Butch Cassidy was one of the West’s best-known outlaws. He was born in 1866 to a Mormon pioneer family in the Utah territory. His first bank robbery was in Telluride, Colorado, but that was only the beginning of his many criminal exploits.
He rustled horses and robbed trains, hauling in what would, in today’s currency, be more than a million dollars in cash. Pursued by law enforcement, Cassidy fled to South America, eventually settling in Bolivia.
Even there, he continued his life of crime and was believed to have been killed in a shootout. But did he really die in Bolivia in 1908? Author Larry Pointer maintained that Cassidy escaped and returned to the U.S. where he lived a quiet life under a pseudonym.
You can read Larry Pointer’s manuscript “In Search of Butch Cassidy” at UW’s American Heritage Center and come to your own conclusions about the fate of the western outlaw.