Robert Leroy Parker, better known as Butch Cassidy, is considered one of the last celebrated criminals of the Wild West. Due to this distinction, as well as rumors surrounding his escape to South America, Parker has been granted legendary status in American folklore.
Parker was born in Beaver, Utah, on April 13, 1866, to English immigrants, who had moved to the United States after joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At the age of fourteen he left home and began working at various ranches in the area, at one point coming under the tutelage of former cattle rustler Mike Cassidy, whose last name Parker would adopt as an alias. During the next half dozen years, he worked as a migrant cowboy in Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado, and during this time began to engage in criminal activity. His first arrest and trial, which ended in his acquittal, came when he stole a pie and left behind an IOU.
The Wild Bunch gang of outlaws in 1901. “Butch Cassidy,” born Robert Leroy Parker (1866–1908), is seated at right. Seated at left is Harry Alonzo Longbugh or Longabaugh (1867–1908), better known to posterity as “The Sundance Kid.” The rest of the gang included William Carver (1866–1901), standing at left; Harvey Logan (1867–1904), alias “Kid Curry,” cowboy and gunman, standing at right; and Ben Kilpatrick (1874–1912), seated in the middle. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)
By his early twenties, Parker had moved on to bigger crimes and was now known by numerous aliases, including Butch Cassidy. He formed the Hole in the Wall Gang, named after the Wyoming geological feature that provided shelter and security following the bank and train jobs in which he would participate during the next decade.
In 1893, Parker became involved with fifteen-year-old Ann Bassett, who would herself go on to become a notable outlaw figure during the closing period of the American West. Bassett, the daughter of a rancher with whom Parker did business, was by all accounts intelligent, beautiful, and skilled at ranching. Parker’s relationship with Ann would continue off and on until his voyage to South America, after which they never saw each other again. The claims that Ann Bassett and Etta Place, girlfriend of the Sundance Kid, were in fact one and the same person have largely been discredited, despite the fact that modern facial recognition software concludes that all extant photographs of Bassett and Place pertain to the same woman.
Using money from his first bank robbery, which occurred at the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride, Parker purchased a ranch in western Wyoming. He proved to be an indifferent businessman, however, and soon returned to robbing banks and rustling livestock. He did his first stint in jail in 1894 and was released after serving eighteen months of a two-year sentence for horse rustling. It was following his release in early 1896 that Parker formed the gang that would capture the imagination of an American people beginning to comprehend the loss of the frontier. The exploits of the Wild Bunch were circulated far and wide, and Butch Cassidy became a household name along with Elzy Lay, Kid Curry, News Carver, and the Sundance Kid (Harry Longabaugh), the latter of whom joined in late 1896. The gang was very much romanticized by the press, which fed the public’s nostalgia for a defining period that was rapidly coming to a close.
A bank robbery in southeastern Idaho was followed by a payroll theft in central Utah, but it was the robbery of the Union Pacific overland flyer on June 2, 1899, as well as the subsequent evasion of a wide-scale manhunt, that would serve as the impetus for the most intriguing dimension of Parker’s legend: his escape to Argentina. This plan would take him two years to realize, and largely came about due to increased pressure for Parker’s capture by large business interests. In addition to local and state law enforcement officials, E. H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad hired Pinkerton detectives, in essence, to track down and to execute Parker and his gang members. Over the next several years, Parker would attempt on several occasions to negotiate a truce with the governors of Utah and Wyoming as well as the Union Pacific. However, these efforts came to nothing, in large part due to the facts that both Parker and other members of his gang continued to rob banks and trains and that several lawmen were killed in confrontations during this time period. It is thought that Parker was not present for any of the fatal confrontations, and they have instead been attributed to Kid Curry as retaliation for the shooting deaths of two of his brothers.
By the end of 1900, it had become increasingly clear that the dragnet would eventually result in the death or capture of all gang members. Sure enough, by the time Parker arrived in South America, Wild Bunch co-founder Elzy Lay had been captured and sentenced to life imprisonment, and two of the Curry brothers had been killed. Gang members Ben Kilpatrick and Laura Bullion would soon be captured. Lay’s incarceration was particularly difficult for Parker, as the former had been his best friend and confidant for over a decade. During the two-year period between the overland flyer heist and Parker’s journey to South America, he and Longabaugh had become closer, perhaps largely due to the fact that fewer and fewer gang members were left.
