Butch Cassidy
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Robert LeRoy Parker (13 April 1866 - c. 1908?), commonly known as Butch Cassidy, was a notorious train and bank robber.
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Early days
Robert LeRoy Parker was born in Beaver, Utah to Maximillian Parker and Ann Gillis, English Mormon immigrants to the Utah Territory. He grew up on his parent's ranch near Circleville, Utah, some 300 miles south of Salt Lake City, Utah.
Parker left home during his early teens when, while working at a local dairy farm, he fell in with Mike Cassidy, a horse thief and cattle rustler. He subsequently worked several ranches in addition to a brief stint as a butcher in Rock Springs, Wyoming, whence he acquired for himself the nickname "Butch", (however a "Butch" is also the name given to a borrowed gun) to which he soon appended the surname Cassidy in honor of his old friend and mentor.
Life as a Criminal
1880–1887 — First Incidents, Becoming a Robber
Parker's first brush with the law was a petty affair. At the age of about 14 (circa 1880) he made a long journey to a clothier's shop in another town only to find the place closed. So, letting himself in, he removed a pair of jeans and left an IOU to the effect that he would pay for it upon his next visit. However the clothier took down the details which Parker had included in the IOU and reported him. After a stubborn resistance to the resultant charges in court, he was acquitted despite his having broken into the premises.
He continued to do ranch work until 1884 when he briefly moved to Telluride, Colorado, ostensibly to find work but possibly to deliver stolen horses to buyers there. He then returned to ranch work, in Wyoming and in Montana before returning again to Telluride in 1887, where he then met one Matthew Warner, the owner of a race horse, and together the two raced the horse at various events, dividing the profits between them. Through this line of enterprise he soon afterwards met, again in Telluride, the brothers William and Thomas McCarty, who may have been instrumental in introducing Parker to the ideas and strategies of train and bank robbery.
Parker, Warner and Thomas McCarty may or may not have been responsible for the robbery, on 3 November 1887, of a train near Grand Junction, Colorado, where the train's safe-master had assured them that nobody aboard had the safe's combination, and so, gathering together what other spoils they could, they had made off with a modest $150.
1889–1894 — Early Robberies, Going to Prison
Image:CassidyMugshotupload.jpg However this trio, together with an unknown fourth man, was certainly responsible for the robbery, on 24 June 1889, of the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride in which they stole approximately $21,000 with which they then fled to the Robbers Roost, a remote hideout in southeastern Utah.
In 1890 Parker then purchased a ranch near Dubois, Wyoming. However this location is close to the notorious Hole-in-the-Wall, a natural geological formation which afforded outlaws much welcomed protection and cover, and so the suspicion has always existed that Parker's ranching, at which he was never economically successful, was in fact a façade which operated to conceal more clandestine activities, perhaps in conjunction with Hole-in-the-Wall outlaws.
In 1894 he was arrested at Lander, Wyoming, for stealing horses and possibly for running a protection racket among the local ranchers there. Imprisoned in the State Prison in Laramie, Wyoming, he served 18 months of a two-year sentence and was released in January 1896, having promised the Governor of Wyoming, William Alford Richards, that he would not again offend in that state in return for a partial remission of his sentence.
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1896–1897 — Leaving Prison, Forming a New Gang
Upon his release he then associated himself with a circle of criminals, notably Harvey Logan (alias Kid Curry), Ben Kilpatrick, Elza Lay and Harry Tracy, who together with others he formed into a gang known as the Wild Bunch, and with this his criminal activity increased considerably.
On 13 August 1896 Parker, Lay and an unknown third man robbed the bank at Montpelier, Idaho, escaping with approximately $7,000. Shortly thereafter he recruited Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, alias the Sundance Kid, a Pennsylvania native, into the Wild Bunch. On 21 April 1897 in the mining town of Castle Gate, Utah, Parker and Lay ambushed a small group of men carrying the payroll of the Pleasant Valley Coal Company from the railroad station to their office, liberating a sack containing $7,000 in gold, with which they again fled to the Robber’s Roost. On 11 July 1899 Lay and others were involved in a train robbery near Folsom, New Mexico, which Parker may have planned and may or may not have been directly involved in, which led to a shootout with local law enforcers in which Lay, arguably Parker’s best friend and closest confidante, killed a sheriff, leading to his imprisonment for life in the New Mexico State Penitentiary.
Perhaps in consequence of this loss Parker appears to have approached Heber Wells, then Governor of Utah, which had joined the Union in 1896, to negotiate an amnesty, but Wells appears to have recoiled from this, advising Parker to instead approach the Union Pacific Railroad and settle matters with them in such manner as to persuade them to drop their criminal complaints against him. However, possibly due to bad weather this meeting never went ahead and Parker, disillusioned with both the Union Pacific and with the politicians with whom he had sought to deal, expressed his contempt at the whole situation. The Union Pacific Railroad, under chairman E. H. Harriman, did subsequently attempt to treat with Parker, through Parker's old ally Matthew Warner, by then released from a prison sentence, but Parker’s robbing, together with Harry Longabaugh and others, on 29 August 1900, of one of their trains near Tipton, Wyoming, which was also committed in flagrant violation of his earlier promise to the Governor of Wyoming not to offend in that state, brought the proceedings to a premature conclusion.
1900–1901 — Media Exposure, Travel to South America
Parker, Longabaugh and an unknown third man then traveled to Winnemucca, Nevada, where on 19 September 1900 they robbed the First National Bank of $32,640.
