BUTCH CASSIDY

A lively, necessarily speculative biography of the notorious desperado.

Journalist Leerhsen, former executive editor of Sports Illustrated, correctly points out that while the hit 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, made Butch Cassidy’s (1866-1908) name familiar to most readers, Cassidy and his circle did not often put pen to paper, so contemporary evidence consists largely of legal documents, police reports, and newspaper accounts of his crimes. Modern biographers often fill the gaps with fiction, personal theories, or highly suspicious memories from Cassidy’s descendants, and movies muddy the water with a romantic portrait of life on the frontier when in fact it was usually miserable. The eldest of 13 children of a hardscrabble rancher, Cassidy had his first brush with the law at age 12, and he left home permanently just before he turned 18 to take up a life of crime. “Crime” on the frontier mostly involved stealing cattle or horses; it was rarely lucrative, and Cassidy regularly worked as a ranch hand to make ends meet. After years of low-paid labor, petty thievery, a prison term, and companions with similar loose morals, added to a talent for leadership, he took up a full-time life of crime, and newspapers happily recorded a series of spectacular bank and train robberies. This spree lasted only a few years before advancing technology and the end of the frontier made this life too risky. No psychopath like Billy the Kid or Jesse James, Leerhsen’s Cassidy is likable and mostly sensible. He escaped to Argentina in 1901 with considerable cash and a companion (the Sundance Kid, a more shadowy figure). For several years, they apparently worked as honest ranchers but returned to robbery in 1905, when they “dropped any pretense of being law-abiding citizens.” They moved to Chile and Bolivia, where, cornered by soldiers in 1908, they probably committed suicide, an event absent from the movie.

Perhaps the most successful of the frontier outlaws, Cassidy receives an entertaining and likely definitive account.