BUTCH & SUNDANCE: STILL DEAD?

Butch Cassidy has been reported dead dozens of times over an eight-decade stretch, from ten years before he actually perished to seventy years afterward. His most recent demise was in 1978, when he would have been 112.

Cassidy died first in 1898. He was only 32, and he wasn’t even missing yet. A posse near Price, Utah, cornered and shot two rustlers, and identified one of the men as the noted outlaw. Eye witnesses said he was the one who had robbed the Castle Gate mine. The dead man thought to be Cassidy was later identified as John Herring, a Utah cowboy. Hole-in-the-Wall historian Thelma Condit wrote of a similar event, in which two innocent prospectors said to have been Elzy Lay and Butch Cassidy were shot dead in their bedrolls by a posse near Vernal in the late 1890s.

The Salt Lake Tribune jested:

The supply of Butch Cassidays [sic] seems inexhaustible. You will find him in every county of the State, and he turns up at Evanston, Richfield and Thompson’s Springs at the same hour. Several of him have been killed, but he still flourishes before.

A few years later, the Vernal Express wrote:

Butch Cassidy is receiving as much unsolicited notoriety as a New York Tammany leader. He has been reported killed a dozen times in the last five years, and yet every time a notorious train or bank robbery occurs, Butch comes to life and is credited with being the leader of the gang. He certainly must have more lives than a whole family of cats.

The Express had but an inkling of what was to come. By the 1930s, Cassidy was expiring all over the Northwest. In Search of Butch Cassidy author Larry Pointer contended that the once famous bandit had died in 1937 in Washington, under the name William T. Phillips. A Spokane machine-shop owner, Phillips pretended to be the celebrated Rocky Mountain outlaw as a playful hoax. Stories that he was Cassidy circulated in Wyoming and Colorado newspapers in the late 1930s, and probably inspired other accounts of Cassidy’s death in the Northwest, as well as accounts of his dying as a man named Phillips elsewhere in the country.

Not satisfied with Pointer’s resolution of the outlaw’s fate, a Scot named James McGowne claimed that Cassidy was not William T. Phillips but Phillips’s brother, and that he had died in Spokane as Charles Fred Harrison. (There is no evidence that William T. Phillips even had a brother.) A woman who claimed to be Kid Curry’s niece said Cassidy perished in an auto accident in Washington in the 1930s. Charls Hanks, a purported Wild Bunch member, said Cassidy died in Oregon in 1930 or 1937. Two decades later, Cassidy’s compatriot the Sundance Kid followed suit, “dying in Oregon in 1956.”

In her book, Butch Cassidy, My Brother, Lula Parker Betenson said that her brother was not William T. Phillips, but that he had died the same year, 1937, and in the same region, the Northwest (she didn’t name the state). English writer Bruce Chatwin, who visited Betenson in Utah, elicited more specifics: “She believes he died of pneumonia in Washington State in the late 1930s.”

If those weren’t sufficient coincidences, she conceded in another interview that her brother occasionally used the alias Phillips. Her co-writer, Dora Flack, said that although Betenson never told her who Cassidy was, “I honestly believe he died as William Phillips. I have no proof . . . . It just seemed logical to me . . . after everything Lula told me.”

It seems unlikely that Betenson knew what happened to her brother and, as a result, had to rely on shards of rumors and anecdotes in constructing her fable of his return. Although a few members of the Parker family still support Betenson’s story, the greater number have expressed the opinion in one way or another that Cassidy never returned home after his flight to Argentina in 1901.

In any event, Cassidy couldn’t stop dying. John Gardner, a Scot who had been Butch and Sundance’s neighbor in Argentina, retired to Ireland, where he became friends with a garrulous Irishman, Frank O’Grady. In the 1970s, several decades after Gardner’s death, O’Grady wrote to Betenson, telling her that Gardner had confided to him that her brother had died in Arizona in 1936. In a another letter, O’Grady added these details: “Shot in the back by a skunk who feared to face him like a man. Somewhere in the vicinity of Tombstone.”

Nevada is another happy hunting ground. Writer Gale R. Rhoades said that Cassidy, who was working “for the Pioneer Club as a chiller” named Ed C. Roberts, died in Las Vegas in 1944. Rhoades got that from writer Pearl Baker, who had apparently collected a pile of death certificates of people she thought might be Cassidy. (During her long career as a Wild Bunch student, Baker had him dying in 1936, 1937, 1943, and 1944, in California, Nevada, and Washington.) Rhoades said that no one knew anything about Roberts’ immediate family, which was evidence in favor of his having been Cassidy. “And just as convincing, perhaps,” Rhoades added, “is the fact that no one ever reported seeing Butch Cassidy after the death of Ed C. Roberts.”

