"Hollywood always takes creative license with the facts when it comes time to bring a story from the past to the silver screen." So reads the internet promo (1) for a videotape of a recent documentary about the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which turned the outlaws into household names. But Hollywood's creative liberties were nothing compared to how the documentary's producers manipulated facts in order to give viewers the false impression that Butch Cassidy probably did not die in Bolivia.

In January 2001, the History Channel premiered four sixty-minute episodes of "History vs. Hollywood," a new series hosted by Edward Hermann and narrated by Burt Reynolds. The shows interspersed clips from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Mash, Patton, and The French Connection -- popular films from the late 1960s and early 1970s -- with newsreel footage, historic photographs, and interviews with actors, screenwriters, historians, and the films' subjects or their descendants. A History Channel press release promised that the series would "explore the true story behind the people and events portrayed in some of the best known motion pictures of our time" and "help sort out the fact from fiction in these 'historic' dramatizations." (2)

Early in 2000, Van Ness Films, the Los Angeles company that produced the series, approached a number of outlaw historians, including us, for assistance on the Butch and Sundance episode. The producers were looking for advice, video clips from other documentaries, and period photographs, as well as interviews with experts.

How well was the History Channel's promise fulfilled? Much of the program was an admirable effort to compare the 1969 movie with what was known of Butch and Sundance's lives at the time it was made, as well as with the considerable information that has come to light since then. But the effort was marred by a disingenuous attempt to breathe new life into the all-but-expired controversy over whether Butch died in a Bolivian shootout or returned to the United States to die with his boots off. In this respect, it misled the viewers and failed in its mission to tell what it called the "true story." At the very least, the documentary failed to give the viewers a balanced presentation of the facts.

There would be nothing wrong with discussing the disagreements over the fate of the bandits, a controversy that reached its apogee with the publication of Lula Parker Betenson's Butch Cassidy, My Brother (1975), Larry Pointer's In Search of Butch Cassidy (1977), and Ed Kirby's Rise and Fall of the Sundance Kid (1983). Betenson, Pointer, and Kirby argued that previous Wild Bunch historians like Charles Kelly and James Horan were wrong about the bandits' deaths, and that Butch and Sundance had returned to the United States alive and well enough to be spotted by ordinary people all over the West. (Although most of the supposed sightings of a returned Butch Cassidy could be traced to debunked impersonator William T. Phillips, he was not mentioned in the documentary.) Because the shootout in San Vicente, Bolivia, had not been documented, the revisionists could dismiss it as nothing more than an old-timer's tale or a lie designed to throw the Pinkertons off the bandits' trail. Documents discovered in the late 1980s, however, prove that the shootout did indeed take place and that the outlaws who died in it were most likely Butch and Sundance.

While accepting the notion that the Sundance Kid had died in South America, the documentary attempted to show that Butch had survived. (3) The evidence presented, however, was grossly misleading. First, an excerpt was shown from a 1974 videotaped interview of the then ninety-year-old Lula Parker Betenson, Butch's last surviving sister, in which she told Ed Kirby that Butch had visited the family in 1925, almost two decades after the Bolivian shootout. Not disclosed to the viewers was the fact that most of Butch's family -- his father and other siblings, some of whom Betenson averred had been present at the 1925 visit -- told people that he had never returned. Several researchers who met Betenson in the 1970s have expressed doubts about her story. After she died (in 1980), one of her sons, who was said to have been at the reunion, told writer Roger McCord that it had never happened. Kirby, himself, has expressed doubts about Betenson's stories to his colleagues in the outlaw history world. (4) These facts were known to the documentary's producers.

Second, the program introduced a short letter written by D.J. Myers on January 14, 1909. The holographic letter, along with two others, had been found in a scrapbook among the personal effects of Percy A. Seibert, an American mining engineer who had worked with Butch and Sundance at the Concordia tin mine in Bolivia from 1906 to 1908. Seibert's scrapbook -- actually, an 1897 U.S. Department of Agriculture Yearbook -- also contained other ephemera, including newspaper clippings, railroad tickets, calling cards, and dance flyers from the early 1900s. Among the clippings were three accounts of the 1908 shootout in which Butch and Sundance reportedly died. (5)

The letters were removed after Seibert's scrapbook was purchased in the mid-1980s, and both they and the scrapbook passed through the hands of several antique dealers. (6) There apparently were only three letters in the scrapbook. (7) The first, dated November 12, 1907, was from J.P. Maxwell "To the Boys at Concordia." Maxwell was Butch's alias in central Bolivia, and the "Boys" were undoubtedly his colleagues at the tin mine. The second, dated February 16, 1908, was signed simply "Gilles," and was addressed to C.R. Glass. The third letter, from Myers, was addressed to Seibert.

