This Week in Texas History
by BARTEE HAILE
After blowing the safe on a New Mexico train on July 11, 1899, Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch high-tailed it for Texas.
As lawmen of every description and an army of Pinkerton detectives searched high and low, the surviving members of the notorious gang were the guests of a San Antonio madam. Fanny Porter operated a house of ill repute in Hell’s Half Acre, an infamous red-light district where sanctuary was always for sale.
By the time the Pinkertons tracked the outlaws to the Alamo City, Butch Cassidy and his cohorts were long gone. Fanny’s employees did confess, however, that Butch had entertained them with daredevil tricks on his new bicycle.
But for 34-year-old Cassidy the criminal life had gone stale. Except for two years in the Wyoming state penitentiary, he had been a desperado on the dodge for more than a decade. The subject of a massive manhunt, he knew it was only a matter of time until he was captured or killed.
So in 1900 Cassidy secretly petitioned the governor of Utah for a pardon. In turning down the unusual request, the politician countered with a novel suggestion of his own. The Union Pacific, Butch’s favorite target, might drop all charges if the badman promised to be a model citizen and hire on as an express guard.
A clandestine conference was scheduled, but the company representatives happened to be running late that afternoon. Smelling a trap, Butch bolted and held up the first Union Pacific train he could find.
After pulling their last job in the summer of 1901, the Wild Bunch went their separate ways. To throw off his pursuers, Cassidy took a roundabout route to South America by way of Canada, England and the Canary Islands.
A year later at Montevideo, Uruguay, Butch met up with the Sundance Kid and his wife, Etta Place. Under their real names, Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Longabaugh, the exiles bought a ranch in Argentina with the intention of spending the rest of their days quietly raising cattle.
But in time Butch and Sundance were bored to tears and in 1906 resumed their robbing ways. Sketchy reports two years later had the gringo bandits surrounded by troops in a Bolivian village. Cassidy supposedly put his mortally wounded sidekick out of his misery before taking his own life.
Not so according to “The Bandit Invincible, the True Story of Butch Cassidy” written nearly 30 years later by a Spokane, Washington businessman. In the thinly disguised autobiography, William T. Phillips divulged the sensational details of a miraculous escape.
Sundance did die from multiple gunshot wounds on that bloody night in Bolivia, but Butch crawled to his horse under the cover of darkness. He managed to reach Brazil and caught an ocean liner to England. After minor facial surgery to alter his appearance, Butch slipped back into the United States.
Assuming the identity of Phillips, a mechanical engineer, he wooed a woman in a small Michigan town. The newlyweds moved to Globe, Arizona, where the groom worked on local ranches and in construction.
The hand-scrawled story told how Phillips took a mercenary sabbatical as a sharpshooter for Pancho Villa. This claim coincided with a rash of unrelated sightings of Butch Cassidy during the Mexican Revolution.
Leaving his wife in Spokane, Phillips panned for nuggets in Alaska, where in an Anchorage casino he allegedly made the acquaintance of Wyatt Earp. The frontier legend did, in fact, swear he encountered Cassidy during the gold rush.
On a visit to his old Wyoming haunts, Phillips called upon many former friends. Years later, a score of old-timers convincingly claimed that Butch Cassidy, alias William T. Phillips, had come back from the dead. As proof positive they cited the opal ring sported by Phillips, which was exactly like the finger ornament Cassidy always wore.
Failing to find buried loot on another trip, Phillips wrote his memoirs in 1934. Publishers passed on the poorly written manuscript, and the author abandoned the project.
After Phillips’ business went belly up, his health deteriorated rapidly. He died in a charity hospital on July 20, 1937 at the age of 71 assuming, that is, he really was Butch Cassidy.
When the movie version of her brother’s exploits turned him into a modern folk hero, Cassidy’s 86 year old sister granted a rare interview. She revealed in 1970 the closely guarded family secret that Butch had visited his kin 45 years earlier.
“The law thought he was dead, and he was happy to leave it that way. He made us promise not to tell anyone he was alive, and we never did.”
Butch Cassidy joined that long list of outlaws some think short-changed fate. For an admiring public, it is somehow easier to believe six-gun Robin Hoods were bullet-proof instead of simply dead.
Bartee Haile welcomes your comments, questions and suggestions at [email protected] or P.O. Box 152, Friendswood, TX 77549. Come on by www.twith.com for a visit and follow Bartee on Facebook!