Several people, including Josie Bassett, who knew Cassidy in Brown’s Park in the 1890s, were convinced that he had expired in Johnnie, Nevada, an old mine camp. Even Betenson went poking around Johnnie. Kerry Ross Boren and Steve Lacy, two of the more fanciful writers in the outlaw-history community, are among those who adhere to Nevada scenarios. Boren contends that Cassidy, going by the name Frank Monette Ervin, was fatally crushed in a mine accident in Johnnie sometime between 1941 and 1944, while Lacy votes for Cassidy dying in 1943 in two other Nevada mining towns, Goldfield and Tonopah. Boren and Lacy are perhaps the last men standing who still contend that Hiram BeBee, a gnomish convicted murderer who died in a Utah prison in 1955, was the tall, handsome Sundance Kid.

Nevada figures in yet another anecdote. Longtime Brown’s Park resident Edith Embrey MacKnight said that in 1928 she visited a ranch at Pahrump Springs in the company of Ann Bassett, Josie’s sister. There they met “an old fellow who looked like a Desert Rat! Ann called him Albert. It wasn’t necessary to mention a last name. Old Albert was Butch Cassidy.”

“You’d never forget those eyes. I know it was Butch I saw in Nevada,” MacKnight exclaimed. The man with the unforgettable eyes died in 1937.

“I knew it was Butch” is a refrain that repeats itself in these personal-experience stories. The three most common elaborations on that theme: “He never said who he was”; “I knew by the look in his eyes”; and “He told me a story only he could have known.”

Utah has several claims on its native son. He died on a ranch near Vernal, according to one of Wild Bunch historian Charles Kelly’s informants. As Idaho mechanic Budd Anderson tells it, however, Cassidy “spent his last ‘four or five years’ in relative seclusion in Richfield, where he died and was buried in the 1930s.” He was also run over by a car, “a big limousine” on the “main road leading into Castle Dale,” according to Utah surgeon Clifford M. Cutler. Cutler had heard the story from a patient named Bill Cassidy, who said he was the outlaw’s son. Someone murdered Cassidy in Minersville in 1913, “to get his shotgun,” according to a woman who had seen a documentary about Butch and Sundance on television. They never found his body. She said that Cassidy and her grandfather were friends.

Then there is William Jack Casaday, who perished in an accident at the Castle Gate Mine in the 1920s and is buried in Price. As evidence that he was the famous outlaw, his grandson said that in none of the photographs of his grandfather is his face showing. Second, his feet pointed out, and so did Cassidy’s. Third, Matt Warner used to hang around the house. Fourth, “Grandma wouldn’t let Grandpa touch guns.”

Larry Pointer received a letter from a reader saying that the Sundance Kid died in 1967 outside of Cutbank, Montana. He was using the name Grover Shropshire. That story started with Del Schrader, who wrote Jesse James Was His Name, a book squarely in the Baron Munchausen wing of outlaw history. According to Schrader, Sundance was actually Grat Dalton, when he wasn’t Grover Shropshire. Schrader said that Butch and Sundance escaped from Bolivia while operating a Wild West show in the Andes starring Will Rogers and Billy the Kid.

The Pinkerton files are clotted with death rumors. Tantalizing is a 1910 letter from the agency’s Pacific Division manager J.C. Fraser to New York General Manager George D. Bangs: “All I know about the death of Geo. Parker [Butch Cassidy] is covered in the report referred to.” Said report, however, is neither named nor in the files. Fraser added that an informant “gave me to distinctly understand that Parker was dead and was deader than hell, and that it was a damn good thing he was dead.” Fraser closed his letter by saying, “I am inclined to believe that the information given by the informant about Parker being dead is true, but of course I cannot prove it.”

Other agency reports are more speculative. Retired Pinkerton official Lowell Spence said that Cassidy “was killed in some town in New Mexico in a house of prostitution where he was creating trouble. The women called the police and Cassidy was shot and killed while resisting arrest.” A Pinkerton informant told the agency in 1909: “I can tell you for a positive fact . . . that ‘Butch’ Cassidy is dead, that he was filled full of holes on the bridge at Green River,” Wyoming, “in the winter of 1905-1906.” But in the summer of 1905, wrote the Los Angeles Times, an escaped lunatic shot dead near Douglas was identified as Butch Cassidy.

Butch died twice in Lander in the 1930s. Sundance also passed away in Wyoming, but only once, in Casper in 1957. That story comes from, among others, a refugee from a California detox center who sometimes called himself Harry Longabaugh, Jr., but was dubbed “Sundance, Jr.,” by the press. (Sundance’s real name was Harry A. Longabaugh.) Charlie Rile, a traveling cigarette salesman, had the scoop on Butch in True West back in 1969. He died in Lander in 1953. How did Charlie know? Barney Smith told him. Who was Barney Smith? A “mule skinner, gambler, bartender, bar owner, and old time cowboy.” How did Barney know that Butch had died? A friend told him.

