by David Fisher
It is said that the Kid responded by telling the judge, “You can go to hell, hell, hell.”
Billy the Kid was the only man convicted of a crime committed during the Lincoln County War, which he believed to be patently unfair. His only hope, he understood, was that the governor would honor the agreement they had made. As he told a reporter, “I think he [Wallace] ought to pardon me…. Think it hard that I should be the only one to suffer the extreme penalties of the law.” On April 16, he was taken by wagon to Lincoln, where he was scheduled to be hanged on May 13, between the hours of nine a.m. and three p.m. Among the seven men who guarded him during that five-day trip was an old enemy, Bob Olinger, who had fought for Dolan in the war and, from all accounts, was especially hard on the Kid. It was reported that more than once he poked him with his shotgun and dared him to try to escape so that he could shoot him in the back, “Just like you did Brady.”
In Lincoln, the Kid was shackled to the floor on the second story of a merchant building, guarded by Olinger and deputy James W. Bell. On the evening of April 28, Olinger went across the street to get some dinner, leaving the Kid alone with Deputy Bell. People have always said Bell was a decent man who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. There are several versions of what happened next, but they all usually begin with Billy asking the deputy to take him outside to the privy. Perhaps Billy shoved Deputy Bell down the steps, then hobbled into the gun room and grabbed a pistol. Maybe he bludgeoned Deputy Bell with his chains and grabbed his gun. Or perhaps Billy never touched Deputy Bell but instead retrieved a pistol that had been planted for him in the latrine. However it happened, Billy the Kid added to his legend by obtaining a gun and shooting Deputy Bell, who staggered into the street and died. Then, still in chains, Billy managed to get into the armory and grab Olinger’s double-barreled shotgun, the very gun with which he had been poked and taunted. He then stood at the window, patiently awaiting the return of Robert Olinger.
It was not a long wait. Hearing the shots, Olinger raced from the hotel dining room. A passerby warned him, “Bob, the Kid has killed Bell.” And, at that moment, Olinger saw the Kid framed in the window only a few feet away, holding a shotgun. “Hello, Bob,” Billy is reputed to have said.
Billy the Kid escapes from prison by killing deputy Robert Olinger.
Olinger accepted his fate and has been quoted as saying, “Yes, and he’s killed me, too.”
Billy the Kid fired both barrels; Olinger died without another word. With the help of people who were never identified, he was able to sever his chains, arm himself, and then steal a horse and ride out of town.
Pat Garrett had been in White Oaks when the daring escape took place. He assumed that Billy would head immediately for the Mexican border. So he bided his time, waiting until the following July, when he heard that Billy the Kid might be visiting a lady friend out at Pete Maxwell’s place. He rode out there that night with his two deputies. Not surprising, there are other versions of the final confrontation between Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. In one, Garrett tied up and gagged Paulita Maxwell, and when the Kid came in to see her, Garrett let loose with both barrels of his shotgun. There is no argument, though, that Pat Garrett shot and killed a man at Pete Maxwell’s ranch on the night of July 14. The man believed to be Billy the Kid was buried by his Mexican friends on the Maxwell Ranch. A white wooden cross marked his grave, and inscribed on it were the words DUERME BIEN, QUERIDO (“Sleep well, beloved”).
Almost immediately, souvenir hunters started pulling at the grave site, so within days, his body was moved to the nearby Fort Sumner military cemetery and buried next to his friends Tom O’Folliard and Charlie Bowdre. The inscription on their stone reads simply, PALS, then identifies the three men.
Pat Garrett did not receive the attention he had hoped for, and in fact, many people believed he had shot the Kid in the back in a cowardly manner. At an inquest, Garrett stated, “He came there armed with a pistol and a knife expressly to kill me if he could. I had no alternative but to kill him or suffer death at his hands.” The coroner’s jury ruled it a justifiable homicide. To profit from his success in tracking down the outlaw Billy the Kid, Garrett published a ghostwritten book in 1882 entitled The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid. It was moderately successful but served primarily to embellish the growing legend of William H. Bonney. When Garrett ran for sheriff in the next election, he was defeated. In 1884, he ran for the New Mexico state senate, was also defeated, and left New Mexico for Texas. In 1908, he was shot to death outside Las Cruces, New Mexico, allegedly during an argument about goats grazing on his land without permission. His body was found lying by the side of the road.
