

In 1896, after a stint in jail, Cassidy went right back to his old ways. “Matt Warner nicknamed me Butch, he thought it was a big joke.” Cassidy met the Sundance Kid after a stint in jailĬassidy, “a big dumb kid who liked to joke” according to friend Josie Bassett, continued his life of crime. “I took a job in Rock Springs in the butcher shop when I needed to lay low for a while,” he told a friend years later. He chose Cassidy in honor of his mentor Mike Cassidy, but Butch was not his personal choice. With his entry into serious crime, Robert changed his name to protect himself – and his family’s honor. This shrewd attention to detail would become a hallmark of robberies committed by the Wild Bunch. “Butch and his pals also constructed special leather bags to carry the loot, and they painstakingly laid out an escape route in advance, bolstered by relay teams of fresh horses.”

“A witness recalled seeing Butch, in the weeks before the robbery, spend hours teaching his horse to stand calmly while he ran and vaulted into the saddle,” Richard Patterson writes in the magazine Wild West.

But in 1889, he would ride into the big leagues, successfully robbing the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride with associates Matt Warner and Tom McCarty. Robert would soon enter a life of Wild West crime – cattle rustling and other petty offenses. Maybe twenty or thirty dollars a month with board – and the board’s not much to brag about in most places. At the age of 18, Robert – probably on the run from crimes committed with Cassidy or alone – left the family home, telling his mother Mike Cassidy, cowboy by trade, outlaw cattle rustler by choice, seems to have indoctrinated the restless Robert into the lucrative business of stealing of livestock. While working on a nearby cattle ranch as a teenager, Robert met a man who would alter the course of his life forever. Cassidy's pseudonym was inspired by a cattle rustler The Parker family were not the most devout members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, but it is believed that they may have been involved in an illegal “underground railroad” sheltering polygamous Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints families from the U.S. Here, he became an expert cowboy and was a playful older brother to his younger siblings. When Robert was eight, his family homesteaded a large ranch outside of Circleville, Utah. Robert, the oldest child in a large family, grew up playing harmonica on “home evenings” when the family would read the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints doctrine and play games. His loving parents, Ann Gillies and Maximillian Parker, were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. According to Richard Patterson, author of Butch Cassidy: A Biography, Cassidy was born Robert LeRoy Parker on April 13, 1866, in Beaver, Utah Territory. Butch Cassidy grew up in a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints family in Utahįew criminals have reaped as much goodwill – in life and death – as Cassidy. Many – including members of Cassidy’s family – believe that the real-life Butch Cassidy, the jovial, charismatic leader of the Wild Bunch, lived for decades after the legendary South American shoot-out. But the film’s ambiguous ending points to a murkier truth.
#Butch cassidy and the sundance kid3 movie#
In the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the two outlaws, played by Paul Newman and Robert Redford respectively, appear to go out in a blaze of glory during a gun battle in Bolivia in 1908. It’s one of the most famous endings in film history.
