Charles Leerhsen - Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw

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CHARLES LEERHSEN

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Simon & Schuster

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Copyright 2020 by Charles Leerhsen

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition July 2020

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Interior design by Lewelin Polanco

Jacket design by Richard Ljoenes

Jacket Photograph: Hole In the Wall Gang, Fort Worth, Texas, 1900 (B/W Photo), Rose, Noah Hamilton (18741952) / Denver Public Library / Bridgeman Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Leerhsen, Charles, author.

Title: Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw / Charles Leerhsen.

Other titles: True story of an American outlaw

Description: First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: 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 -- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019 034980 | ISBN 9781501117480 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501117497 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781501117503 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Cassidy, Butch, 1866- | Outlaws -- West (U.S.) -- Biography. | Gangs--West (U.S.)--History--19th century. | Frontier and pioneer life--West (U.S.) | West (U.S.)--Biography.

Classification: LCC F595.C362 L44 2020 | DCC 364.15/52092 [B]--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034980

ISBN 978-1-5011-1748-0

ISBN 978-1-5011-1750-3 (ebook)

For Erica, Deborah, and Nora

There are few subjects that interest us more generally than the adventures of robbers and bandits.

SCOTTISH WRITER CHARLES MACFARLANE, CA. 1830

THE THORNY ROSE

S tart at the end, they say.

The last member of Butch Cassidys gang, the Wild Bunch, went into the ground in December 1961. Which means that someone who held the horses during an old-school Western train robbery, or had been otherwise involved with the kind of men who crouched behind boulders with six-guns in their hands and bandannas tied around their sunburnt faces, might have voted for John F. Kennedy (or Richard Nixon), seen the movie West Side Story or heard Del Shannon sing run-run-run-run-runawaythat is, if she hadnt been rendered deaf years earlier during the blasting open of a Union Pacific express car safe. Her outlaw buddies were always a little heavy-handed with the dynamite.

Yesshe. The Wild Bunch, which some writers have called the biggest and most structurally complex criminal organization of the late nineteenth century, came down, in the end, to one little old lady sitting in a small, dark apartment in Memphis. Laura Bullion died in obscurity eight years before the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, revitalized the almost-forgotten semilegend in which she had played a minor but authentic part. Her obituary did not make the newspapers. If anyone saw the cryptic hint of a previous life on her headstoneThe Thorny Rose, the inscription sayshe didnt question it publicly. Yet for a time, in a different world, a world where outlaws needed their horses held and their ashes hauled, Laura was in several ways a wanted woman. Reporters and Pinkerton detectives knew her name and sought her out for interviews.

Laura Bullion had been a gun moll before the term existednot one of the all-time greats, perhaps, owing to her natural reticence and plain face. She stands, for example, eternally in the shadow of Ethel Place, Sundances mysterious inamorata (usually referred to, mistakenly, as Etta), who was every bit as beautiful as Katharine Ross, the actress who played her on the screen, and whom Cassidy once called an excellent housekeeper with the heart of a whore. Yet in terms of curriculum vitae, at least, Laura was a classic Molly. She had danced, as she put it euphemistically in Texas gambling halls, taken on a bewildering number of aliasesincluding Della Rose, a name she used while working in Fanny Porters famous sporting house on Delarosa Street in San Antonioand traveled with the kind of bad boys who had pistols in their pockets and were happy to see her.

Lauras first love, chronologically, was the dapper Will Carver, given the nickname News in the movie because he liked to see his name in the frontier dailies. She met him when she was fourteen and he was married to her Aunt Viana; they all lived together in a small house in West Texas, and Laura said she and her uncle got brushed up a heap agin each other in the tight quarters, which eventually caused romantic sparks. It was around then that Carver transformed himself from an honest ranch hand who worked for the standard dollar a day to an associate of outlaws like Tom Black Jack Ketchum and Butch Cassidy. Though inevitably cast in a supporting role by his crew leaders, Carver became over time almost a caricature of an old-time criminal, dressing like a Texas gambler, according to one lawman; affecting a haughty, R. Crumb-ish way of striding out in which his feet preceded the rest of his body; and talking like a dime-novel desperado. When he was confronted in a Sonora, Texas, bakery (where he had gone to buy grain for his horse) by a sheriff who wanted to speak to him about the very badass-sounding crime of killing a man in Concho County, Carver whipped out his six-gunlike other Wild Bunchers, including Cassidy himself, he was known as a superior marksmanbut the barrel got tangled in his fancy suspenders, and the sheriff just shrugged and shot him in the chest. Carvers last words were supposedly, Die game, boys!

Laura took the news with mixed emotions. In her diary she wrote: W. R. Carver, killed Tuesday, April 2, 1901. He has fled. I wish him dead, he that wrought my ruin. O, the flattery and the craft, which were my undoing. (She herself was no stranger to dime novels.) Before long, though, seeking consolation, she moved on to another member of the gang, Ben Kilpatrick. Laura and the Tall Texan, as he was known in those nickname-crazed days, made an odd-looking couple: he was in the vicinity of six feet; she, four foot eleven. But they became soulmatesand in a poetic sense, cellmates, who served long, more-or-less simultaneous sentences in far-distant penitentiaries after they were arrested in Saint Louis in 1901 with $8,500 in stolen banknotes. They stayed in touch while incarcerated. I received the little lead pencil you sent and it just could not be prettier, she wrote to Ben. I think it is too sweet to be used and would not take anything for itand briefly reunited years later, following his release. They might have grown old together if Kilpatrick had grown old. Instead, while robbing the safe on a train full of oysters near Sanderson, Texas, in 1912, he had his skull fatally fractured by a railroad messenger wielding an ice mallet. Excited townsfolk prepared Kilpatricks body for the trophy photo that was practically de rigueur in those days after youd assassinated a well-known outlaw, but rather than keeping him horizontal, they propped him up on his feet so the local shutterbug could get a better angle. (You can see the picture in the photo insert of this book.) He and his deceased accomplice, known as Ole Beck, look like a couple of high-end scarecrows.