Someone, probably Seibert, wrote on the Gilles letter: "Letters from 'Butch' Cassidy or Maxwell." The handwriting in both the Maxwell and Gilles letters is consistent with that in all the other letters known to have been written by Butch. The only question is whether Butch had taken Gilles as a new alias (which doesn't make much sense, as he was writing to someone who knew him as Maxwell) or had merely written a note on behalf of an illiterate colleague named Gilles. (8)

Of all the letters ever attributed to Butch Cassidy, the only one shown in the documentary was the one from D.J. Myers. Interviewed on the program, outlaw historian Jim Dullenty said, "If it could ever be proven that the letter was Butch Cassidy's letter, it destroys at least [the theory] that Butch Cassidy died in South America, because it's dated January 1909 and, of course, the shootout in which they were killed -- allegedly -- occurred on November 6, 1908, in San Vicente. To me, the handwriting looks very much like Butch Cassidy's, like the other letters. I know it's devastating, but there it is, and we have it."

The only thing devastating, however, was the trick the program played on its viewers: The camera panned the Myers letter, but because none of Butch's authenticated letters was shown for comparison, the viewers had no opportunity to see for themselves. The obvious reason for this is that Butch's handwriting is, in fact, quite different from that of Myers. (9) In any case, Seibert himself, who presumably knew Myers, was firm in his opinion that both Butch and Sundance had died in San Vicente. (10)

The third and final distortion was the use of a brief clip from the 1991 Nova forensic expedition (in which we participated) to San Vicente, Bolivia. After stating that we had hoped to find scientific proof that Butch and Sundance had been killed there, the narrator said that "only one body was found, and the DNA tests were negative," implying that we had found one of the bandits, and that he was neither Butch nor Sundance. Left unsaid was that we had not located the bandits' actual grave at all, but had mistakenly disinterred a German miner named Gustav Zimmer, who had no known connection with the bandits -- other than having had the misfortune to die in the same remote corner of Bolivia. (11)

The program might better have been titled "The History Channel vs. History," because Hollywood, although it romanticized the circumstances of Butch and Sundance's fatal shootout, at least got the basic idea right.

1. "History Channel Presentation: History vs. Hollywood: Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid," http://store.aetv.com.

2. Debra Fazio, "A History Channel Presentation: History vs. Hollywood," History Channel press release, 28 November 2000.

3. The documentary showed a brief interview with the Sundance Kid's great-nephew, Paul Ernst, whose family contends that Sundance died in South America, but the program did not specify how one bandit died and the other could have escaped. Outlaw historian Ed Kirby, whose Rise and Fall of The Sundance Kid(Western Publicatons: Iola, WI, 1983) argues that Sundance did return from South America, was unfathomably absent from this segment but on hand in the next segment bolstering Cassidy's sister's recollection that her brother had returned, a recollection about which he had elsewhere expressed doubts. See note 4. For a discussion of the Sundance Kid's family's views on his fate, see Donna Ernst, Sundance, My Uncle (Creative Publishing: College Station, TX, 1992).

4. For an analysis of the many stories told about Butch's fate by family members and others, see Daniel Buck and Anne Meadows, "Did Butch Cassidy Return? His Family Can't Decide," WOLA Journal, vol. VI, no. 3, Spring 1998. Kirby, who is heard during the 1974 interview saying that he also believed that Butch had returned, had a different opinion in 1986, when he told the authors that Betenson had given him the impression that "she was just having fun with her stories." Ed Kirby, conversation with Daniel Buck and Anne Meadows, March 1986.

