Butch Cassidy (20 page)

Clyde Snow, on the other hand, was quoted as saying he was certain they had the correct gravesite to begin with and that they simply needed to excavate deeper. It is inconceivable, however, that in 1908 the San Vicente residents would have dug a grave for two presumed outlaws in excess of eight feet.

In spite of Meadows’s extremely important and significant discoveries relative to the South American activities of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, as well as her important efforts to locate and evaluate the burial site, she has not uncovered any conclusive, or even substantial, evidence that Cassidy and Longabaugh were (1) guilty of robbing the Aramayo payroll, (2) killed in San Vicente in November 1908, or (3) buried in the San Vicente cemetery.

So, once again the question must be asked: what happened to Butch Cassidy?

Sixteen

Return of the Outlaw, Butch Cassidy

Following the alleged gun battle at San Vicente and, according to many, the subsequent deaths of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, rumors abounded that the two outlaws—specifically Cassidy—were still alive. In fact, the initial death reports, or more precisely, death rumors, were met with considerable skepticism, not only among the Parker family and friends of Butch Cassidy, but among the Pinkertons as well. During the time of the so-called shootout in San Vicente, the Pinkertons probably knew more about the location and activities of Cassidy and Harry Longabaugh than anyone. A thorough search of the files of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency yields no information to suggest they ever believed Butch Cassidy had been killed in San Vicente.

According to several sources, many weeks, perhaps months, after Cassidy’s alleged death, a number of Cassidy’s friends—including Matt Warner, J. K. W. Bracken, Bert Charter, Elzy Lay, and Charley Gibbons—collected some money and sent a man named Walker to Bolivia to ascertain the truth about the outlaw’s reported death. When Walker returned, he said that, after interviewing several soldiers and San Vicente residents, he determined the story of Cassidy’s death was true. Walker reportedly returned with a photograph of the corpses of Cassidy and Longabaugh.

On examining the photograph, however, Bracken claimed the body identified by some as Cassidy was actually that of an outlaw named Tom Dilly.

Following the appearance of Arthur Chapman’s article in 1930, a number of Butch Cassidy’s friends stepped forward to dispute the assertion that the outlaw was dead. Many of them stated they had visited Cassidy during the years since the alleged San Vicente shootout.

Since the “deaths” of Cassidy and Longabaugh in 1908, dozens of reports surfaced either stating or implying they were still alive, several of them issued by the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The two famous outlaws were reportedly seen not only in South America but also in Mexico and in the United States, time and again, and over a period of the next three decades.

As members of the Parker family went about their lives in Utah, they occasionally heard rumors that Butch Cassidy was still alive and had been seen in various locations in South America, as well as in the United States. Lula Parker Betenson claimed her father was certain Cassidy was alive, but the family never understood how he knew.

For the three decades following the incident at San Vicente, a man believed by many to be Butch Cassidy appeared on numerous occasions throughout parts of the American West. He visited extensively with members of the Parker family and with many known friends of Butch Cassidy. Who was this man? Was it really Butch Cassidy, or was the return of this famous outlaw merely a hoax? An examination of the events relating to his appearances offers some rather stunning revelations, as well as some compelling evidence that continues to baffle researchers.

The first recorded mention of seeing the outlaw Butch Cassidy in the United States following his departure to South America in 1901 actually occurred prior to his alleged death in San Vicente. The year was 1906, and the sighting occurred in Ogden, Utah.

According to Betenson, a young man named Pete Parker, who knew Cassidy well, used to deliver messages between the outlaw and his lawyer, Douglas A. Preston, when the outlaw was on the run in Wyoming and Utah. Betenson once received a letter from the son of Pete Parker in which an encounter between his father and Butch Cassidy was described.

Pete Parker arrived in Ogden one afternoon in 1906 to take a train that would carry him to college in Logan. Since the train was not leaving until the next morning, Parker checked into a hotel. On the way to his room, Parker noticed a man sitting in the lobby who looked familiar to him. Stunned, Parker suddenly realized it was Butch Cassidy. He and Cassidy spoke for approximately forty-five minutes, during which time the outlaw asked Parker about his parents and neighbors.

