A pair of Wild West historians think the Hollywood ending of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” needs a rewrite. They claim to have uncovered a long-lost manuscript which suggests Cassidy was not killed in a blaze of Bolivian bullets in 1908 as is commonly believed, but actually survived the gun battle and died quietly of old age thirty years later. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
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It’s called “The Bandit Invincible, the Story of Butch Cassidy” by William T. Phillips.
And they contend Phillips, the supposed biographer, was really Cassidy the bandit.
“I’m convinced,” Brent Ashworth, a Utah-based rare books dealer, told The Deseret News of Salt Lake City. “I believed it before I saw the manuscript.”
Montana author Larry Pointer said the 200-page text includes details of Cassidy’s life that only the outlaw could have known.
Other Cassidy historians like Dan Buck call that claim nonsense.
“Total horse pucky,” Buck told the Associated Press. “It doesn’t bear a great deal of relationship to Butch Cassidy’s real life, or Butch Cassidy’s life as we know it.”
Historians agree Cassidy was born Robert LeRoy Parker in 1866 in Beaver, Utah. They say he was the oldest of 13 children in a Mormon family and became a bank-robber in 1889.
In the 1969 movie starring Paul Newman as Butch and Robert Redford as Sundance, the desperados died in a shootout with the Bolivian cavalry.
Phillips’ manuscript also has a dramatic ending, with Sundance killed but Cassidy escaping to Paris, where he undergoes plastic surgery and later reunites with an old flame in Wyoming.
Ashworth and Pointer contend the truth about Cassidy’s last days was far more prosaic. They say the outlaw morphed into Phillips, a mild-mannered machinist in Spokane, Wash., who died with hardly a penny.
Phillips’ adopted son, William, believed his stepfather was Butch Cassidy, said Pointer, author of a Cassidy bio called “In Search of Butch Cassidy.”
So did a lot of upstanding people who heard Phillips tell tales of riding with The Wild Bunch.
“All of these people were bamboozled by this faker from Spokane?” Pointer said. “These weren’t hayseed, duped ignorant people. These were pillars of our community. And if they said something, you had to better take it seriously.”
