Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid didn't die in a Bolivian gunfight

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SALT LAKE CITY -- Butch Cassidy waited along the trail, hidden in the bushes. He knew the banker, with a thousand dollars in his pocket, would be coming his way shortly. He didn’t have to wait long. The banker approached in a buggy, and, as luck would have it, stopped right in front of Cassidy’s hiding place to count his money. Cassidy stepped out of the bushes, six-shooter in hand, and said, “I’ll take those.”

There’s nothing unusual about Butch Cassidy robbing a banker. What makes this story unusual is that it allegedly happened several years after he and the Sundance Kid were supposed to have died in a famous gunfight in Bolivia.

According to Lula Betenson, Cassidy’s youngest sister, Cassidy and the Sundance Kid didn’t die in Bolivia. Betenson is the author of "Butch Cassidy, My Brother." She wrote the book in 1975. The information in her book came from a meeting she said she had with her brother in 1925, when Betenson was 41 and Cassidy was 59. Betenson died in 1980.

Cassidy was the leader of the Wild Bunch gang, a group of 10 outlaws famous for their train and bank robberies throughout the West. According to the legend, Cassidy and Harry Longabaugh (better known as the Sundance Kid) escaped to Bolivia in 1901 to escape the increasing pressures of being pursued by the Pinkerton Detective Agency.



The childhood home of Robert Leroy Parker, alias Butch Cassidy, outside of Circleville, Utah. (Photo: Steven Law)

In 1908, two outlaws were killed during a gunfight with Bolivian police. The two bodies were identified as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

So if Cassidy and Sundance didn’t die in a Bolivian gunfight, how did that rumor get started? Betenson says in her book, quoting from Cassidy, that the rumor was started by a man named Percy Seibert. Seibert was a native Bolivian living in Bolivia in 1908 and a friend of Cassidy and Sundance. It’s true that in 1908 two armed bandits died in a gunfight with Bolivian police. It was Seibert who identified the bodies as Cassidy and Sundance, even though he knew it wasn’t them.

“He knew this was the only way we could go straight,” Cassidy says in Betenson’s book. Cassidy had saved the lives of Seibert and his wife on a previous occasion.
Seibert saw this — the false identification of the two bodies — as a way to pay Cassidy back. And with that, word was out that Cassidy and Sundance were dead, and the heat was off.

They could come out of hiding. They were free to travel. They could finally go home. They could live out the rest of their days in relative peace if they did it under the radar and under an alias. And, Betenson writes, that’s exactly what they did.

Cassidy was born in Beaver, Utah, in April 1866 and grew up in Circleville. His real name was Robert LeRoy Parker. Sit down in a cafe in just about any town in Garfield, Piute or Iron county and ask about Butch Cassidy and it isn’t hard to find someone who has a Butch Cassidy story. Cassidy stories drift about here like cotton from the cottonwood trees. But verifying the truth of any of these stories is difficult to do this far after the fact. Anyone who knew Cassidy is long-since dead. Like the respectable outlaw that he was, he’s still a hard man to track down.

One starts to feel like they’ve entered the realm of Sasquatch, Elvis and the Loch Ness Monster. A Butch Cassidy story often starts like this, “I heard this story from my dad/grandpa/grandma who heard it from his dad, who used to hang out with Butch Cassidy.” It’s folk hero meets conspiracy theory meets six degrees of Kevin Bacon.

Dale Hollingshead, a resident of Beaver and owner of Arshel’s Cafe, admits this is true. “So much of it is conjecture and mystery, but that adds to the intrigue of it all.”

The most reliable source for what truly happened to Cassidy is Betenson, who says she heard the stories and information straight from her brother.

The story of Cassidy robbing the banker on the side of the road is recorded in Betenson’s book, and the story is a favorite of residents of Butch Cassidy country. The rest of the story goes like this: Cassidy walked into a store (Betenson didn't give its location) to pick up some supplies. It was run by a widow, and Cassidy saw that she was “looking glum.” He asked her what was the matter. She told Cassidy that the mortgage on the store was due, she didn’t have the money and the banker was coming to take her store.

“How much do you owe?” Cassidy asked her.

“A thousand dollars,” she said. “I just can’t make ends meet with my husband dead and gone.”

Cassidy told her to stop worrying and that he’d help her. Cassidy left the store and a short time later returned with ten $100 bills and told her to make sure she got a signed receipt for it, marked paid in full.

