The definitive biography of infamous western outlaw Harvey Alexander Logan, better known as Kid Curry. A violent conflict with a ranching neighbor in Montana caused him to flee to the Hole-in-the-Wall valley in Wyoming, where he became involved in rustling and eventually graduated to bank and train robbing as a member of the Wild Bunch. This outlaw group was a melding of the best of the Hole-in-the-Wall gang and Butch Cassidy's Powder Springs gang. Smokov shows that Curry was not the bloodthirsty killer that many have claimed. He contends that Curry was the actual train robbing leader of the Wild Bunch.
Inspired by Buth Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Simon Casson and Richard Adamson set out on horseback to retrace the real-life footsteps of their boyhood heroes, covering 2,000 miles of the country's toughest and most treacherous terrain. Together they grapple with hostile landscape, climatic extremes, vital supply shortages, and enormous personality clashes. Battling from one outlaw hideout to another and following trails sometimes only accessible by horseback, they are constantly taxed to the limit. In this dramatic account of their adventure, Simon and Richard also encapsulate the exciting and violent lives of the Wild Bunch 100 years ago, and provide an intimate and heartwarming picture of the rancher families who live and work this demanding land today.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid planned and executed the most daring robberies of the Old West, targeting banks, railroads and mines. As the sun rose on the twentieth century, they could not outrun the rapid growth of new technology and sprawling cities that altered the landscape and their very way of life. With high prices on their heads, Butch and Sundance fled to South America, where they supposedly met their deaths in a blaze of glory. This biography traces the lives and mysterious deaths of two Wild West icons who defied a nation.
Lawyer-turned-writer Anne Meadows and her husband, Dan Buck, set out to solve the mystery of what really happened to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. With the tenacity of Pinkerton agents, the couple tracks the outlaws and the enigmatic Etta Place through South America, where they fled in 1901. Meadows and Buck rove Argentinian pampas, Chilean deserts, and Bolivian sierras; pore over faded newspapers and musty documents; exhume skeletons with the aid of forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow; unearth eyewitness accounts of Butch and Sundance?s final holdup and the Bolivian shootout; and examine letters by the bandits and interviews by the Argentine police who investigated their activities. Information about William T. Phillips, who claimed to be Butch Cassidy, is also included. ø While filling in the blanks in the Wild Bunch saga, Meadows explores the nature of truth and discovers how myths are made. She updates the search with a new afterword to this edition.
Robert Leroy Parkers transformation into Butch Cassidy wasnt immediate. He worked on ranches as a cowboy, was a butcher for a time, and finally chose a path of crime in the American West in the late 1800s. Cassidys involvement with the band of outlaws known as the Wild Bunch and later partnership with Harry Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid, resulted in a crime spree and a life on the run. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fled to South America, where their fate remains a mystery. This lively, well-researched volumefilled with fascinating photographs and fact boxesprovides a gripping account of a fugitives life and legend.
This well-researched biography of the life—and controversial death—of Robert LeRoy Parker, a.k.a. Butch Cassidy, is a journey across the late-nineteenth-century American West as we follow Cassidy’s exploits in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah, where he made his name as a surprisingly affable outlaw. More important, this book answers the question: Did Butch Cassidy, noted outlaw of the American West, survive his alleged death at the hands of Bolivian soldiers in 1908 and return to friends and family in the United States? The evidence suggesting he did is impressive and not easily dismissed, but how he lived and what identity he assumed are still debated.
Who was Butch Cassidy? He was born Robert LeRoy Parker in 1866 in Utah. And, as everyone knows, after years of operating with a sometime gang of outlaws known as the Wild Bunch, he and the Sundance Kid escaped to South America, only to die in a 1908 shootout with a Bolivian cavalry troop. But did he die? Some say that he didn’t die in Bolivia, but returned to live out a quiet life in Spokane, Washington where he died peacefully in 1937. In interviews with the author, scores of his friends and relatives and their descendants in Wyoming, Utah, and Washington concurred, claiming that Butch Cassidy had returned from Bolivia and lived out the remainder of his life in Spokane under the alias William T. Phillips. In 1934 William T. Phillips wrote an unpublished manuscript, an (auto) biography of Butch Cassidy, “The Bandit Invincible, the Story of Butch Cassidy.” Larry Pointer, marshalling an overwhelming amount of evidence, is convinced that William T. Phillips and Butch Cassidy were the same man. The details of his life, though not ending spectacularly in a Bolivian shootout, are more fascinating than the until-now accepted version of the outlaw’s life. There was a shootout with the Bolivian cavalry, but, according to Butch (Phillips), he was able to escape under the cover of darkness, sadly leaving behind his longtime friend, the Sundance Kid, dead. Then came Paris, a minor bit of facelifting, Michigan, marriage, Arizona, Mexico with perhaps a tour as a sharpshooter for Pancho Villa, Alaska, and at last the life of a businessman in Spokane. In between there were some quiet return trips to visit old friends and haunts in Wyoming and Utah. The author, with the invaluable help of Cassidy’s autobiography, has pieced together the full and final story of a remarkable outlaw—from his Utah Mormon origins, through his escapades of banditry and his escape to South America, to his self-rehabilitation as William T. Phillips, a productive and respected member of society.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were legendary figures even in their own time, and their lives are shrouded in myth and controversy. This book sifts through the evidence in order to find the truth behind their lives.
"For a century Butch Cassidy has been the subject of legends about his life and death, spawning a small industry of mythmakers and a major Hollywood film. Charles Leerhsen sorts out fact from fiction to find the real Butch Cassidy, who is far more complicated and fascinating than legend has it"--
