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The Outlaw Who Got Away--Or Did He? part 1

© Mary Trotter Kion

When we think of the old west various trails naturally come to mind. There was the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, and the Santa Fe Trail, as well as others, that wound westward across the Great American Plains. But there was another trail, one that ordinary folks seeking a new home didn’t travel. That was the Outlaw Trail.

The Outlaw Trail ran from northern Montana to Mexico and had numerous side trails. The main route traversed Montana south and across Wyoming. It crossed Utah and part of Colorado and on into Arizona and New Mexico, veering southeast into Texas to the Mexican border. This was the trail that young Robert LeRoy Parker came to know intimately.

Ironically, Parker was born the same year that Jesse James led his gang on its first raid against a Missouri bank. That was in 1866. But Parker’s birthplace was a long travel from Missouri, at least in those days. Robert LeRoy, the grandson of a Mormon Bishop, was born in Beaver, Utah. And like the James boys, Parker came from a devout family.

You may not know this fair-haired and square-jawed man, who liked children, by his Parker name. History records his exploits under another handle. Young Robert LeRoy, before he ever robbed a train or a bank, had a friend he admired greatly. Now this friend, whose name was Mike Cassidy, didn’t always run his affairs on the up and up. In fact, it was Cassidy who gave Parker his first instructions on horse stealing and cattle rustling. Evidently, Parker just naturally took on his friend’s name out of admiration. So that took care of Parker’s new last name. As for the new first name he acquired, it’s said that he at one time worked for a butcher and his friends just naturally began calling him “Butch.”

So from here on out in this tale of the outlaw who got away we’ll refer to the man as Butch Cassidy.

Things followed the natural Wild West outlaw progression in Cassidy’s career and soon he’d joined a gang. Another James Gang irony is that one of the members of this gang was Bill McCarty who was believed to have been a member of the notorious James Gang at one time.

Well, somewhere along his education with Mike Cassidy, Butch must have missed a day of school. After a time of robbing banks and holding up trains Cassidy was arrested for stealing a horse. For his effort he got another year and a half of hard-rock instruction at the Rawlings, Wyoming penitentiary.

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