I just saw a documentary on exactly this subject last week. Interesting stuff but the claims of the guy who said he was Cassidy were pretty much debunked. His sister’s account that he survived seemed a bit more credible.
I watched the Redford-Newman 1969 movie a few months ago via Netflix. It was a good movie. I had seen it years earlier on TV.
If not true, it should be... I'm not one to romanticize criminals, but with Butch Cassidy I'll make an exception...
The Parker family (he was born Robert LeRoy Parker) maintained that he returned from Bolivia and they and others saw him on occasion. A sister wrote a book that included some details. There are further by people who had been acquainted with him. But beyond this hearsay, there’s little or no evidence to support the claim. I’ve often wondered myself if there is some truth behind it.
"We stopped one night at a ranch where the people were know to me. Originally, I had come to the place riding the grub-line with a cowboy who used to work on the ranch. We had stayed, told stories, and generally enjoyed ourselves, so I though we would stop by and say hello. My father who was a veterinarian, took time out to fix the teeth on a couple of horses at the ranch, and in the evening, as we sat on the porch, I happened to comment that an uncle of mine by marriage had known Butch Cassidy.
The rancher commented that Butch had been through no long before, driving a Dodge, and had swapped a couple of tires for a saddle.
Butch was supposed to have been killed in South America but a lot of people in Utah and Wyoming knew better."
Louis L'Amour continued on about how Butch was a very nice person and well liked and had never killed anyone in a holdup.
That's what Louis L'Amour had to say about it.
He is dead!
The right ears don’t match.
There’s always some nut who claims he’s someone famous. My great-great grandmother ran a boarding house and said one of her boarders decided he was dying and confessed to her he was John Wilkes Booth. He gave her a pistol wrapped in a newspaper that had headines of the assasination and she buried it under the house. He recovered and soon moved away. Then there was some guy claiming to be Jesse James so my great-grandfather, a James relative, went to see what that was all about. He came back saying the guy knew a lot about Jesse and the family but it wasn’t him. Then there’s Brushy Bill Roberts who claimed he was Billy the Kid.
Cool find!
Cool find!