Sundance also exited in New York City: After returning from South America, he “worked as a bellhop at a fancy hotel in the city, and died while using an alias,” per a story told recently by the granddaughter of the man who said he had once met the outlaw-turned-bellhop, who was his great-uncle.

Colorado can offer only one grave to the cause: “Word comes to me from a reliable source,” Frontier Times editor Marvin Hunter wrote in 1941, “that ‘Butch’ Cassidy died in Denver, Colorado, less than three years ago.” That story was repeated by veteran Western writer Ed Bartholomew, who wrote in Kill or Be Killed that Cassidy might have died in Denver in the late 1930s.

A few years ago a gentleman in Idaho divulged that his neighbor Warren Vincent was the Sundance Kid’s son and that Sundance was buried in St. Marie’s, across the state line from Spokane. Vincent knew about Butch dying in Spokane even before it was on television, so his story about Sundance being his father must be true, the neighbor said. “He’s telling the truth. I can tell. Of course, everyone around here thinks he’s nuts.”

Several years ago, a man named Bobby Simpson began contacting outlaw historians, saying that he was Sundance’s grandson. He claimed to be a physicist and mentioned that he was having trouble getting a security clearance. Harry Longabaugh and the Sundance Kid, Simpson confided, were two different people. Simpson said that Sundance was born in Goat Neck, Texas, and that he was part Indian and part Luxembourger. He and Butch spent most of the first half of the Twentieth Century in a federal penitentiary. When they got out, they went into the casino business in California and Las Vegas. They also owned the Coconut Grove, which Sundance burned down. Later, the Kid murdered Bugsy Siegal. According to Simpson, Sundance also starred in several Westerns in the 1920s and 1930s, under the name Buck Jones. At the time of his death in Fort Worth in 1954, he owned a brothel. “I do know where the money is buried,” Simpson said.

Cassidy expired several times in California. A letter published in Old West in 1966 offered the tip that he had breathed his last in Los Angeles in 1937. A young man who claimed to be the bandit’s great-great-nephew said that it “was always a story in my family that Butch ended up in California, where he was a successful businessman, and that he died there in the 1930s.

Cassidy’s only reported Southern death is that of a man coincidentally named William Phillips who died in Georgia in 1936 at the age of 92 – or perhaps 68. The informant, who wasn’t sure whether Phillips was his grandfather or his great uncle, said he had lied about his age in order to get a Civil War pension. In the evidence department, Phillips’s grandson/nephew offered that the old man didn’t like to have his picture taken, that he was a crack shot, and that he resembled the Spokane William Phillips.

Butch and Sundance died all over Latin America. There’s hardly a country there that doesn’t have a piece of them. Most famously, Butch and Sundance fell in a shootout in San Vicente, Bolivia, in 1908, the only death that is supported by a body of evidence. They also died in San Vicente in 1909 and 1911, and elsewhere in Bolivia, such as Cochabamba. Many of the stories, however, simply refer to the entire continent of South America, as if it were one big mysterious land mass, without naming the country. Charles Siringo, Matt Warner, Elzy Lay, and William L. Simpson, all named “South America” as the site of Butch and Sundance’s mausoleum.

Other tales are more specific. Butch and “the boys” were perforated side-by-side before a firing squad in Honduras, according to a 1938 interview with Harry B. Adsit, Cassidy’s rancher friend from Telluride, Colorado. Adsit said that Butch and his Hole-in-the-Wall gang had arranged a truce with authorities

by which for a consideration they were to go to Honduras, never to return. There they bought a herd and for years raised cattle. An American engineer in Honduras informed me that the old bandit instinct finally came to the fore. They learned that a very rich gold mine was packing out gold bullion by mule train. The boys captured the train, but two hundred pounds of bullion on each mule make a quick get-away difficult. They were soon captured by Honduras cavalry and immediately executed. It is a safe bet that Butch Cassidy faced the firing squad with a smile.

In 1945, using the name David Sanders Merril (or Merril S. Miles), Cassidy again turned up his toes in Honduras, but this time of natural causes. Kerry Ross Boren said that Butch died in Ecuador in 1907. (The same Butch who Boren also said died in Nevada in 1944.)

