Butch Cassidy(1866-1908)
Born Robert Leroy Parker in Beaver, Utah, in 1866, the outlaw later to
become famous as Butch Cassidy (he took the name Butch because he was
once a butcher and the name Cassidy in honor of a local rancher who had
befriended him as a youth) started his criminal career at an early age,
stealing livestock when he was just a teenager. He soon left the Beaver
area and hooked up with other rustlers and thieves, eventually forming
a gang known as The Wild Bunch, which included such well known
desperadoes as The Sundance Kid and Harvey Logan. The gang began
robbing banks, payrolls and trains all over Colorado and Utah, and
became so proficient at it that the Pinkerton Detective Agency was
hired to run them down, and in addition a $4000 bounty (a huge sum at
the time) was placed on their heads. The gang soon broke up and Cassidy
and his partner The Sundance Kid headed to Mexico. Even that wasn't far
enough, however, as both the Pinkerton detectives and professional
bounty hunters were soon in Mexico looking for them, so they fled to
Argentina, where they set up shop--under assumed names--as cattle
ranchers. The ruse worked for a while until one night The Sundance Kid,
under the influence of too much alcohol, began to brag about the many
robberies they had gotten away with. A few days later a bank in a
nearby town was robbed by two English-speaking bandits, and suspicion
immediately fell upon the two, who were forced to pull up stakes and
flee again. They wound up in Chile, and though they made several
attempts to settle down and give up their lives of crime, circumstances
dictated otherwise. They eventually crossed into Bolivia with plans to
rob a bank in the small town of San Vicente. A hotel worker, having
heard that the police were on the lookout for two English-speaking bank
robbers, became suspicious of the pair and informed the local police
chief. The chief and two of his men approached them in a restaurant,
whereupon the Sundance Kid opened fire, killing one of the officers.
The two gunmen fled and the police requested help from an army cavalry
regiment that happened to be in town, and the soldiers and police soon
trapped Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in a small house, where, after an
all-night siege and gun battle, the two were found dead the next
morning of gunshot wounds. Although rumors have surfaced over the years
claiming that the pair actually escaped the battle and returned to the
US, so far no real evidence has surfaced to conclusively prove that
story.