That’s when Cassidy went a ways out of town, hid in the bushes and waited for the banker to come along. And when the banker passed by, Cassidy robbed him and took his money back. Betenson quotes Cassidy as saying, “This was so successful that I paid off more than one mortgage in the same way.”

According to Betenson’s book, Cassidy spent very little time in southern Utah after he returned from South America, likely less than a few months. She wrote that he spent most of his remaining years in Wyoming, Oregon and California, moving often to maintain his cover, and always under an assumed name.

After word got around that Betenson was writing a book about Cassidy not dying in Bolivia, friends and acquaintances of Cassidy started sending her letters telling of times they had seen or worked with her brother. In her book she records more than a dozen of these letters coming from all over the West.

So the big question is: where is Cassidy’s grave? And where are the letters that people sent Betenson claiming to have seen Cassidy? Cassidy is rumored to be buried in California, in Oregon, in a Salt Lake City cemetery and somewhere on a hillside outside of Circleville.

But Betenson writes in her book that “Robert Leroy Parker died in the Northwest in the fall of 1937. Where he is buried and under what name is still our secret. All his life he was chased. Now he has a chance to rest in peace and that’s the way it must be.”

“Lula claimed to know where Cassidy was buried,” said Bill Betenson, Lula’s great-grandson, “but if she did, she took that information with her to the grave.”

Like Cassidy himself, she was good at covering her tracks.

Source: http://www.ksl.com/?nid=968&sid=17130775

[BruteForce]

Excellent read. I was unaware of the ties to Circleville and Beaver; that explains all the Butch Cassidy RV parks in that area. Thanks for the great read.

[Scott P]

Lula Betenson's piece on Butch returning to see the family was proven to be a fraud years ago. Yet the Newspaper is now reporting the "find" as news and saying that she is the most relaible source of information? Shoddy reporting at it's best.

[Don]

Lula Betenson's piece on Butch returning to see the family was proven to be a fraud years ago. Yet the Newspaper is now reporting the "find" as news and saying that she is the most relaible source of information? Shoddy reporting at it's best.

Yeah, I'll have to find the article, but I remember reading a refutation of this somewhere too. I clicked on the thread expecting something new in the news; my mistake.

[BruteForce]

You know, I don't care if its true or false. It's still quite intriguing. And to know its so local to the area where I spend much time is a bonus.

[Brian in SLC]

It is intriguing. Heckuva story.

They purportedly robbed a train near Mendoza, up near the Chilean border. There's a valley there, the Rio Vacas, near where the train was robbed. A long time known spot to spend the night is a house built into the side of a rock (Casa de Piedra or some such). Its a standard approach to that side of Aconcagua, that climbers and trekkers use now.

Anyhoo, I'm kickin' around in the dirt near where the old campsite is, and, notice an old cartridge pop out of the dirt. Its a .44-40, and, the headstamp is UMC which hasn't been made for many years.

Guess what caliber Butch's favorite pistol was? Yeah, now, I ain't sayin'...but...

We'll probably never know what happened to those guys...(and gal for that matter, Etta Place?).

[Scott P]

You know, I don't care if its true or false. It's still quite intriguing

It is intriguing indeed.

The article however states that Lula Betenson is the most reliable source on Butch's life, which really isn't considered true by most. Betenson's book has been been disputed not only by all historians I know of, but the entire rest of her (and Butch's) family as well.

The mysteries of Butch Cassidy are indeed intriguing and there is lots of local history (to name a few places strongly connected to the history of Butch Cassidy; Telluride Colorado, Baggs Wyoming [just north of where I live], Circleville Utah, Beaver Utah, Castle Gate Utah, San Rafael Swell, Robbers Roost, Capitol Reef, etc., ect).

There used to be a Butch Cassidy signature on one of the old cabins at Capitol Reef. The NPS removed it on the suspision that it was fake, but apparently later it was found to be genuine (at least I have been told by Steve Allen, who is really into the history of the area).

You can still find signatures of members of the outlaw gangs (including Butch Cassidy), especially in places like the San Rafael Swell, Robbers Roost, Capitol Reef and some of the canyons draining into Powell.

The history is indeed intriguing and to date no one has ever found Butch's body and much of his life is still a mystery.

[Deadeye008]

I had a run-in with a man from Circleville last summer while I was shooting a wedding. The man was in his 80's. I got to talking to him about Butch Cassidy and he said that he hadn't ever seen him after the Bolivia incident but that his older sister swore to him that she had seen Butch in Circleville after he had supposedly died. Don't know what to believe and we probably won't ever know the truth but I do know that it seems like faking your death was a popular thing back then.(Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Butch and Sundace)