Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw by Charles Leerhsen
Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw by Charles Leerhsen
For more than a century the life and death of Butch Cassidy have been the subject of legend, spawning a small industry of mythmakers and a major Hollywood film. But who was Butch Cassidy, really?
Born into a Mormon family in Utah, Robert Leroy Parker grew up dirt-poor and discovered when young that stealing horses and cattle was a fact of life in a world where small ranchers were being squeezed by banks, railroads, and cattle barons. Sometimes you got caught, sometimes you got lucky. A charismatic and skilled cowboy -- even ranch owners who knew he was a rustler said they would hire him again. -- He adopted the alias of "Butch Cassidy" and moved on to a new moneymaking endeavor: bank robbery. By all accounts, Butch was a clever and considerate thief, refusing to take anything from bank customers and insisting that no one be injured during his heists. His "Wild Bunch" gang specialized in shrewd getaways, stationing horses at various points along their escape route ahead of time so they could outrun any posse. Eventually Butch and his gang graduated to train robberies, which were more lucrative. But the railroad magnates hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency, forerunners of the FBI, whose agents pursued Butch relentlessly until he and his pal Harry Longabaugh (The Sundance Kid) fled to South America. There they replicated the cycle of ranching, rustling, and robbery until they made a drastic mistake in Bolivia.
In Butch Cassidy, Charles Leerhsen shares his fascination with how criminals such as Butch deftly maneuvered between honest work and thievery, battling the corporate interests that were exploiting the settlers, and shows us in vibrant prose the Old West as it really was, in all its promise and heartbreak.
Simon & Schuster, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2020
THIS IS A BRAND NEW BOOK.