The following morning, Parker went down to the desk to check out and discovered that Cassidy had paid his hotel bill and left him a package containing two brand-new white shirts. In the pocket of one of the shirts was a $20 gold piece. Following the visit with Parker, Cassidy supposedly returned to the mines in Bolivia. If the incident is true, it verifies that Butch Cassidy returned to the United States for a time during his residence in South America, probably accompanying Harry Longabaugh and Etta Place during one of their trips.

Jim Gass and Butch Cassidy were boyhood friends in Circleville. Gass once told Cassidy’s sister, Lula Parker Betenson, about an incident wherein he and Butch once found a fawn pinned to the ground by a fallen log, one of its legs apparently broken. Gass suggested they shoot the fawn to put it out of its misery. Butch, however, was determined to save the animal. After freeing the deer from under the log, Butch splinted the leg and the fawn was able to walk.

Gass once said of Cassidy that he couldn’t kill a dog, let alone a man.

Sometime during the year 1908, Gass returned from a trip to California. He immediately went to visit Betenson and informed her he had seen her brother, Butch Cassidy, at the train station in Los Angeles. According to Gass, the two men spotted each other at the same time and both waved. Butch’s train pulled away before they could speak.

It was unclear whether Gass’s sighting of Cassidy occurred before or after the alleged San Vicente shootout.

The first clear sighting of Butch Cassidy after the San Vicente shooting occurred in Mexico. During the Mexican Revolution, an Anglo family named Bowman was living in Colonia Juárez, a Mormon colony in the Mexican state of Chihuahua located in the foothills of the Sierra Madres. Here, they became acquainted with Butch Cassidy in 1910. According to Betenson, Henry Bowman had been taken prisoner by the federal soldiers and was about to be executed when Cassidy interceded. Mrs. Bowman said Cassidy agreed to provide the
federales
some information on the whereabouts of Pancho Villa on the condition that Bowman be released. The Bowmans took a picture of Cassidy, and years later, the photograph was presented as a gift to Betenson.

The Bowmans later moved to Texas and eventually raised horses on a farm not far from El Paso. According to Mrs. Bowman, Butch Cassidy arrived at the farm one day and remained a guest for several weeks. Finally, she said, he returned to Mexico.

Author Larry Pointer secured a revealing interview with Fred Hillman. Hillman, it will be recalled, was the young man Butch Cassidy frightened with a snake while he was working on his father’s ranch in Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains; this was in 1897, following the Castle Gate payroll robbery. According to Hillman, he was returning to his house from working in the hay fields one afternoon when he spied a man standing under a tree in the front yard, apparently waiting for him. Hillman walked up to him, and the stranger smiled and asked how the hay crop was doing. After exchanging pleasantries for a few minutes, the stranger grinned at Hillman and asked, “Have you had any rattlesnakes tossed up on the hay rack with you lately?” (according to Pointer). At that point, Hillman realized he was talking with the man who worked for his father for a time, the ranch hand who befriended him when he was a thirteen-year-old youth, the man who taught him how to shoot, and the man who, it was later discovered, was the outlaw Butch Cassidy.

Joseph Claude Marsters worked as a horse wrangler for Cassidy and Longabaugh in South America and knew the two men well. In 1915, Marsters had a job riding bulls with a traveling Wild West show. During a performance in San Francisco, Marsters was walking back to the chute following a ride when a cowhand walked up to him and told him that his old boss thought his riding had improved since he had last seen him. The cowboy pointed to the “old boss” up in the stands, and when Marsters turned to look, he saw Butch Cassidy waving at him.

In 1922, a stranger drove a Model T Ford into John Taylor’s Rock Springs garage for some repairs. While Taylor was working on the car, the stranger asked him a lot of questions about current and past residents of the town. “He didn’t tell me who he was,” wrote Taylor, “but I recognized [Butch Cassidy]” (according to Pointer).

In 1924, Cassidy allegedly visited an old friend named Tom Welch near Green River, Wyoming. According to Welch, Cassidy was driving a Model T Ford and pulling behind it a small, two-wheeled trailer containing camping gear.

Tom Vernon was a well-known citizen of Baggs, Wyoming, often referred to as “Mayor,” although the town was too small to support such an office. As a young man, Vernon knew Butch Cassidy and often played music at Baggs dances attended by members of the Wild Bunch. According to Vernon, Butch Cassidy returned to Baggs “sometime in the twenties” and stayed with him for two days (in Patterson’s
Butch Cassidy: A Biography
). The two men relived a number of events and adventures from the old times. Vernon said he never had any doubt that the man who visited was Cassidy.