In December 1900, Parker posed for a photograph in Fort Worth, Texas, with the only gang members who were both living and free: Harry Longabaugh, Kid Curry, Ben Kilpatrick, and News Carver. Not realizing the identity of his client, the photographer placed a copy of the photograph in his window for advertising purposes, and a passing Pinkerton detective identified Parker. The photograph was used on a wanted poster that was spread all over the United States, bolstering the legend of, in particular, Parker and Longabaugh, by then known colloquially all over the country as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
A few months after the photograph, Parker and Longabaugh decided to flee the United States, correctly surmising that this was their only way to evade death or capture. Given that News Carver was ambushed and killed only a few months after the photograph was taken, and that Kid Curry took his own life after being surrounded by a posse a few years later, they were correct, becoming the only members of the Wild Bunch to escape justice. Along with Longabaugh and his companion, Etta Place, Parker traveled to New York and on to Buenos Aires, and eventually reached a ranch he had purchased near Cholila in central Argentina.
Parker’s actions during the final seven years of his life are largely built upon speculation, although certain details are known. The mixture of facts and tantalizing possibilities caused his legend to magnify following his 1908 death, and he would quickly be enshrined in the American consciousness as a romantic symbol of the past. While in Argentina, it is thought that Parker and Longabaugh, occasionally joined by Etta Place, were involved in bank robberies and payroll heists. By 1905, the Pinkerton detectives had tracked them to Cholila; getting wind of this development, the trio fled to Chile. By the next summer, Place decided to return to the United States and, after escorting her back, Longabaugh joined Parker in Bolivia, where the pair allegedly spent the final two years of their lives.
The details surrounding Parker and Longabaugh’s deaths are sketchy, and accounts contradict one another. The most common version maintains that on November 3, 1908, the pair robbed a courier who was carrying a mining company’s payroll. They proceeded to a boardinghouse in the town of San Vicente, where the mule they had stolen from the courier was identified. Later that night, the house was surrounded by local law enforcement officials and a few soldiers from the Bolivian army. A shootout occurred and the two were killed, although the most common version of the story suggests that neither succumbed to direct fire, but instead that one had killed his partner to put him out of his misery before turning the gun upon himself.
Given that these bandits were never verified to be Parker and Longabaugh, and that their unmarked grave has never been found—despite much looking—it is perhaps no surprise that numerous claims were made of their existence after 1908. This is particularly true of Parker. Although most claims of his move back to the United States tend to be third-person rumors, Parker’s own sister, Lula Parker Betenson, published a biography claiming to have had a reunion with him in 1925.
Whether or not he died in Bolivia in 1908 or the United States at a later time, the legend of Robert Leroy Parker continued to grow during the twentieth century, bolstered by a series of successful portrayals in popular culture, each of which solidified his identity as “Butch Cassidy.” He has been the subject of numerous books and half a dozen films, the most famous of which was the 1969 Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid (directed by George Roy Hill). This film and others like it have kept Parker’s legend fresh with new generations, as he continues to live in American consciousness as a romantic example of the death of the Wild West.
Andrew Howe
See also Bonney, William “Billy the Kid”; Bonnie and Clyde; Dillinger, John; Floyd, Charles “Pretty Boy”; James, Jesse; Murrieta, Joaquín; Outlaw Heroes; Villa, Pancho
Further Reading
Hatch, Thom. 2013. The Last Outlaws: The Lives and Legends of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. New York: New American Library.
Kelly, Charles. 1996. The Outlaw Trail: A History of Butch Cassidy and His Wild Bunch. Lincoln, NE: Bison Books.
MacGowan, Douglas. “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” CrimeLibrary website. http://www.crimelibrary.com/gangsters_outlaws/outlaws/cassidy/1.html. Accessed September 24, 2015.
Newell, Linda King, and Vivian Linford Talbot. 2014. “The Myths and Legends of Butch Cassidy.” Utah History To Go website. http://historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/statehood_and_the_progressive_era/themythsandlegendsofbutchcassidy.html. Accessed September 24, 2015.
Seal, Graham. 2011. Outlaw Heroes in Myth and History. New York: Anthem Press.