In his twenty-one years, Billy the Kid was credited with killing twenty-one men, but as with so much else about his life, that number certainly is exaggerated. It is known that he killed at least four men himself and was involved in five more fatal shootings. That’s nine. As for the others, no one will ever know how many notches were on his gun.
Months after he had shot Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett published this ghostwritten book, which did more to support the growing legend of Billy the Kid than benefit the sheriff.
And as with other notorious outlaws, the story doesn’t end in that hacienda. Legends take on a life of their own, and people wanted to believe that the Kid who’d pulled off so many daring feats and escapes had executed just one more. Rumors quickly surfaced that Billy the Kid did not die that night. To support these claims, people have pointed out that no photographs of the body exist, no death certificate was ever issued, Pat Garrett was never paid the reward, and the three coroner’s jury reports contained conflicting testimony and were signed by people who admitted they did not witness the shooting. In fact, beyond Pat Garrett’s claims, there is little evidence that the victim was Billy the Kid.
Although only twenty-one years old when he died, Billy the Kid had shot his way into American history. His legend has been celebrated in dime novels, books, comics, plays, songs, poems, and even an Aaron Copeland ballet. He has been portrayed more often in film and television than any other person, by actors including Paul Newman, Kris Kristofferson, and Marlon Brando.
Is it possible that Billy the Kid actually survived that night? According to one version, he was badly wounded, but the Mexican women of the hacienda saved his life, then substituted the body of a man who had died naturally that night; Bonney then lived the rest of his life peacefully under the name John Miller. Another version claims that Garrett and the Kid had become close friends years earlier in Beaver Smith’s Saloon and that Garrett had helped set up this elaborate ploy, to enable Billy to live the rest of his life in peace. And from time to time, through the succeeding years, men would show up in the saloons of the Old West claiming to be Billy the Kid, saying they’d miraculously escaped death at the end of Pat Garrett’s six-shooter that night—And, by the way, would you buy me a drink?
The most publicized claim was made in 1949, when a ninety-year-old man from Hamilton County, Texas, William H. “Brushy Bill” Roberts, stated that his true identity was, in fact, Billy the Kid. The man killed that night in 1881, he said, was a friend of his, known as Billy Barlow. He himself had lived in Mexico until things cooled down, then led a life of adventure. He’d served with Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution, worked in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, joined Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and fought in Cuba, and even served as a US marshal while marrying four times and living under a dozen aliases. Although Roberts died of a heart attack in 1950, the book detailing his story, Alias Billy the Kid, was published in 1955. Although it was generally dismissed at that time, years later, the full transcripts of interviews conducted before his death seemed to make a much more convincing case.
Brushy Bill told an entertaining story. Although there was compelling evidence that “Brushy Bill” was actually a man named Oliver P. Roberts, who was born in 1879, other evidence seems to indicate that William Roberts had intimate knowledge of Lincoln City and many of the events tha
t took place there. In face, there is more hard evidence to support the claim that William H. Roberts was indeed Billy the Kid than there is evidence that Pat Garrett actually killed the Kid the night of July 14, 1881.
In 2007, a legal effort was launched to settle the story once and for all by exhuming the remains in Billy Bonney’s grave and attempting to match the DNA to that of his mother. That request was denied. Although it is still generally accepted that the legendary life of William H. Bonney, alias Billy the Kid, ended in the darkness of Pete Maxwell’s bedroom, there remain enough unanswered questions to make this one of the Wild West’s most compelling mysteries.
BUTCH CASSIDY
THE LAST MAN STANDING
Butch Cassidy slowly pulled back a corner of the white lace curtain and looked out the broken windowpane. The plaza seemed deserted. But from behind every barrier, he saw the long barrel of a rifle pointed directly at him. Without counting, he figured at least three dozen Bolivian soldiers were drawing a bead on the house at that very moment. From the back of the darkened room, the wounded Sundance Kid asked evenly, “So, what do you think?”
