Most of us met Butch Cassidy through the 1969 film starring the dreamy duo, Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Cassidy was the charming, sweet-talking schemer. Sundance, the dangerous fast draw who preferred to act while Cassidy was still talking. How much either man resembled the real thing, nobody can say for certain — but we let the two superstars beguile us into believing the whole adventure, right up to the last frame where, pistols blazing, they burst into a courtyard full of soldiers waiting to gun them down. And then we never see them die. It seems the filmmakers couldn’t quite bring themselves to kill them. As it turns out, neither could history.
We are led to believe the two men, the real ones, were cornered in a Bolivian courtyard in the autumn of 1908, and fell to their deaths in a storm of bullets in one last stand.
But were they?
In 1991, researchers determined to settle the question once and for all exhumed the grave and compared the bones’ DNA with living relatives of both men — and it matched neither.
Behind the colorful nicknames were two ordinary men. Butch Cassidy was Robert LeRoy Parker, a Utah farm boy who borrowed “Cassidy” from an early mentor and “Butch” from a stint working as a butcher. He also used the aliases George Cassidy, Jim Lowe, and Santiago Maxwell. The Sundance Kid was Harry Longabaugh, a boy from Pennsylvania who went west at fifteen and earned his name after being arrested for stealing a horse in the town of Sundance, Wyoming. Together they became the leaders of the gang known as the Wild Bunch, the most successful outlaws of their day.
