Insight Guide to USA the Rockies (Travel Guide eBook) by Insight Guides

Author:Insight Guides
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, USA
Publisher: Apa Publications
Published: 2016-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

The two most engaging characters to roam the Rocky Mountains, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid remain legends not only of the Old West but of a romantic outlaw existence.

Thanks in large part to being mythologized in the classic 1969 Hollywood movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (which starred Paul Newman and Robert Redford), these two former thieves and cattle-rustlers continue to cast a long shadow across the Rockies.

Butch Cassidy was born Robert LeRoy Parker in the Mormon town of Beaver, Utah in 1866. Taught the fine art of cattle rustling by local ranch-hand Mike Cassidy, Robert borrowed his mentor’s last name, then picked up the handle “Butch” while working as a butcher in Rock Springs, Wyoming. He pulled his first bank job in Telluride, Colorado in 1889, and soon found himself in the company of a like-minded group of villains known collectively as the Wild Bunch. There were several female members of the gang, including Laura Bullion, who was likely born in Texas. Among their male members was one Harry Longabaugh – the Sundance Kid – who picked up his nickname following a jail stint in Sundance, Wyoming in 1887. Longabaugh was born in Mont Clare, Pennsylvania, in 1867, and came West at the age of 15, settling near Cortez, Colorado. He worked primarily as an itinerant ranch-hand throughout the Rockies, only turning to crime full-time in the 1890s.

The Wild Bunch used Hole-in-the-Wall, near Kaycee in Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains, as a base, and often laid low through the winter months in Brown’s Hole (now a wildlife refuge), a broad river valley in remote northwest Colorado and Utah. They were also known to visit (and get quite raucous in) the southern Wyoming towns of Baggs, Rock Springs, and Green River. The gang, however, was eventually undone by their own vanity and love of a good time. During a visit to Fort Worth, Texas, five of them posed for a photograph in smart suits and derby hats, looking so dapper that the photographer proudly placed the photo in his shop window, where it was seen by a detective from the famous Pinkerton’s agency. Despite their reputation, it’s thought that Butch and Sundance didn’t kill anyone during their spree of robberies and heists – though other gang members such as Kid Curry certainly did, and gunfights with lawmen were common.

Having masterminded some major railroad robberies in the late 1890s, and wearying of life on the run, Butch and Sundance sailed for South America in 1901. They traveled to Argentina and finally Bolivia, where they supposedly died in a hail of bullets at the hands of Bolivian soldiers in 1908 (as depicted in the film) – the rest of the gang had been arrested or killed back in the US in the years before. Yet rumors of the outlaw’s survival began almost immediately; residents of Baggs claimed Cassidy had visited for several days in 1924, while Josie Bassett, an old girlfriend from Butch’s Brown’s Hole days, insisted that he died an old man in Johnnie, Nevada, some time during the late 1930s.

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