Legendary outlaw Butch Cassidy lived and died on his own terms
He was the nicest bad man around.
True, he stole horses and robbed banks. And there was that time when, blowing up a safe, he nearly destroyed the train it was on.
When passengers saw his six-shooter and nervously offered their wallets, he calmly waved them off, saying he was only there for the railroad’s money.
“We don’t want yours,” he said. “We want theirs.”
Charles Leerhsen’s “Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw” tells the tale of the charming robber.
Hollywood told it first in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” but got a lot wrong. Butch was nice looking, but he was no Paul Newman (then again, who is?). The Sundance Kid was kind of a jerk.
Oh, and Butch Cassidy might have been gay.
He began life as Robert Leroy Parker in 1866, raised on a hardscrabble farm in Utah Territory. His mother’s favorite, he was a blue-eyed boy with a fondness for pranks, like getting the family’s chickens drunk on stolen wine.
He was Huck Finn before there was a Huck Finn.
He also had his personal code of honor. At 12, Butch rode into town to buy overalls. Finding the store closed, he broke in and took them anyway, leaving an IOU. The sheriff chased him down, threatening arrest.
It was then that Butch realized he and the law just didn’t see eye-to-eye.
He was working on a nearby ranch when he met his future namesake: Bob Cassidy, a big, blond cowboy. The young men became best friends, or maybe more, Butch’s mother worried. She had heard noises, and wondered just what those two “were doing down by the corral.”
Later, the pair ran off together, taking some of their boss’s cattle. They figured it was all right since the rancher had stolen them to begin with. After selling the livestock, the duo split up. “You’re too good for where I’m going, kid,” the other cowboy declared.
But Butch – who would soon take his friend’s last name as his own – disagreed. Becoming an outlaw was exactly where he was headed.
Teaming up with another cowboy, Matt Warner, Butch began hustling, traveling around and tricking rubes into betting against their impossibly speedy horse. They kept on the move, but even then, Butch Cassidy attracted attention.
“I thought he was the most dashing and handsome man I had ever seen,” gushed one Colorado teenager, who met him in 1888. Still, she complained, “He was more interested in his horse than in me. I was very put out.”
Within a year, the two men moved on to banks, knocking over one in Telluride. It was Cassidy’s first robbery, but he was already full of ideas.
One soon became his signature – extra horses, tied up and waiting every few miles along the getaway route. That way, just when the posse’s horses were tiring out, the robbers could switch to fresh mounts.
The Telluride haul was over $22,000 – more like $500,000 today. As much money as that was, Cassidy couldn’t hold on to it, gambling big and treating his friends at bars and bordellos.
He always minded his manners, though. Whenever his gang got drunk and shot up a saloon, Cassidy invariably returned the next day to settle accounts. After counting the bullet holes, he gave the owner a silver dollar for each one.
Eventually, the law nabbed him in Wyoming, for stealing horses. Cassidy insisted they were his to begin with; he was merely stealing them back. He got two years. Typically, the law and he just saw things differently.
Also, typically, people couldn’t help being charmed. The judge who sentenced him later wrote the governor on his behalf, calling the outlaw “a brave daring fellow and a man well calculated to be a leader.” Cassidy was released six months early.
And immediately returned to what he did best: robbing.
He assembled a colorful crew: Harvey “Kid Curry” Logan, Will “News” Carver, and George “Flat Nose” Currie – previously George “Big Nose” Currie until a horse kicked him in the face. Later, Harry “The Sundance Kid” Longabaugh would join the gang, accompanied by his lover, Ethel Place.
They called themselves “The Wild Bunch.”
Wild, maybe, but not savage. “Our greatest defense was our reputation as being bad men,” one gang member explained. Although Cassidy encouraged his desperado image, it was mostly for show.
“Pardon us,” he would say politely while drawing his gun. “But we know you have a lot of money, and we have a great need.”
By the turn of the century, though, Cassidy could see what was coming. Private security firms, like the Pinkertons, were growing. Police forces were getting more professional. The days of the outlaw were fading.
In 1901, Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and Place went to Manhattan, renting rooms on East 12th St. and spending a month seeing the sights. Cassidy even went to Tiffany & Co., where he bought Place a gold watch. He was always more of a gentleman than the Kid.
Then they went out to Red Hook and caught a steamship for Argentina.
The original plan was to go straight. After all, they amassed $12,000 among them, the equivalent of $250,000 today, and a substantial nest egg. They bought a ranch, with the intention of going respectable.
Fate had other ideas.
One day the local police dropped by, linking Cassidy to a robbery. He loudly proclaimed his innocence. OK, so he loaned the thief his gun, let him hide out for a while. But he was an old pal. And what were friends for?
Once again, the police were unswayed.
Cassidy and company fled and returned to robbery, the one thing they did well. Gringo bandits attracted attention, however, especially when one was a pretty young woman. In 1906, they split up, with the Kid and Place going to San Francisco.
But then Place needed an appendectomy. While she was in the hospital, a drunken Kid shot up their hotel room, enraged he couldn’t get room service. Evicted, he abandoned his lover and returned to South America and a somewhat fatalistic Cassidy.
“There’s no use trying to hide out and go straight,” Cassidy declared. “After you’ve started, you just have to keep going, that’s all.”
They returned to stealing.
After robbing a Bolivian mining company in November of 1908, the duo rode into dusty San Vicente, where they shared a room at a boardinghouse. Soldiers occupied the other rooms, already hunting for them because of the robbery.
When the mayor found out who was in town, he tipped off the soldiers. After that, Leerhsen writes, “Things went bad rather quickly.”
It wasn’t as epic as in the movies. The soldiers crept up outside the outlaws’ room and called on them to surrender. Cassidy came out firing his six-shooter, killing one of them. The men returned fire with rifles. They peppered the room with bullets.
Later, investigators found both Americans dead. However, the fatal shot, in both cases, had been a single bullet to the head. Rather than be taken alive, it seemed, Cassidy had killed the Kid, and then committed suicide.
Cassidy had always lived life on his own terms.
And he left it the same way.
