

(1866–1909?). American outlaw Butch Cassidy was perhaps the best-known member of the Wild Bunch. The Wild Bunch was a collection of bank and train robbers who ranged through the western United States in the 1880s and ’90s. (See also frontier.)

Robert LeRoy Parker was born on April 13, 1866, in Beaver, Utah. He took his alias from Mike Cassidy, an older outlaw from whom he learned cattle rustling and gunslinging in the mid-1880s. Beginning in the late 1880s (except for 1891–92, when he worked as a cowboy, and 1894–96, when he was in Wyoming State Prison), Butch Cassidy was teamed up with a succession of outlaws. His favorite friend and confederate was Elzy Lay. The two helped to rob a number of trains, banks, and paymasters and also rustled horses and sometimes cattle.

In 1899 Lay was arrested and imprisoned, and Cassidy teamed up with the Sundance Kid. By then, sheriff posses and Pinkerton detectives were capturing or closing in on members of the Wild Bunch. Cassidy and Sundance (with Sundance’s girlfriend, Etta Place) escaped first to New York, New York, and then to South America in 1901. (Etta Place returned home in 1907.) From 1902 to 1906 Cassidy and Sundance owned and ran a ranch in Argentina, but thereafter they returned to outlawry. Drifting from country to country in South America, they robbed banks, trains, and mine stations.

In 1909, according to Pinkerton detectives, Cassidy and Sundance were trapped by a group of mounted soldiers, possibly at Concordia Tin Mines near San Vicente, Bolivia; there Sundance was mortally shot and Cassidy shot himself. Another story puts their death in Mercedes, Uruguay, in December 1911, cut down by soldiers during a bank robbery. Still other stories have Cassidy (either alone or with Sundance) returning to the United States, drifting about from Mexico to Alaska, and dying in obscurity in 1937 in the Northwest (possibly Spokane, Washington) or in Nevada (possibly Johnny, Nevada).