Numerous accounts have one or both outlaws being shot or committing suicide in Argentina or Chile in 1904, 1906, 1909, 1911, 1912/1913, and 1935. They were ranchers, they were bank robbers, they were rustlers – the details vary. In at least one version, Kid Curry replaces Sundance. There is a kernel of fact here: Two North American delinquents, William Wilson and Robert Evans, were shot dead in 1911 by the Argentine Policía Fronteriza in the Patagonian Andes, near the Argentine-Chilean border. Although Wilson and Evans are sometimes confused with Butch and Sundance, they were different people altogether.

An island off the coast of Mexico was the idyllic setting of Cassidy’s demise in 1932, per another of Charles Kelly’s confidants. Butch and Sundance were “ambushed by bounty hunters while driving cattle to market in Brazil.” A Wyoming newspaper, prone to geographic vagueness, disclosed that Cassidy had been “killed in a tropical saloon brawl” in the early 1900s.

Retired Pinkerton operative Frank Dimaio said that Butch and Sundance, and Sundance’s friend Etta Place, were mortally wounded in a shootout with police in Mercedes, Uruguay, in 1911, following a bank holdup. He got the story from a Mr. Steele, a traveling salesman whom he had once met in Buenos Aires and later bumped into in a Detroit restaurant. The salesman, who swore he saw the bodies, actually just said Mercedes, of which there are dozens in Latin America. Years later, Dimaio consulted an atlas and determined that only Mercedes, Uruguay, was big enough to have had the kind of hotel that the salesman frequented.

Yet another informant told the Pinkertons that Sundance and an unnamed associate crossed the River Styx in Venezuela in the early 1900s.

Cassidy died twice in Europe. An Argentine book dealer said that the outlaw retired to Ireland, where he later passed away. In 1908, Harper’s Weekly wrote that he had been stabbed to death in a Paris slum by an “Apache” – French slang for a thug – a few years earlier:

‘Butch’ Cassidy, another leader in the affairs of the outlaw trust, as the ‘Wild Bunch’ has been euphemistically referred to, fled overseas, only to pay his reckoning in the Paris slums. He could not mingle successfully with those other Apaches of the Rue Pirouette. A gendarme found him face downward, the hilt of a long crooked knife fast between his shoulders.

What accounts for Butch and Sundance’s multiple deaths on three continents? For one thing, they were outlaws, and outlaws perforce lead secret lives and sometimes meet anonymous deaths. They had disappeared, at least from general public view, years before they died. And their 1908 deaths in Bolivia did not become common – albeit controversial – knowledge until decades later. Rumors naturally fill a vacuum. In any event, outlaw deaths – secret, anonymous, controversial, or in full public view – are often disputed: Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Curly Bill Brocious, Kid Curry, John Wilkes Booth, William Quantrill, Tiburcio Vásquez, Bill Longley, Joaquín Murieta, and John Dillinger, come to mind.

“To some extent,” British historian Eric Hobsbawm has observed, this phenomenon “expresses the wish that the people’s champion cannot be defeated, the same sort of wish that produces the perennial myths of the good king – and the good bandit – who has not really died, but will come back some day to restore justice. Refusal to believe in a robber’s death is a certain criterion of his ‘nobility.’ . . . For the bandit’s defeat and death is the defeat of his people; and what is worse, of hope. Men can live without justice, and generally must, but they cannot live without hope.”

In Cassidy’s case, the controversy was also fed by the hoaxers, like William T. Phillips, and the story tellers, some within the Parker family, like Lula Parker Betenson, and others who claimed to have known the outlaws, or said they knew someone who knew them. Sometimes a reference to Cassidy’s or Sundance’s deaths were picked up out of a newspaper or magazine article, but in the retelling names, dates, and places were garbled. Strict adherence to detail is not important in story telling, especially when the subject is an outlaw who is something of a folk hero to begin with. The facts are not as important as the story. It’s fun to tell stories and just as fun to listen, as any one who has repeated a rumor or heard an urban legend can attest.

A case in point: Last year, a Florida newspaper reported that a “man with a beard, round sunglasses, a gold cross dangling form his ear, and a British accent stayed at the Casa Monica hotel” in St. Augustine. The hotel’s marketing director told the local press it was Ringo Starr. The singer’s publicist in New York, however, said that Ringo wasn’t in St. Augustine. A British newspaper flew a reporter over to do a story on Starr imposters in Florida. The police declined to get involved, because the bearded man “did not appear to have broken any laws.”

A waitress at the Tradewinds Tropical Lounge and Grill, where the bearded man performed, said, “‘I thought he sounded exactly like Ringo Starr.” She added, “‘He never said he was Ringo Starr’” – but – “‘He never said he wasn’t when people called him that.’ She said she doesn’t care either way if the man she met wasn’t Starr. ‘I think it’s cool I met a man who looks just like him.’”