disappointed his mother. She quoted him lamenting, "all I did is make a wreck of my life." Betenson claims that Cassidy lived out his years in "the Northwest" and died in 1937 and that the family had agreed not to disclose his final resting place, since "they had chased him all his life, and now he's going to rest in peace." This story is also recounted by W. C. Jameson in Butch Cassidy: Beyond the Grave, referencing the 1975 book Betenson co-authored with Dora Flack, Butch Cassidy, My Brother.
On an episode of the series Mission Declassified (2019), investigative journalist Christof Putzel met with local researcher Marilyn Grace at Cassidy's childhood log cabin on the Parker ranch in Circleville to talk about the alleged burial of Cassidy there on July 20, 1937. Grace explains that Cassidy was secretly buried at Tom's Cabin, a former sheepherders' log cabin located in a remote area of the property, a favorite camping spot for his brothers and him. Grace says an eyewitness, neighbor Dee Crosby, saw the burial take place at the cabin. Earlier, Putzel spoke to Alta Orton, another Parker neighbor, who described the family as having been dressed in funeral-like attire on that same day. Grace goes on to say that dogs had been brought to the cabin in an attempt to locate remains and led to a positive indication. The underside of the cabin was later dug and two bones discovered, identified as a human spinal bone and a toe bone. Putzel had forensic scientist Suzanna Ryan at Pure Gold Forensics in Redlands, California conduct a DNA test on the bones. Ryan confirmed they were human, but lacked enough DNA for a complete profile. As the site may have become public knowledge, the Parker family is believed to have since excavated Cassidy's remains at the cabin and moved them to a different burial site, leaving the spinal and toe bones behind in the process.
Aliases
- George Parker
- George Cassidy
- Lowe Maxwell
- James "Santiago" Maxwell
- James Ryan
- Butch Cassidy
- Santiago Lowe
- Jim Lowe
Alleged friends
William T. Phillips claimed to have known Cassidy since childhood. In his book In Search of Butch Cassidy, Larry Pointer speculated that Phillips was actually Cassidy, based upon stories in Phillips's unpublished manuscript, The Bandit Invincible, and a resemblance between the two men. In 2012, though, Pointer obtained a copy of the Wyoming Territorial Prison mugshot of William T. Wilcox, a previously unknown associate of Cassidy's. Observing the similarities between the two men, he revised his previous theory and concluded that Phillips was Wilcox, and not Cassidy.
See also
- List of fugitives from justice who disappeared
