Arts & Life Books


Book review: ‘The Last Outlaws: The Lives and Legends of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,’ by Thom Hatch


"The Last Outlaws," by Thom Hatch

The passage of a century and more has eroded the romantic ideas attached to such figures as Jesse James, Billy the Kid and Doc Holliday, but not so the subjects of this adept history. Notions about Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Lorenzo Longabaugh seem to be immutable, and Butch and Sundance, as they are remembered, continue to beguile us.

The author is expert in patching together what is known about these furtive characters, their stories obstructed by time and evidence gaps, their movements often a blank. Neither man left more than a shadowy trail along the 8,000 miles separating the place of his exploits, the deserts and canyons of the far West, and the place of his death, the deserts and canyons of Bolivia.

Parker, born in Beaver, Utah, in 1866, was the son of Mormon pioneers. As a teen he worked as a cowboy and began his law-breaking as a rustler. He then partnered with a cowman named Mike Cassidy, who became Parker's mentor and whose surname he adopted. (“Butch” seems to have originated from his occasional work as a butcher).

Harry Longabaugh, born 1867 in Mont Clare, Pa., was a canal-boat kid captivated by such dime-novel heroes as Deadwood Dick and Calamity Jane. As a teen, tall and elegantly handsome, he made his way to Colorado, there learning the trades of mule skinner and ranch hand. He appears to have met Cassidy while working at a Montana ranch in 1886, about the time he earned a jail cell in Sundance, Wyo., for horse theft.

Longabaugh’s lady friend, Ethel “Etta” Place, was an enigmatic woman, pretty and seemingly refined, although some who claimed to know her said she had been a “working girl” in San Antonio, a place well known to the Wild Bunch. She accompanied Sundance in many of his and Butch’s travels, including a trip to Argentina. She seems to have appeared out of nowhere and disappeared back into it.

A bank robbery in Telluride, Colo., in June 1889, was Butch’s outlaw debut, netting $20,000 for him and three cohorts, and resulting in no casualties. Thereafter, with Sundance and a revolving band of bandits the press called the Wild Bunch, he engineered a series of largely bloodless bank and train robberies, escaping into such outlaw refuges as Robber’s Roost in the steep-walled canyon country of eastern Utah; Brown’s Park, a stretch of wilderness straddling the borders of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming; and, most famously, the Hole-in-the-Wall, a scattering of rough cabins in the Big Horn Mountains of north-central Wyoming.

The author has collected an amazing amount of data and written authoritatively on Butch and Sundance’s last, twisting trail. In 1901, after a bank job in Nevada and the robbery of a Great Northern train near Wagner, Mont., the two, increasingly dogged by agents of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, left Etta in New York and sailed to Argentina.

They intended leaving their criminal life behind, but after a failed attempt at ranching, they robbed a bank near the Chilean border, made a final trip to New York and returned south, this time to Bolivia. The fugitives earned a living for a time as mule skinners in the mining district near the Cordillera Mountain town of San Vicente, where they committed their last, fatal robbery.

Author Thom Hatch, a Custer authority and veteran Old West biographer, appears to have been somewhat co-opted by his subjects. “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid have gained immortality,” he writes, “and will always stand as a symbol of the final days of that romantic era as the last outlaws of the American frontier.”

Whether the two stand as such a symbol is debatable, as are the assertions that their era was romantic and that they were the “last outlaws.” Even so, Hatch, like Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the celebrated 1969 film, catches the infectious spirit of the two men and their exploits.

Dale L. Walker of El Paso is the author of many historical and biographical books.

The Last Outlaws

The Lives and Legends of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Thom Hatch

(New American Library, $26.95)

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