Q: Was the fictional character Hopalong Cassidy inspired by Butch Cassidy?
A: Nope. If Hopalong's creator Clarence Edward Mulford modeled his hero on anyone, it was Wild Bill Hickok, perhaps with a few John Wesley Hardin gunfights thrown in. His knight-errant was a scruffy, tobacco-chewing gimp (hence, Hopalong). Much to Mulford's dismay, the bad leg vanished after the first movie, and Hoppie blossomed into a sanitized, sarsaparilla-sipping do-gooder.
Q: What actor played Butch twice in the movies?
A: Neville Brand.
Q: Was the gang really called the Wild Bunch?
A: Depends on your definition of the word really. During its heyday, the band was known in the newspapers as the Hole-in-the-Wall gang, the Train Robber's Syndicate, Butch Cassidy's gang, Kid Curry's gang, the Powder Springs gang, and the Robbers Roost gang. The first recorded use of the "Wild Bunch" in reference to Butch and Sundance and their pals was in a 1902 Pinkerton memorandum to the American Bankers Association. The headline-friendly bon mot was soon picked up by the newspapers, undoubtedly with an assist from the nimble detective agency. Ironically, by then the gang was no more. The term was used generically in the Old West to mean a group of cowboys on a spree or a herd of free-roaming horses. Oklahoma outlaws like the Doolins and the Daltons were also called the Wild Bunch.
Q: When did Butch and Sundance first meet?
A: Their paths could have crossed in the mid-1880s when Butch was cowboying near Telluride, Colorado, and Sundance near Cortez, Colorado, but there is no evidence that they knew each other then. In Montana in the early 1890s, Sundance met Bill Madden, one of Butch's 1889 confederates from the Telluride bank holdup, so they had friends in common. Regardless, Butch and Sundance didn't team up in a felonious enterprise until 1896 or 1897, and prior to decamping for Argentina, they had participated in no more than three -- and perhaps as few as two -- holdups together.
Q: Did Butch participate in any of the gang's train robberies?
A: As a train robber, he was something of a shirker. Seven train robberies are generally attributed to various members of the Wild Bunch: Malta in 1892; Wilcox and Folsom in 1899; Tipton in 1900; Wagner in 1901; Rifle in 1904; and Sanderson in 1912. Butch was not accused of participating in the Malta, Folsom, and Sanderson holdups, and his name was added to the list of Wilcox suspects only after he became famous, so it is doubtful that he could have been convicted for it. He was in Argentina at the time of the Wagner and Rifle holdups, so he couldn't possibly have participated in either of them. That leaves Tipton, where Butch was recognized by a rancher who knew him on sight. In short, when it came to trains jobs, Butch had a miserable attendance record.
Q: Who the heck was Tom Capehart?
A: Tom Capehart has been mistaken for Will Carver, Elzy Lay, Harvey Logan (who once took the name as an alias), and Harry Longabaugh. Like a bad penny, he keeps turning up in one tale or another in a dozen outlaw histories of the era. In spite of all the attention, he vanished from view after a spell on the WS Ranch in the late 1890s. He might have gone to prison in Colorado or meandered up to Montana. Who the heck was he? Don't know.
Q: Were Butch and Sundance gunslingers?
A: Hardly. Neither one ever had what we think of as a traditional gunfight -- that is, a barroom brawl or a showdown -- and during their holdups, they took pains not shoot anyone. Sundance might have been among the bandits who mortally wounded Sheriff Joe Hazen during the chase following the Wilcox holdup, and Butch killed one soldier during the San Vicente shootout, but those incidents were exceptions.
Q: How did Butch and Sundance get their nicknames?
A: Several old timers claimed that Butch had worked briefly as a butcher in Rock Springs in the early 1890s; he also might have butchered rustled cattle. For anyone who doesn't like the job-related explanation, Matt Warner claimed that Cassidy had once had difficulty shooting a rifle of Warner's named "Butch." In any event, back then Butch was a generic nickname, like Buddy. About Sundance there is no controversy: At the tender age of twenty, he was jailed in Sundance, Wyoming.