In December 1900 he then posed in Forth Worth, Texas for the now-famous Fort Worth Five Photograph [1], which depicts himself, Longabaugh, Harvey Logan (alias Kid Curry), Ben Kilpatrick and William Carver and a copy of which the Pinkerton Detective Agency soon began to use for its latest wanted posters. Parker and Longabaugh then fled east into New York City whence, on 20 February 1901, together with Ethel "Etta" Place, Longabaugh’s female companion, they departed to Buenos Aires, Argentina aboard the British steamer Herminius, Parker posing as one James Ryan, Place’s fictional brother. There he settled with Longabaugh and Place on a small ranch which they purchased near Cholila, Chubut province in west-central Argentina near the Andes, which comprised of a four-room log cabin and 15,000 acres of land on the east bank of the Rio Blanco.
![[1]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wildbunchlarge.jpg){kind=link}
Then, on 3 July 1901, members of the Wild Bunch, this time minus Parker and Longabaugh, robbed a train of $65,000 near Wagner, Montana.
1905 and His Last Years — His Biggest Robbery, Evading the Law
On 14 February 1905, two English-speaking bandits, who may or may not have been Parker and Longabaugh, held up the Banco de Tarapacá y Argentino in Río Gallegos, 700 miles south of Cholila, near the Strait of Magellan. Escaping with a sum that would be worth at least US $100,000 today, the pair vanished north across the bleak Patagonian steppes.
On 1 May 1905 the trio sold the Cholila ranch as once again the law was beginning to catch up with them. The Pinkerton Agency had known their precise address for some time but the rainy season had prevented their assigned agent, one Frank Dimaio, from traveling there and making an arrest. Governor Julio Lezana had then issued an arrest warrant but before it could be executed Sheriff Edward Humphreys, a Welsh Argentine who was friendly with Parker and enamored of Etta Place, tipped them off. The trio fled north to San Carlos de Bariloche where they embarked on the steamer Condor across Lake Nahuel Huapi and into Chile. However by the end of that year they were again back in Argentina; on 19 December Parker, Longabaugh, Place and an unknown male took part in the robbery of the Banco de la Nacion in Villa Mercedes, 400 miles west of Buenos Aires, which liberated 12,000 pesos. Pursued by armed lawmen, they crossed the Pampas and the Andes and again into the safety of Chile.
On 30 June 1906 Etta Place, having lamented the loss of their ranch, decided that she had had enough of life on the run and was escorted back to San Francisco by Longabaugh. Parker, now under the alias James "Santiago" Maxwell, obtained work at the Concordia Tin Mine in the Santa Vela Cruz range of the central Bolivian Andes, where he was joined by Longabaugh upon his return. Their main duties included guarding the company payroll. Still wanting to settle down as a respectable rancher, Parker, late in 1907, made an excursion with Longabaugh to Santa Cruz, a frontier town in Bolivia's eastern savannah, and from here Parker wrote to friends at Concordia, saying that he had found "just the place I’ve been looking for 20 years". At 41, he seemed to be burdened with regret. In the same document he laments, "Oh God, if I could call back 20 years ... I would be happy". He marveled at the affordability of good land with plenty of water and grazing, and made a prediction: "If I don't fall down I will be living here before long".
Death
The facts surrounding Parker’s death are uncertain. On 3 November 1908 near San Vicente, in southern Bolivia, a courier for the Aramayo Franke y Cia Silver Mine was conveying his company’s payroll by mule when he was attacked and robbed by two American bandits. The bandits then proceeded to San Vicente where they lodged. Three nights later, on 6 November, their lodging house was surrounded by a small group comprising the local mayor and some of his officials, and two soldiers. A gunfight then ensued, during which, in a lull in the firing, a single shot inside the house was heard, followed by a man screaming, which in turn was followed by another single shot. The locals kept the place surrounded until the next morning when, cautiously entering, they found two dead bodies, both with numerous wounds to the arms and legs, one with a bullet hole in the forehead and the other with a hole in the temple. Both bodies, apparently suicides, were removed to the local San Vicente cemetery where they were buried close to the grave of a German miner named Gustav Zimmer. Although their unmarked grave has been sought in the 1990s, notably by the American forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow and his researchers in 1991, no remains with DNA matching them to the living relatives of Parker and Longabaugh have yet been discovered.
However there have always been claims, not least of all by Parker’s own sister Lula Parker Betenson, that he returned alive to the USA (and therefore could not have been one of the San Vicente outlaws) and there lived in anonymity for years.
In her biography of her brother, Butch Cassidy, My Brother, she cites several instances of people familiar with Parker who encountered him long after 1908, and she relates a detailed impromptu "family reunion" which included Parker, their brother Mark, their father, and Lula herself, in 1925.
However the western historian Charles Kelly closed the chapter Is Butch Cassidy Dead? in his 1938 book, Outlaw Trail, by observing that if Parker "is still alive, as these rumors claim, it seems exceedingly strange that he has not returned to Circleville, Utah, to visit his old father, Maximillian Parker, who died on 28 July 1938, at the age of 94 years". Kelly is thought to have interviewed Parker's father before his death, but no transcript has ever come to light.
All correspondence from both Parker and Longabaugh abruptly ceased after the San Vicente incident.
Aliases
- George Parker (Butch's real name, according to the Pinkertons' wanted posters [2])
- Butch Cassidy
- George Cassidy [3]
- Lowe Maxwell [4]
- James "Santiago" Maxwell [5]
- James Ryan [6]
Alleged imposters
- William T. Phillips claimed to have known Cassidy since childhood. Some have speculated that Phillips was Butch Cassidy but no evidence supports the claims.
External links
- History of Butch Cassidy, LeRoy Parker
- Was Henry Long Harry Longabaugh?
- IMDb-Search "Butch Cassidy"de:Butch Cassidy
nl:Butch Cassidy ja:ブッチ・キャシディ sv:Butch Cassidy uk:Кессіді Буч