Key Takeaways:
- The 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is based on a pair of outlaws who robbed banks and trains in the early 1900s.
- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had outsized reputations. Rather than committing every robbery in the American Northwest as some suggested, one expert says they likely conducted nine major thefts.
- The real Cassidy and Sundance did escape to South America as depicted in the movie. However, members of their family believed they didn’t die there.
Among the most iconic movies of actor Robert Redford, who died Tuesday at age 89, is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The classic 1969 Western stars Paul Newman and Redford, respectively, as dramatized versions of the real-life outlaws known as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid who gained notoriety for a series of bank and train robberies in the early 1900s.
In the movie’s finale—now one of the most famous in cinema—Cassidy and Sundance appear to meet their end during a gun battle in Bolivia in 1908. But did their last stand actually happen?
The movie’s ambiguous ending reflects a murkier truth. Many—including members of Cassidy’s family—believe that the jovial, charismatic leader of the real Wild Bunch lived for decades after the legendary South American shootout. The fate of the Sundance Kid is no less speculative. Here’s what we know about what might have actually happened to the famous duo.
Butch Cassidy grew up in a Mormon family in Utah
Few criminals have reaped as much goodwill, in life or death, as Cassidy. According to Richard Patterson, author of Butch Cassidy: A Biography, Cassidy was born Robert LeRoy Parker on April 13, 1866, in Beaver, Utah Territory. His loving parents, Ann Gillies and Maximillian Parker, were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Robert, the oldest child in a large family, grew up playing harmonica on “home evenings” when the family would read the church doctrine and play games.
When Robert was 8, his family homesteaded a large ranch outside of Circleville, Utah. Here, he became an expert cowboy and was a playful older brother to his younger siblings. The Parker family weren’t the most devout members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, but it’s believed that they might have been involved in an illegal sheltering of polygamous Mormon families from the U.S. government.
Cassidy’s pseudonym was inspired by a cattle rustler
While working on a nearby cattle ranch as a teenager, Robert met a man who would alter the course of his life forever. Mike Cassidy was a cowboy by trade and an outlaw cattle rustler by choice. He seems to have indoctrinated the restless Robert into the lucrative business of stealing livestock. At the age of 18, Robert—probably on the run from crimes committed with Cassidy or alone—left his family home, telling his mother:
Ma, there’s not much here for me. No future. Pay in Utah is low—you know that. Maybe twenty or thirty dollars a month with board—and the board’s not much to brag about in most places. There’s no excitement around here. I’m not a kid anymore. Gotta be thinking about my future.
Robert soon entered a life of Wild West crime, rustling cattle and committing other petty offenses. But in 1889, he rode into the big leagues, successfully robbing the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride, Colorado, with associates Matt Warner and Tom McCarty. “A witness recalled seeing Butch, in the weeks before the robbery, spend hours teaching his horse to stand calmly while he ran and vaulted into the saddle,” Richard Patterson writes in the magazine Wild West. “Butch and his pals also constructed special leather bags to carry the loot, and they painstakingly laid out an escape route in advance, bolstered by relay teams of fresh horses.”
This shrewd attention to detail became a hallmark of robberies committed by the Wild Bunch. With his entry into serious crime, Robert changed his name to protect himself and his family’s honor. He chose Cassidy in honor of his mentor, Mike Cassidy, but Butch was not his personal choice. “I took a job in Rock Springs in the butcher shop when I needed to lay low for a while,” he told a friend years later. “Matt Warner nicknamed me Butch, he thought it was a big joke.”
Cassidy met the Sundance Kid after a stint in jail
Cassidy, “a big dumb kid who liked to joke” according to friend Josie Bassett, continued his life of crime. In 1896, after a stint in jail, he went right back to his old ways. It was sometime after his release when Cassidy met a stoic, handsome former cowboy–turned-outlaw from the East Coast named Harry Longabaugh, best known as the Sundance Kid.
Cassidy now had a posse of outlaw acolytes who liked to rob banks and trains and also liked to party. During one celebration, the members of the Wild Bunch dressed as waiters, much to the amusement of friend Ann Bassett:
Poor Butch, he could perform such minor jobs as robbing banks and holding up pay trains without the flicker of an eye lash but serving coffee at a grand party that was something else. The blood curdling job almost floored him, he became panicky and showed that his nerve was completely shot to bits.
It was only after his friends showed him how to fill coffee cups at the table that he started to get the hang of it. “This just shows how etiquette can put fear into a brave man’s heart,” Bassett recalled.
The Wild Bunch pulled off many successful robberies
Cassidy and the Wild Bunch’s notoriety grew as they racked up a staggering average of $35,000 per robbery. Although Patterson thinks the bunch probably only robbed four banks, four express trains, and a coal company payroll office, they were soon blamed for every robbery in the Northwest.
It was Cassidy’s meticulous planning that made his robberies so successful. According to Patterson:
Little was left to chance. Butch and a few selected gang members would spend days, sometimes weeks, scouting a robbery site and the best escape route. Wisely, they always chose the summer months for all their holdups, when the weather was favorable for eluding posses. It appears that Cassidy also avoided killing. Although shots were fired during escapes, Butch was never known to have shot anyone during a holdup. The closest Butch ever came to harming a robbery victim was when he used explosives to force his way into an express car. A few express messengers were injured in the blasts, but none seriously. The gang always warned them when they would use dynamite, and they were wise enough to protect themselves by hiding behind the cargo.