Jim Dullenty, another outlaw historian who knew Betenson, believes that she didn't know what happened to her brother; he said that she had changed her versions of his fate and was looking for his grave in Nevada long after she said he had died in Washington. Jim Dullenty, conversations with Daniel Buck, 5 September 1997, and 6 January 1998. Kirby related a similar story of Betenson's having traveled to Nevada in search of Butch's grave while she was telling reporters that he had died in Washington. Anne Meadows, Digging Up Butch & Sundance (Bison Books: Lincoln, NE, 1996), p. 203.

One of Butch's nieces, who does not wish to be identified by name, said Betenson's book was "controversial" within the family. "They were upset she wrote it." The niece herself observed, "I won't say she told a fib, but I don't think everything she wrote was true -- she embellished." She added that Butch's brothers had searched for him, had chased down rumors, into the late 1930s, without success. "I don't think the family ever saw him again" after he left home as a young man. "I don't think he ever came home." Butch's niece, conversations with Daniel Buck, 1 April 1992 and 22 February 2001.

Suggestions of Betenson's story-telling abilities come from her own pen. Butch was, she wrote, "the sainted abbot of the world's largest gang of outlaws." Continuing in the same hagiographic vein, she said, "Cassidy was of the highest quality. Clean, intelligent, and wholly removed from any environment cheap and tawdry during his upbringing." Lula Parker Betenson and Bill Kelly, "Butch Cassidy . . . and When He Came Home." Real West, September 1977.

It is not too hard to conclude that Betenson wanted her saintly brother to defeat death, not to mention defeat the Hollywood moguls who had appropriated his story, especially as the stories of his death in Bolivia were not documented at the time she was writing, and -- thanks to William T. Phillips -- rumors that he had come back were floating around the West. For example, in a 1974 interview with Dora Flack, the coauthor of her book, Betenson said, "when I saw the picture show, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, I thought something had to be done. . . . So I felt then that it's time to tell the real story, the true story of his life." Lula Parker Betenson, "Lula Parker Betenson's Life and Family," interview by Dora Flack, Utah State Historical Society, OH-00, 450, 31 October 1974. Betenson even gave Flack the impression that Phillips was Cassidy. "It just seemed logical from everything Lula told me." Dora Flack, conversation with Daniel Buck, 17 January 1998.

5. Daniel Buck saw the scrapbook at Beehive Antiques in Salt Lake City on 5 November 1986.

6. Jim Dullenty learned of the letters in the mid-1970s from a woman in Maryland, who had found them in a trunk of Percy Seibert's personal effects, which she had received from his family after his death. In the mid-1980s, California antique-dealer Craig Fouts asked Dullenty about any Butch Cassidy material, and Dullenty advised him of the Seibert collection. Fouts purchased the letters and scrapbook and later sold pieces of the collection to antiquarian colleagues Brent Ashworth, and Nyal Anderson in Utah. Daniel Buck, conversations with Craig Fouts, 30 May and 7 June 1986, and 20 February 2001; Brent Ashworth, 8 July 1986; Nyal Anderson, 9 July, 15 July, 21 August, and 5 November1986; Ed Kirby, 19 August 1986; and Jim Dullenty, 14 February 2001. See also, Anne Meadows, op cit., pp. 132-33.

7. The authors received photocopies of the three letters from Craig Fouts in 1986.

8. Butch Cassidy is known to have used three aliases in South America. In Argentina, he was James P. Ryan; in Chile he was James P. Maxwell; and in Bolivia he was James P. Maxwell and James Lowe. Frank Aller, letter to Alexander Benson, 31 July 1909, in Anne Meadows, op cit., p. 128; Daniel Buck and Anne Meadows, "Leaving Cholila," True West, January 1996; Arthur Chapman, "'Butch' Cassidy," The Elks Magazine, April 1930; A.G. Francis, "The End of an Outlaw," Wide World Magazine, May 1913; James Horan, The Authentic Wild West: The Outlaws, (Crown: NY, 1974), pp. 258-90; and "Statística, movimiento de pasajeros," El Chorolque (Tupiza, Bolivia), 4 November 1908.

