In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Cassidy and his bff slash partner in crime flee to Bolivia before dying in a hail of bullets. It's a nice movie ending, but the reality of their lives is just a little more complicated than Hollywood would have you believe.
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00:00So, if you've never seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, you absolutely should. But
00:05if you have, Hollywood's taught you a lot of lies about the true lives of Butch Cassidy
00:09and the Sundance Kid. Spoiler alert, neither one of them looked like Paul Newman or Robert
00:14Redford.
00:15It doesn't take much Googling to figure out that the Sundance Kid was an alias. His real
00:20name was Harry Longaboe. His more famous moniker came from his one-and-only arrest. Longaboe
00:26was a thief from a young age. He left home when he was 15, and sometime after, he was
00:30jailed in Sundance, Wyoming, for stealing a horse. By the time he left prison and took
00:35up with Butch Cassidy, the name Sundance Kid had stuck.
00:39But Cassidy's name wasn't his own, either. No part of his alias was. He was born Robert
00:43Leroy Parker to a loving, if unorthodox, Mormon family. He, too, discovered crime as a teen.
00:49Though in his case, he was tempted by a rebellious cowboy, Mike Cassidy. Inspired by his shady
00:55mentor, Parker took the surname Cassidy when he left home at 18. He changed his name to
01:00shield his family from his own reputation.
01:02The front half of his alias, according to Cassidy himself, started as a joke. Along
01:07the run, he briefly worked as a butcher in Rock Springs, Wyoming. A fellow outlaw, Matt
01:12Warner, thought it was funny to call Cassidy Butch for the job. The nickname Butch Cassidy
01:16never left him.
01:18The Hollywood classics suggest that Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid were thick as thieves,
01:22and all they did together — rioting in a gang, fleeing to Bolivia, and tying together
01:27in a shootout — could lead anyone to believe they were close.
01:31Is that what you call giving cover?
01:35But while the kid might have been Butch Cassidy's best gunman, the evidence suggests that he
01:38wasn't Cassidy's closest confidant. In real life, Cassidy's best friend was a man named
01:43LZ Lay, whom Cassidy met in his native Utah. Their relationship was so close that it ended
01:49Lay's own marriage. His wife asked him to stop rioting with outlaws, and he refused,
01:54leading the two to split in 1899.
01:56Lay and Cassidy rode together for a number of years, and Lay helped Cassidy figure out
02:00the logistics of the gang's operations. Despite how close they were, he didn't follow Cassidy
02:04and the kid to Bolivia. But, you see, he couldn't, even if he wanted to, as he was locked up
02:09for life after robbing a train. But in 1906, he won himself a pardon by helping stop a
02:15riot, rescuing the warden's wife and daughter in the process.
02:18Using the name William McGinnis, he headed for Wyoming, established a ranch, and ended
02:22his days as a guide and a dabbler in geology.
02:26Again, if you've seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, you probably see Cassidy as
02:30the head of a tight-knit posse, the Wild Bunch. The film opens with him facing down the hulking,
02:36deep-voiced Harvey Logan, who challenged his leadership.
02:38Well, if there ain't gonna be any rules, let's get the fight started. Someone count one,
02:42two, three, go.
02:43One, two, three, go.
02:46And in telling a story, there's a natural instinct to simplify and clarify. If Cassidy
02:50is the protagonist, why wouldn't you present him as the leader?
02:54But the Wild Bunch may not have been an organized gang. It was more of a loose association of
02:59thieves who came together for various jobs, sometimes in pairs and sometimes as a group.
03:03And if they had a leader at all, it might not have been Cassidy.
03:07It's widely accepted that he was, but some historians believe that the group's real masterminds
03:11were Logan, also known as Kid Currie, and William News Carver. Indeed, a small amount
03:16of evidence suggests that Lawman took more note of Currie than of Cassidy. Some even
03:20think that Currie and the Sundance Kid were better friends than the Kid was with Cassidy.
03:25Whether he was the real leader or not, Currie made a lie out of the oft-repeated claim that
03:29the Wild Bunch didn't kill. Cassidy may have abhorred violence, but Currie killed multiple
03:34people, and by some accounts, had to be stopped by Cassidy from killing again.
03:39To push Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Cassidy suggests to the Kid that they move to Bolivia
03:44early on. He imagines the country as the perfect place for a pair of outlaws, abounding in
03:48gold and full of easy pickings. And he and the Kid resume thieving almost as soon as
03:52they arrive. It's only a chance sighting of a lawman that compels Cassidy to go straight.
03:57And even then, he and the Kid can't seem to live honestly, falling back into robbery before
04:01they're eventually cornered.
04:04But the real reason Cassidy fled to South America may have been less adventurous than
04:12the film suggests. Evidence suggests that by the turn of the century, the famous outlaw
04:16was tired of his infamy. He may even have approached a lawman in a doomed effort to
04:20secure a full pardon. When that fell apart, Cassidy, the Kid, and the Kid's lover at a
04:25place fled south by way of New York — to Brazil, not Bolivia — before settling in
04:30Argentina in 1901. There, they established a ranch and seemed to have settled down for
04:35a few years. Several years later, Cassidy and the Kid fell back into crime. The next
04:40thing you knew, Argentinian authorities had started looking for them. The Kid escorted
04:44place back to America, but on his way back, he shot a police officer, sparking his and
04:48Cassidy's official return as outlaws.
04:52Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid probably died in Bolivia in 1908. They fled there after
04:57their trouble in Argentina and were pinned down after robbing a payroll. There are no
05:01ironclad reports of them after their alleged standoff with Bolivian authorities, but if
05:05they died there, they didn't go out in a blaze of glory like in the movie.
05:10Charles Learson's Butch Cassidy, the true story of an American outlaw, tells a different
05:14sort of story. Learson draws on contemporary reports out of Bolivia to portray an exhausted
05:18and pathetic end for the outlaws. According to his book, they were shot down without fanfare
05:23by policemen as they lay in their holdout. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which
05:28was tracking Cassidy and the Kid, reported in 1909 that Cassidy died by suicide, while
05:33the Kid died from injuries inflicted by the Bolivian cavalry. In a variation on that story,
05:38Cassidy kills the Kid before shooting himself.
05:41But while there were two Anglo men cornered by the Bolivian authorities who died in 1908,
05:46their bodies were not conclusively proven to be Cassidy's or the Kid's, and no photographs
05:50were taken of the corpses. While written evidence still suggests that the duo died
05:54in Bolivia, a lack of concrete proof fueled rumors. Some claim that they lived to be shot
05:59another day, or even that they escaped back to America and carried on normal lives under
06:04aliases. Cassidy's own family spread such stories, claiming that they kept in contact
06:08with him until 1937, when he supposedly died of natural causes.