Butch and Sundance: Of Con Men, Facts, And Legacy

Howdy folks and greetings from the Great Plains of North Texas!

We're finishing a series about two of America's most famous and successful outlaws, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who came to a violent end in a small Bolivian town called San Vicente high in the mountains of Southern Bolivia.

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Of course, when you have famous people die, especially in foreign countries, you have those who refuse to accept the fact. Then you have sightings. Just look at how many Elvis sightings there have been.

Then you have con men who pose as imposters or relatives trying to cash in on the fame of the deceased.

Without bodies, or even photos, the alleged death of Butch and Sundance was ripe for con men to exploit. The most famous imposter was a man named William T. Phillips. He even had some historians fooled.

He showed up in Utah in 1925 or 1930, depending on who's version you listen to, and proclaimed that he was the actual Butch Cassidy. He even visited Butch's sister Lula who had never seen him because she was just a baby when he left home.

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After more than 40 years he wouldn't be expected to look exactly how people remembered him, especially after all the stuff he'd been through.

But just in case they didn't believe him he had that aspect covered by telling them he had escaped South America and gone to Paris and had plastic surgery done to change his face! And Lula believed him.

He freely traveled around presenting himself as Butch, not seeming to be concerned that he might get picked up by law enforcement. It wasn't until after his death in 1937 that his wife told everyone that he was NOT Butch Cassidy but that "he knew him very, very well".

It turns out that his real name was William T. Wilcox and that he was Butch's cell mate in the Wyoming State Penitentiary. That's how he knew facts about his childhood and family that no one but Butch would have known.

Lots of people wanted to be Sundance

Another imposter going by the name of Hiram Bebee, which was supposedly one of Sundance's alias's, had at least on author fooled by claiming that he was the Sundance Kid. He claimed to have made it out of Bolivia and settled in Southern Utah.

He was sentenced to life in prison for shooting a Marshall in Provo and died in 1955. The problem with his story is that Sundance was a handsome man who was right at 6 feet tall but Bebee was a pugish looking ugly dude who was only 5 ft 2 inches.

There were probably half a dozen other people who claimed that Butch visited them about the year 1925 but no photos have emerged as proof.

Digging for facts

In 2009 the incredible author, researcher and historian which I've mentioned before, Anne Meadows, arranged to have the bodies of Butch and Sundance exhumed. With her was a famed forensic anthropologist.

When they dug up the grave site there was only one skeleton there and they identified it as being someone other than one of our two guys. In fact, it was some guy who had famously died by putting a stick of dynamite on a wood stove to thaw it out. You know how that ended!

Anyway, DNA testing was done to make sure and of course there was no match. So the last information I had was that they don't even know where the bodies were buried and they weren't where they were supposed to be or thought to be after all these years.

Possibly more evidence

I just found out that Anne Meadows wrote a second edition of her book which includes more exhuming and DNA testing in San Vicente so I'm going to get the book and I'll do an update.

But as much as we'd like to think that the pair made it out of South America, the overwhelming circumstantial evidence points to the fact that they did indeed meet their end on that cold, windswept mountain in Bolivia and were interned in a small, forlorn cemetery without so much as a grave marker.

A lasting legacy

However, few outlaws have captured the imagination of the country as those two and they've been immortalized through our culture in the form of film, tv shows, plays..as well as having venues, buildings, companies and resorts named after them. Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival is one example.

Butch and Sundance were two of the most unusual outlaws in history. I mean, if you were going to get robbed, you definitely wanted it to be by these guys!

They were always polite and courteous to their victims, even thoughtful. And never hurt anyone until Butch shot that soldier in San Vicente.

They left a lasting mark on our history of the American West and many historians say that the Old West died when they boarded that ocean liner to South America and that is largely true.

But they will always stand as a symbol of the final days of that romantic era as the Last Outlaws of the Old West.

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Thanks so much for staying with me on this research project of Butch and Sundance, I hope I done 'em proud.

-jonboy
Texas