“Looks like rain,” Butch replied casually. “Now’s probably not a good time to go for a stroll.”
“Yeah, that’s just what I was thinking.” After a brief pause, Sundance said, “Hey, I got an idea; when it clears up, let’s go watch one of those newfangled moving pictures.”
Butch sparked at that thought, then smiled broadly. “Hey, maybe they’ll make one of them about us sometime. You know, the story of two good-natured fellas just trying to make a decent living in a quick-changing world?”
Sundance laughed. “More likely, people’ll be walking on the moon.”
And then another shot shattered the remains of the window.
Did that conversation ever take place? Of course not. But it may be about as accurate as most of the stories that have been told about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the gang they rode with, the Wild Bunch. Those oft-told tales, culminating in the award-winning 1969 film starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, have ensured that the two robbers and the last gang to roam the Old West will live forever in American folklore. Although the movie purportedly told the “true story” of these outlaws, in this case, the word true was defined pretty loosely.
According to that history, after a successful life of crime in the United States, Butch and Sundance fled to South America, where they were eventually trapped by soldiers in a small house in San Vicente, Bolivia. The ambiguous ending of that classic movie left open the possibility that Butch and Sundance somehow managed to survive that last gunfight. And, in the century since that 1908 shoot-out, several intriguing stories would actually seem to support that contention. Although the fate of all the other members of the Wild Bunch is well known and accepted without question, some people do wonder if it is possible that Butch and Sundance somehow escaped.
Robert Leroy Parker was born in April 1866, the first of thirteen children, and grew up in Circleville, Utah. As a teenager, he worked briefly as a butcher, supposedly cutting up rustled cattle, then rode for a time with rancher and cattle and horse thief Mike Cassidy, which led to him being nicknamed Butch Cassidy.
Harry Alonzo Longabaugh was born a year later in Mont Clare, Pennsylvania. As a twenty-year-old, he was caught stealing a gun, a horse, and a saddle from a ranch in Sundance, Wyoming. While serving eighteen months in jail there, he picked up the nickname by which he gained fame, “the Sundance Kid.”
A loosely knit association of various gangs, operating mostly out of the Hole-in-the-Wall hideout in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains, the Wild Bunch pulled off the longest string of bank and train robberies in American history. In addition to Butch and Sundance, the primary members included Elzy Lay, Kid Curry Logan, News Carver, Tall Texan Kilpatrick, Matt Warner, Butch’s brother Dan Parker, Flat Nose Currie, and Harry Bass. From 1889 through the turn of the century, the Wild Bunch purportedly stole the modern-day equivalent of about $2.5 million, before each of its members was caught or killed, one by one.
Robert Leroy Parker, who became the famed Butch Cassidy.
After Butch and Sundance held up the First National Bank of Winnemucca, Nevada, and got away with $32,640, the Pinkertons issued this Wanted poster, in which Cassidy was described as a “known criminal in Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Colorado and Nevada,” and it was pointed out that the Kid “is bow-legged and his feet far apart.”
Butch Cassidy committed his first bank job in 1889, when he and several other masked men held up the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride, Colorado, riding away with about twenty thousand dollars. It was a transitional time for a region once known as the Wild West. Civilization was encroaching quickly, brought in by the 164,000 miles of railroad track that now stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with trains that ran on a schedule. People were talking to friends miles away on the candlestick telephone. They were driving crazy fast in horseless carriages; in fact, only a year earlier, one of them had raced from Green Bay to Madison, Wisconsin, in just thirty-three hours, almost as fast as the stage. In cities, people were speeding over paved streets on bicycles with pneumatic tires. And instead of living in fear of Indians and highwaymen, for only a few cents people could watch reenactments of Indian attacks on wagon trains and stagecoach robberies—and even behold the actual Sitting Bull and twenty of his warriors, when Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and its “Congress of Rough Riders of the World,” just back from Paris, came to town.
