Long before Paul Newman played him alongside Robert Redford’s Sundance Kid, Butch Cassidy was one of the great outlaw legends of the Wild West. Thanks to his habit of sharing the proceeds from his crimes with the widows and children of men killed or ruined by bankers and cattle barons, Butch Cassidy earned a reputation as the “Robin Hood of the Wild West.” That, plus the fact that he never killed anyone while committing his crimes, gained him popular admiration from the cowboys, miners, and homesteading pioneers among whom he worked his trade.
Born Robert Leroy Parker to a family of Mormon farmers in Beaver, Utah, on Friday the 13th of April, 1866, the man who came to be known as Butch Cassidy spent his youth as a ranch hand in Utah, Colorado, and southern Wyoming. The first major crime attributed to Butch Cassidy is the robbery of a bank in Telluride, Colorado, in 1889, which netted him and his three accomplices some $20,000. From 1894 to 1896 he was imprisoned in Wyoming for cattle theft, and following this he joined up with Harry Longabaugh (aka The Sundance Kid) and the rest of the gang. Together they robbed over a dozen banks, trains, and stagecoaches throughout the West, netting an estimated $350,000 in five years. One of their many daring heists was the daylight robbery of a coal-mining company in Castlegate, Utah, in April 1897; while the payroll was being taken from a train, Butch simply grabbed the satchel and rode off in a cloud of dust, $9,000 richer.
According to many sources, Butch and Sundance died in 1909, in a shoot-out in South America (as depicted in the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). But some people (including his sister, who lived until the 1970s) say that Butch survived to a ripe old age, living in Spokane, Washington, under the name William T. Phillips until his death in 1937.