The powerful railroad companies were soon hot on the Wild Bunch’s trail. Pinkerton detective Charlie Siringo, who called Cassidy “the shrewdest and most daring outlaw of the present age,” trailed the gang all over the West, often posing as an outlaw to search for the robbers.
A break for the Pinkerton agents seems to have been the result of one of Cassidy’s legendary larks. In 1900, some of the Wild Bunch were in Texas to visit their favorite brothels and blow off some steam. They decided to get a formal portrait taken as a joke. This picture of the Sundance Kid, Will Carver, Ben Kilpatrick, Harvey “Kid Curry” Logan, and Cassidy was a rare misstep for the gang leader. It’s said a Wells Fargo agent recognized the outlaws when the photo was displayed in the photographer’s Fort Worth studio window. It was soon on wanted posters throughout the West.
The gang’s final robbery helped fund a new life for Cassidy and Sundance in South America
By 1900, it appears Cassidy was tired of life on the run. A lawyer claimed the outlaw came to visit him and wondered if he could get a pardon in order to settle down for good. When he was told it would be impossible, Cassidy was understanding. “You know the law, and I guess you’re right,” he said. “But I’m sorry it can’t be fixed some way. You’ll never know what it means to be forever on the dodge.”
The Wild Bunch pulled their last major robbery at the First National Bank of Winnemucca, Nevada, on September 19, 1900. According to Patterson, Cassidy managed to charm the populace yet again, even in the midst of planning and executing the robbery:
One boy, 10-year-old Vic Button, whose father managed the CS Ranch east of town where the outlaws camped, remembered Butch as a likable man with a broad grin. He said the outlaw gave him candy. Button also said that one day when he told Butch how much he admired his horse, Butch replied that someday he might give it to him. A few days later, Butch kept his word. Following the robbery, as the three outlaws were changing to fresh horses, Butch told the cowboy who had been attending the animals to give his winded horse to the young boy at the CS Ranch.
This robbery might have been to fund a new life in South America, far from Pinkerton detectives. In 1901, Cassidy and the Sundance Kid bought property in Cholila, Argentina, under assumed names. They were joined on their new ranch by the mysterious, beautiful Etta Place, Sundance’s girlfriend and, according to some, Cassidy’s unrequited love. In his typical glib manner, Cassidy wrote to his friend Mathilda Davis back in America about his new setup:
Another of my Uncles died and left $30,000 to our little family of three so I took my $10,000 and started to see a little more of the world. I visited the best cities and best parts of the countries of South A. till I got here. And this part of the country looked so good that I located, and I think for good, for I like the place better every day.
The pair were killed in Bolivia, but there were alleged sightings of Cassidy after his death
It wasn’t long before the trio were accused of bank robberies in South America. Place eventually returned to the States, where she disappeared into history, as Cassidy and Sundance ended up in Bolivia.
On November 6, 1908, the pair were said to have stolen payroll from a mining company’s courier in San Vicente, Bolivia. A few days later, the Bolivian Cavalry surrounded the house where they were staying. A subsequent shootout left a man believed be Sundance injured. That evening, soldiers heard two shots coming from inside the house and found the two men dead with bullet wounds in the head. They were buried in a nearby Indian cemetery.
When news filtered back to the U.S. that Cassidy and Sundance had been killed, none of their friends seemed to have particularly believed the story. Sightings of Cassidy began almost immediately.
Cassidy’s nephew Bill Betenson notes in his book, Butch Cassidy: My Uncle, there were around 20 well-documented sightings of Cassidy after 1908. In 1925, Cassidy, driving a shiny new Ford and sporting the “characteristic Parker grin,” was said to have visited family in Utah. His sister Lula Parker Betenson claimed he told the family of his exploits and kept in touch with them until is alleged real death in 1937.
Engineer William T. Phillips claimed he was the real Cassidy
For many years, it was believed that a Spokane engineer named William T. Phillips was, in fact, Cassidy. He seems to have done everything possible to encourage this theory, even writing a book titled Bandit Invincible about Cassidy’s exploits. He also died in 1937, though Lula claimed he wasn’t the real Cassidy.
It does appear that Phillips was an imposter. Historian Larry Pointer has uncovered two mugshots, one of Cassidy and one of Phillips, from the same period in Wyoming. It appears the two men probably served time together in the penitentiary and that Phillips might have ridden for a time with the Wild Bunch.
In the early 1990s, two bodies believed to be Cassidy and Sundance were exhumed in Bolivia. DNA tests conducted by Clyde Snow, one of the nation’s foremost forensic anthropologists, determined they weren’t the famous outlaw duo.
According to Betenson, his family knew exactly where Cassidy was buried after his alleged real death in 1937: “My great-grandmother, Butch’s little sister Lula, was very clear. She said that where he was buried, and under what name, was a family secret; that 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.”