Q: Elzy Lay or Elza Lay, which is it?
A: William Ellsworth Lay was known as Elzy, although at least one of his descendants calls him Elza. Go figure.
Q: Where did the name Etta Place come from?
A: A Pinkerton error and Sundance's mother. We know that she used the name Ethel (whether it was her actual given name or not is unknown), because a Pinkerton agent traced it off a hotel registry, and she was always referred to as Ethel in South American documents. Pinkerton files also refer to her as "Eva" and "Etta," most likely as a result of mistakes by informants or typists. Because some of the agency's WANTED posters called her Etta Place, that became her nom de guerre. As for her surname, she acquired it as the wife (common-law or otherwise) of Sundance, who was then using the name Harry A. Place, an alias borrowed from his mother, whose maiden name was Annie Place.
Q: Did Butch come home for his mother's funeral?
A: Nope. She died in early May 1905, when Butch, Sundance, and Ethel were still at their ranch in Argentina. They were busy wrapping up their affairs and fleeing to Chile after being suspected of involvement in a bank holdup. Unless there was Concorde service between Cholila and Circleville, Butch was not among the mourners at his mother's grave side.
Q: If the U.S. authorities couldn't nab Butch and Sundance, how could the Bolivians catch them?
A: The premise of the question is wrong. Thanks to the efforts of the Pinkertons, the U.S. marshals, and the local sheriffs who chased the bandits, the Hole-in-the-Wall gang was defunct by the early 1900s, with all of its key members jailed, killed, or in exile. As for the Bolivians, they captured the majority of the foreign bandits (mostly disgruntled miners or railroad workers) operating in the country in the early 1900s.
Q: Why did Butch and Sundance stay in San Vicente that fateful night in November 1908, rather than camp out along the trail where they might have been safer?
A: The outlaws had planned the holdup of the Aramayo mine company payroll hastily, after their scheme to rob a bank in Tupiza was foiled by the arrival of army troops on maneuvers. Word of the holdup spread much faster than the bandits could reasonably have expected, and they were unable to continue south and cross the Argentine border. Instead, they looped west and north, putting a mountain range between themselves and most of their pursuers. Thus, two days after the holdup they found themselves high in the arid Andes without cold-weather camping gear and, more importantly, without fodder or water for their animals. They had no choice but to go into a village, and they undoubtedly thought that San Vicente was so remote and small that there would be no chance of encountering a posse there. They were wrong.
Q: Did Butch and Sundance really do something as careless as leave their rifles and ammunition in the patio in San Vicente?
A: According to the Bolivian judicial inquest report, Sundance's rifle was found with his corpse, and both he and Butch had revolvers and plenty of bullets with them. Not that it mattered.
Q: How come Butch's sister Lula Parker Betenson said he came home in 1925 if he didn't?
A: At the time Lula made her claim, many people believed that Butch had returned, so she may have seen no harm in simply inventing a visit to trump Hollywood and write a book with a better story of how Butch, "the sainted abbot of the world's largest gang of outlaws" (as she once described him), defeated death. A more charitable explanation is that age had corroded her memory -- that is, some relative had visited the family's home in Circleville, and decades later that person became Butch in her mind. (Memories are memories of a memory, as the neuroscientists like to say.) In any case, most of Butch's immediate kin, including his father and other siblings, said he never returned.
Q: Who was the last member of the Wild Bunch left standing?
A: Depends on how you construe the term member. If membership in the gang is defined loosely, the honor goes to Laura Bullion, Ben Kilpatricks's chum, who served time for passing stolen notes from the 1902 Wagner holdup and died in 1961. If the criteria include participation in at least one robbery, the answer would be Walt Punteney, who took part in the 1897 Belle Fourche holdup and died in 1948. As for key confederates, the last standing was Matt Warner, who entered bandit Valhalla in 1938. Take your pick.