In 1925, according to writer Pointer, a visitor camped for several weeks in a grove of trees not far from the Charter Ranch near Jackson, Wyoming. According to Boyd Charter, the seventeen-year-old son of the owner, the stranger remained mostly to himself but eventually became acquainted with the boy. Pointer interviewed Boyd Charter in 1973 and learned that the youngster overheard his father tell a friend named Will Simpson that the man camped nearby was Butch Cassidy. Simpson was the prosecuting attorney who was, in part, responsible for Cassidy being sent to prison in 1894.

According to Crawford MacKnight (a nephew of Ann Bassett), his family, including Ann, was camping in Nevada mining country some fifty miles east of Las Vegas. MacKnight said a man named “Masson” arrived at their camp one afternoon and spent a great deal of time visiting and talking with Ann. MacKnight said the man never told Ann who he was but commented that he had known her well when the two of them were much younger and living in Brown’s Park. He told her he had eaten many dinners at the Bassett home. All of a sudden, said MacKnight, Ann recognized “Masson” as Butch Cassidy. Later, Ann took some photographs of Cassidy. MacKnight claimed the photographs of “Masson” closely resembled images of Butch Cassidy.

Ann Bassett made a second trip to the region to visit Cassidy in 1928. Accompanying her was her niece, Edith Jensen, and her nephew and his wife, also named Edith.

According to writer John Rolfe Burroughs, Josephine Bassett Morris met with Butch Cassidy near Rock Springs, Wyoming, sometime during the 1920s. It is alleged by a number of Cassidy researchers that Josephine Bassett was once Cassidy’s sweetheart. Josephine Bassett Morris moved to Rock Springs when her sons were old enough to attend high school.

One afternoon, Morris related, Butch Cassidy and Elzy Lay entered a Rock Springs saloon and visited with the bartender, a man named Bert Kraft, whom they had known years earlier. Kraft told the two men that Josephine was living nearby. At Cassidy’s insistence, Kraft called her and made arrangements for Cassidy and Lay to come to her home. Their visit extended well into the night as the three, according to Morris, relived old times.

According to writers Dick and Daun DeJournette, Josie Bassett Morris met with Cassidy two more times in 1928, once in Baggs, Wyoming, and once again in Johnnie, Nevada. Morris claimed Cassidy passed away sometime in the 1940s, in Johnnie.

Johnnie, Nevada, figures prominently in another Butch Cassidy story. Johnnie was the site of a rich gold mine, discovered sometime during the early 1900s. The Johnnie mine was an active producer of gold between 1908 and 1940, at which time it was finally shut down.

A number of stories emanated from the Johnnie mine, stories that Cassidy worked there for a time. Some of the stories claim he was a mining engineer, others say he was merely a night watchman. A few researchers concur with Josie Bassett Morris’s statement that Butch Cassidy died in the small town. Writer Edward M. Kirby investigated the potential Johnnie, Nevada, connection with Cassidy and, in the process, encountered a longtime resident named Fred Cook. Cook maintained Cassidy lived in Johnnie from 1930 to the mid-1940s. Cook even showed Kirby a gravesite he claimed was that of the outlaw. A wooden cross over the grave bore the name “Bill Kloth.”

A dramatic return of Butch Cassidy to his family was detailed by Lula Parker Betenson in her book,
Butch Cassidy, My
Brother
. It occurred one day in 1925. Lula Parker was forty-one years old. The family was living in town, but on this day her brothers were all out in the field working with the stock and repairing fences.

Mark Parker, one of Butch Cassidy’s brothers, was working on a fence near the road when a brand-new black Ford described as a touring car pulled up. After a moment a man got out and stood by the car looking at Mark. Initially, Mark thought it was a cattle buyer named Fred Levi, a cousin, who had stopped by to talk about a purchase. As the man stepped into the field and approached Mark, however, he stopped working on the fence and stared into the face of the stranger. Suddenly, Mark realized it was his own long-lost brother, Robert LeRoy Parker, alias Butch Cassidy. Cassidy would have been fifty-nine years old.