9. A suggestion was once made that the Myers letter "could have been written by Sundance." Steve Lacy and Jim Dullenty, "Revealing Letters of Outlaw Butch Cassidy," Old West, vol. 21, no. 82, Winter 1984. Lacy and Dullenty also offered the possibility that letters written by William T. Phillips in the 1930s and Frank Ervin in 1940, were also written by Butch. Aside from the fact that Phillips's penmanship looks nothing like Ervin's (and neither man's looks like that of Butch), Phillips died in 1937, and Ervin was still putting pen to paper in 1940. See also, Matt Warner as told to Murray E. King, revised by Joyce Warner and Steve Lacy, Last of the Bandit Riders . . . Revisited (Big Moon Traders: Salt Lake City, 2000), in which Lacy offers yet another epistolary Butch, a California man named Walter D. Morgan, who wrote Matt Warner a "Dear Sir" letter in late 1937 saying that they had once met "for a brief period . . . during the winter of 1889 or 1888" in southwestern Colorado. Butch and Warner, by contrast, had been good friends for many years. Lacy suggested that Morgan, Ervin, and Butch were one and the same person, but the handwriting of the three men is completely different.

10. See, for example, Arthur Chapman, op cit., and James Horan, op cit., note 3, pp. 300-1. "In one of our last meetings before he died [in the late 1960s]," wrote Horan, "I mentioned to Seibert the stories alleging the return of Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. His one comment: 'Rubbish!'"

Betenson recounted that Butch had told her during his 1925 visit that he had heard that Seibert had identified the bodies of the two dead bandits at San Vicente as Sundance and him "as a way for me to bury my past along with somebody else's body so I could start all over. . . . Funny thing, Ma always used to say, 'A friend in need is a friend indeed.'" Lula Parker Betenson, Butch Cassidy, My Brother (Brigham Young University Press: Provo, UT, 1975), pp. 184-85. This is a heart-warming story, but Seibert was nowhere near San Vicente when the shootout happened and, in any event, never expressed any doubt whatsoever about Butch and Sundance's having died in Bolivia.

A few years later, Betenson came up with a completely new version of Butch and Sundance's "deaths," which she had obtained from controversial outlaw researcher Kerry Ross Boren. She now said that there was no shootout in Bolivia at all, but that two outlaws had been shot in Mercedes, Uruguay, and mistakenly identified as her brother and Sundance by an American traveling salesman who, upon returning to the United States "went straight to the office of [Pinkerton detective] Frank Dimaio," who "shrugged, marked [Butch and Sundance's] file 'Closed,' and thanked the salesman." Betenson and Kelly, op cit.

The Boren-Betenson story is an embellished version of the following incident. A former salesman told Dimaio, whom he encountered in an Italian restaurant in Detroit in 1912, that the previous year he had seen Butch and Sundance -- and Etta Place -- dead in a town called Mercedes. (He didn't specify the country, and several decades later Dimaio looked at the many towns named Mercedes in a South American atlas and decided that Mercedes, Uruguay, had the sort of hotels his friend frequented, so that it must have been where the three bandits had been seen.) In any case, there is no record of any such shootout and no evidence that the detective did anything with the information. (The only Mercedes link to the Wild Bunch trio is that they robbed a bank in Villa Mercedes, Argentina, in December 1905, and they escaped unharmed.) Regardless, the Pinkertons never closed their file on the outlaws. The Uruguay story did not come to light until the 1940s, when a retired Dimaio told it to historian James Horan. It is one of dozens of folkloric stories of the outlaws deaths in North and South America and Europe. Daniel Buck and Anne Meadows, "Where Lies Butch Cassidy?" Old West, Fall 1991.

11. For a discussion of the circumstances surrounding Butch and Sundance's deaths in Bolivia in 1908 as well as the 1991 Nova expedition's attempt to locate their grave, see Anne Meadows, op cit. Further information can be found in Daniel Buck and Anne Meadows, "Where Lies Butch Cassidy," op cit.; "Grave Doubts," South American Explorer, June 1993; "Skulduggery: Three Men and a Shovel," True West, December 1993; "Truly Western: Gnawing Doubts," True West, April 1994; and "Butch and Sundance Slept Here," True West, September 1999; and Anne Meadows and Daniel Buck, "Showdown In San Vicente?," True West, February 1993; "Did Butch and Sundance Die in Bolivia?," Bolivian Studies, vol. IV, no. 1, 1993; and "The Last Days of Butch & Sundance," Wild West, February 1997. Some of these articles can be found on the online Butch and Sundance Bibliography at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/danne/.