Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

Butch is pretty well documented. A good Mormon boy, he was born Robert Leroy Parker in Utah in 1866. (He took the alias of Cassidy after his boyhood idol, Mike Cassidy, who first got him interested in robbery.) By the 1890’s, Butch was the head of the largest, the most successful, and the last great outlaw gang—The Wild Bunch, the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. The remarkable thing about this was that Butch was no gunman at all: He never killed a man until late in life, when he was serving as a payroll guard in South America. He was neither particularly big nor strong, never much of a fighter. Nor was he the brains of the outfit; they had a resident intellectual, Elza Lay, who did as much of their planning as anyone. Now, The Wild Bunch consisted of some of the most murderous figures in Western history. Arrogant, brutal men. And yet, here running things was Cassidy. Why? The answer is incredible but true: People just liked him. Everybody liked Butch. Sometimes (and I could never figure out how to get this into the narrative) when he was being followed, he would ride up to a farm and say, more or less, “Look, I’m Butch Cassidy, there are some people after me, I’d really appreciate it a lot if you’d hide me for a while.” And they would. There have been only two American outlaws who were outsized legends during their careers: Butch was one, Jesse James the second. But people liked Butch before he was famous.