On the trail of Butch Cassidy

Main Street in rustic Helper, Utah, south of Castle Gate mountain pass, where Butch Cassidy and...
Main Street in rustic Helper, Utah, south of Castle Gate mountain pass, where Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch staged a famous robbery. Photos by Los Angeles Times.
Utah's Red Canyon, near Bryce Canyon National Park, is thought to be an old Butch Cassidy hide-out.
Utah's Red Canyon, near Bryce Canyon National Park, is thought to be an old Butch Cassidy hide-out.
An old cabin survives at Robbers Roost, a Wild Bunch lair in southeastern Utah.
An old cabin survives at Robbers Roost, a Wild Bunch lair in southeastern Utah.

On the trail of a historical outlaw in Utah, Susan Spano crosses some big country.

"Most of what follows is true."

That's the opening of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the 1969 movie about two bandits born as the sun was setting on the United States' old Wild West.

Morally ambiguous, the movie struck a chord with Vietnam War-era audiences who stood and cheered when Paul Newman as Butch and Robert Redford as Sundance met a hail of bullets in a Bolivian town, etching the final frame on to my 15-year-old heart.

The movie etched something else there as well: a love of Western scenery, which I rediscovered on a March trip to southern Utah. With five national parks, Utah's grand scenery is unrivalled in North America.

It's also where Robert LeRoy Parker, alias Butch Cassidy, was born in 1866.

On the Parker homestead in the Sevier River Valley 300km south of Salt Lake City, Butch learned to be a cowboy first and, later, how to brand, on other people's livestock.

Apparently, he pulled only one big job in Utah, the 1897 Pleasant Valley Coal Co payroll robbery at Castle Gate.

Between heists, he and his Wild Bunch gang often hid out on Utah's Colorado Plateau. I set out to track the historical and Hollywood outlaw in Utah but got only as far as St George when I started running into a third persona: the apocryphal Butch, who is in some ways the more interesting because of the people who told me about him.

St George is the capital of Utah's Dixie, so named because Mormon church leaders dispatched pioneers like Butch's father, Maximillian Parker, to settle and grow cotton around the time of the Civil War.

Downtown at the Washington County Library, I met Bart Anderson, a historian and folklorist, known as "Ranger Bart" because he has devoted his retirement years to giving slide shows at nearby national and state parks.

Of the 111-show repertoire, the one on Butch is the most popular.

It features vintage photos of the outlaw, including the mugshot taken when he was sent to the Wyoming Territorial Penitentiary for horse-stealing in 1894 and a portrait of the Wild Bunch dressed like city slickers.

The Butch it portrays is an affable-looking man.

"Butch was a contagious fellow, well-liked," Anderson said.

"The movie got that much right."

As so many locals claim, Butch didn't die in South America on November 6, 1908.

Instead, he and Sundance rode back to Utah, stopping in Mexico to meet Pancho Villa.

Others have tried to prove the opposite.

The movie takes a middle ground by leaving their fate to the imagination but faithfully underscores the passing of the outlaw era.

Around 1860, Mormon pioneers settled in Grafton, just down the Virgin River from the red rocks of Zion Canyon National Park.

But floods, disease and hostile Indians made the colony unsustainable.

By 1910, many had moved on, leaving a ghost town to Hollywood location scouts who found backdrops for a passel of Westerns, including The Deadwood Coach, with Tom Mix (1924), My Friend Flicka (1943) and John Ford's Rio Grande (1950).

I drove east through thered-and-white slick-rock country along Utah 9, then turned north on US 89 that runs through the hamlet of Orderville.

I turned east on Utah 12 and headed for Ruby's Inn, on the threshold of Bryce Canyon, whittled from limestone into a gallery of pinnacles and spires known as "hoodoos".

Mormon pioneer Ebenezer Bryce, who gave his name to the landmark that is now a national park, once said, "It's a helluva place to lose a horse".

Locals say a posse tracked a teenage Butch here when he took up rustling. Bryce Canyon Pines motel offers day-long trail rides to the remains of one of the stone cabins where Butch is thought to have stashed fresh horses for the relay escapes he perfected The next day, I drove west to the ranching town of Panguitch.

Its block-long business district has Western storefronts occupied by cafés and shops, including Cowboy Collectibles, where I found reproductions of Wild Bunch "wanted" posters.

