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The Outlaw Who Got Away--Or Did He? part 3

© Mary Trotter Kion

Did Butch Cassidy, famed leader of the notorious Wild Bunch gang of the late 1800s and early 1900s escape the law?

By one account the answer is “no” or possibly that yes, he evaded the law of the United States but that the law south of the border down Bolivia way got Cassidy along with his pardoner, the Sundance Kid. But here, too, there are doubts and questions.

It is certain that Etta Place, the girlfriend of Harry Longabaugh, better known as the Sundance Kid, returned to the United States because of illness. But what became of Cassidy and Sundance?

There are many that maintain that the two outlaws, after a time at ranching south of the border, returned to their previous employment of bank and train robbing. The consensus here is that they were surrounded in San Vicente, Bolivia, in 1909, and shot to death by the police. This could very well be the case, or it might have been in Argentina, or Chile, or maybe Uruguay. You can just about take your choice on this theory since men identified as Butch Cassidy are said to have been buried in each of these countries. In a way this last sort of sheds a shadow of doubt on this particular theory.

There is another contention on the fate of Butch Cassidy. This one is that, yes, he did return to the United States. And it seems there is a considerable amount of evidence to support the idea. Paul Hutton, professor of history at the University of New Mexico in 1987 and an authority on the outlaw era of the west is convinced that Cassidy did return to the United States.

One major convincing point is centered on a man, living in Spokane, Washington, who went by the name of William T. Phillips. Back in the 1930s researchers for Wyoming’s state Works Progress Administration writers’ project began hearing tales from old-timers about how Cassidy had visited, between 1925 and 1936, such places as Jackson Hole, Lander and other areas that were Butch’s old haunts.

Sure, the old folks like to relate tales about how it was way back when, and sometimes in the telling the tales get stretched just a bit. But one of those gentlemen who claims to have seen Cassidy during this period was a pioneer storekeeper who was at one time the mayor of Lander. He was also the peace officer who had escorted Cassidy to the state penitentiary in 1894. It’s pretty assured that this gentleman would know Butch Cassidy if he saw him again. Wouldn’t he?