Butch Cassidy

Robert LeRoy Parker grew up Mormon in Utah Territory and took the name Butch Cassidy from an early mentor, a cattle rustler named Mike Cassidy, after drifting into petty theft as a teenager. By the 1890s he was running what law enforcement called the Wild Bunch, a loose confederation of rustlers and robbers who hit banks and Union Pacific trains across Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado with a discipline unusual for the trade — fast horses staged in advance along the escape route, and a standing rule against killing during a robbery that the gang mostly kept.

Cassidy's partner for the gang's biggest jobs was Harry Longabaugh, a Wyoming cowboy known as the Sundance Kid, and together with Sundance's companion Etta Place they became the most wanted trio on the Union Pacific's payroll of Pinkerton detectives. As railroad security hardened after 1900 and the hideouts at places like Hole-in-the-Wall and Robbers Roost grew too familiar to posses, Cassidy and Sundance left the country entirely, settling briefly as ranchers in Argentina before returning to robbery when the ranching failed to pay.

The accepted ending has Cassidy and Sundance cornered by the Bolivian army after a mine-payroll robbery in San Vicente in November 1908, dying in a shootout or, by one account, a murder-suicide after both men were wounded. The identification was never conclusive, and persistent family testimony — including from a sister who claimed he visited her in Utah years later — kept alive a rival story that Cassidy slipped back into the United States under an alias and lived into the 1930s. No grave or forensic evidence has settled the question either way.