Panguitch is where Butch's youngest sister, Lula Parker Betenson, spent her last years after writing Butch Cassidy, My Brother, published in 1975.

The book confounded Western scholars with its assertion that Butch arrived at the Parker home in nearby Circleville in 1925 driving a new black Ford, unscathed by the bullets of federales who supposedly had killed him and Sundance.

Lula was a toddler when her big brother left home, but in the 1930s she believed claims that William T.

Phillips of Spokane, Washington, was Butch.

Later, she changed her mind, saying she knew where the real Butch was buried but planned to take the secret to her grave.

She died in 1980.

Ranches, barns and pastures line the 30km stretch of US 89 north of Panguitch. Just before Circleville, I spotted the lonesome old Parker homestead, now privately owned. The wood cabin has a loft where Butch might have slept as a boy.

I stopped at Butch Cassidy's Hideout restaurant and motel in Circleville for Butch's Special Cheeseburger plate, then visited 84-year-old Alfred Fullmer.

Mr Fullmer remembered that he raced horses with some of the Parker boys.

Like some locals, he believes Lula's story about Butch's 1925 homecoming, although he said no-one talked much about the bandit before the movie.

"Afterward, everybody claimed they'd seen him. I don't know. Maybe I did," Mr Fullmer said.

The next morning, I headed east on Utah 12.

It makes a 180km loop through the minuscule ranching communities of Tropic, Cannonville and Henrieville at the threshold of 768,920ha Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, then rounds the east side of 3105m Powell Point.

Bill Wolverton, a resource management ranger for Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which abuts Grand Staircase-Escalante, knows the region well.

On our way to the trail head to hike Upper Calf Creek Falls, we stopped at Head of the Rocks point, overlooking what seemed like the edge of the world.

Mr Wolverton pointed out me the north face of the massive Kaiparowits Plateau, the snow-capped Henry Mountains to the northeast and the badlands around Waterpocket Fold, a 160km-long buckle of earth with sculptured red-and-white rock marking Capitol Reef National Park.

Utah 12 crosses the wild Escalante River and it was a short walk from the highway to Upper Calf Creek Falls.

Mr Wolverton and I sat looking into the canyon, remembering the scene in the film in which Butch and Sundance jump from just such an aerie.I saw that movie again and it was like 40 years hadn't passed," Mr Wolverton said.

"I could anticipate all the lines."

After that, I took Utah 12 over 3047m Boulder Mountain, unpaved until the 1970s, then spent the night at the Lodge at Red River Ranch on the Fremont River west of Torrey, a beautifully restored stagecoach inn that the owners claim Butch visited.

The next morning in Capitol Reef park, I hiked up the side of Grand Wash to Cassidy Arch, a spot wild enough to have earned Butch's name.

Then on to Hanksville, about 80km east of Capitol Reef, where I met Utah guidebook writer Mike Kelsey, who had promised to take me to Robbers Roost, a 50km-wide mesa banked on the south by the Dirty Devil River.

The Roost was the impregnable lair of the Wild Bunch.

It had narrow slot canyons for hiding out, some springs, enough fodder for horses and overhangs where bandit sentries watched for posses.

It can be reached only by unmarked dirt roads.

Kelsey, an old hand at such terrain, drove fast, pointing out water tanks for cattle that roam free on land leased by the Government to ranchers.

Around mid-morning, we pulled up at Robbers Roost Spring, in a deep-set gulch rimmed by red rock, with water palatable to cows and horses but too bitter for humans.

From there, we walked up the canyon to the remains of an old stone cabin built by early ranchers - and reportedly used by the Wild Bunch.

A shared hostility to railroad barons and bankers kept the outlaws on good terms with the tough cattlemen who worked this isolated range.

Antipathy to outsiders persists among some of them, which is why Mr Kelsey was concerned when we next headed for the Biddlecome-Ekker Ranch at nearby Crow Seep.

But I had permission to see the place from Gayemarie Ekker, one of the ranch owners.

She lives now in Cedar City, Utah, but she grew up with her mother Hazel, father Arthur and older brother A.

C. on the 70ha Robbers Roost ranch started by her grandfather, Joe Biddlecome, in 1909.

"Butch Cassidy was our Robin Hood," Ekker told me. - Los Angeles Times-Washington Post

 

 

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