Butch Cassidy(1866-1908)

Born Robert Leroy Parker in Beaver, Utah, in 1866, the outlaw later to become famous as Butch Cassidy (he took the name Butch because he was once a butcher and the name Cassidy in honor of a local rancher who had befriended him as a youth) started his criminal career at an early age, stealing livestock when he was just a teenager. He soon left the Beaver area and hooked up with other rustlers and thieves, eventually forming a gang known as The Wild Bunch, which included such well known desperadoes as The Sundance Kid and Harvey Logan. The gang began robbing banks, payrolls and trains all over Colorado and Utah, and became so proficient at it that the Pinkerton Detective Agency was hired to run them down, and in addition a $4000 bounty (a huge sum at the time) was placed on their heads. The gang soon broke up and Cassidy and his partner The Sundance Kid headed to Mexico. Even that wasn't far enough, however, as both the Pinkerton detectives and professional bounty hunters were soon in Mexico looking for them, so they fled to Argentina, where they set up shop--under assumed names--as cattle ranchers. The ruse worked for a while until one night The Sundance Kid, under the influence of too much alcohol, began to brag about the many robberies they had gotten away with. A few days later a bank in a nearby town was robbed by two English-speaking bandits, and suspicion immediately fell upon the two, who were forced to pull up stakes and flee again. They wound up in Chile, and though they made several attempts to settle down and give up their lives of crime, circumstances dictated otherwise. They eventually crossed into Bolivia with plans to rob a bank in the small town of San Vicente. A hotel worker, having heard that the police were on the lookout for two English-speaking bank robbers, became suspicious of the pair and informed the local police chief. The chief and two of his men approached them in a restaurant, whereupon the Sundance Kid opened fire, killing one of the officers. The two gunmen fled and the police requested help from an army cavalry regiment that happened to be in town, and the soldiers and police soon trapped Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in a small house, where, after an all-night siege and gun battle, the two were found dead the next morning of gunshot wounds. Although rumors have surfaced over the years claiming that the pair actually escaped the battle and returned to the US, so far no real evidence has surfaced to conclusively prove that story.