A 1901 formal portrait of Sundance taken in New York City
It took a while for Butch and Sundance to meet up, and by the time they did, both of them were fiercely committed to a life of larceny. Butch Cassidy had no formal education, learning the necessities of his trade from outlaw Mike Cassidy. By the time Mike Cassidy had killed a Wyoming rancher and taken off for parts unknown, Bob Parker could outride a posse and shoot well enough to hit a playing card dead center at fifty paces. It was said that he could ride around a tree trunk full tilt and put all six shots from his revolver into a three-inch circle. But in addition to outlaw skills, he also was said to have a pleasing way with words, a sense of fairness, and a quick wit. His first train robbery took place outside Grand Junction, Colorado, when his gang forced the Denver and Rio Grande Express to stop by blocking the tracks with a small mountain of stones. Guns drawn, the gang climbed aboard and ordered the guard to open the safe. He refused, claiming he did not have the combination. Butch’s partner in that crime, a gunman named Bill McCarty, put his revolver to the guard’s head, cocked it, and asked, “Should we kill him?”
After a pause, Butch suggested, “Let’s vote!” He then persuaded the rest of the bandits to leave the guard alone. They collected about one hundred forty dollars from the passengers and rode away.
That wicked sense of humor was also present when he robbed the First National Bank of Denver. He approached the president of that institution and blurted out breathlessly, “Sir! I just overheard a plot to rob this bank!”
The bank president froze in his tracks. “Oh, Lord!” he supposedly said. “How did you learn of this plot?”
Cassidy smiled. “I planned it. Put up your hands!”
Sundance had spent several years working as a ranch hand, committing the occasional crime, when he joined Bill Madden and Henry Bass and held up the Great Northern westbound number 23 train near Malta, Montana, in 1892. This robbery was even less successful than Cassidy’s attempt: Although he got away with about twenty-five dollars, his accomplices were caught and implicated him. Within days, the railroad issued Wanted posters bearing an accurate description of him and offering a five-hundred-dollar reward for his capture. A similar Wanted poster issued years later described his nose as “rather long,” his hair as “brown, may be dyed, combs it pompadour,” and notes that he “is bow-legged and his feet far apart.” Madden was sentenced to ten years, Bass got fourteen, and Sundance spent the rest of his life as a fugitive.
It isn’t known precisely when or how Butc
h and Sundance met, but in those days, after pulling a job, desperadoes were known to retreat to hideouts until things cooled down. As the St. George Union wrote in 1897, “The outlaws live among ‘breakes,’ the wildest, most rugged and inaccessible except to the initiated anywhere under the blue firmament. In recesses cut into the side of those yawning chasms, two or three men are able to hold an army at bay. To such places all who have stolen, robbed or murdered are welcomed so that the gangs are becoming augmented steadily as time goes on … There is no use attempting to dislodge them by force … the only way would be to starve them out and it is questionable if that is feasible.”
These places had many advantages: They offered a clear view of all approaches, they were hard to find and get into, and if it became necessary, they were easy to defend. Pretty much anyone on the run was welcome in these hideouts. For example, young Bob Parker allegedly spent a lot of time in Brown’s Park (or Brown’s Hole, as it also was known), an isolated valley along the Green River, stretching between Colorado and Utah, when he was riding with Mike Cassidy. The Wild Bunch, or, as it originally was called, the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, was formed by Butch Cassidy and his best friend at that time, rustler and holdup man Elzy Lay, while they were lying low in Robbers Roost, a hideout in southeastern Utah. (The gang also called itself, with a wink, the Train Robbers Syndicate.) When lawmen discovered the location of the Roost, the Wild Bunch departed for the famous Hole-in-the-Wall, a natural fortress atop a plateau in Carbon County, Wyoming, used by numerous gangs, a redoubt that could be reached only by squeezing through narrow passes and which was said to be so secure that a dozen men could defend it against a hundred.
Many plans were hatched and relationships formed along the well-known “outlaw trail.” Membership in a gang was fluid; people would ride with several other bandits for a limited time or for a specific job, then move along. Several dozen men participated in at least one of the more than two dozen holdups believed to have been committed by the Wild Bunch. It’s likely that Butch and Sundance crossed paths during one of these robberies.