linkDid Butch Cassidy, the notorious Old West outlaw who most historians believe perished in a 1908 shootout in Bolivia, actually survive that battle and live to old age, peacefully and anonymously, in Washington state?
The 200-page manuscript, "Bandit Invincible: The Story of Butch Cassidy," which dates to 1934, is twice as long as a previously known but unpublished novella of the same title by William T. Phillips, a machinist who died in Spokane in 1937.
Utah book collector Brent Ashworth and Montana author Larry Pointer say the text contains the best evidence yet -- with details only Cassidy could have known -- that "Bandit Invincible" was not biography but autobiography, and that
Phillips himself was the legendary outlaw.Historians more or less agree that Cassidy was born Robert LeRoy Parker in 1866 in Beaver, Utah, the oldest of 13 children in a Mormon family. He robbed his first bank in 1889 in Telluride, Colorado, and fell in with cattle rustlers who hid out at The Hole in the Wall, a refuge in northern Wyoming's Johnson County. He left the area before cattle barons hunted down cattle-rustling homesteaders in the 1892 Johnson County War.
"Total horse pucky," said Cassidy historian Dan Buck. "It doesn't bear a great deal of relationship to Butch Cassidy's real life, or Butch Cassidy's life as we know it."
In 1991, Buck and his wife, Anne Meadows, helped dig up a grave in San Vicente, Bolivia, said to contain the remains of Butch and his sidekick, Harry Longabaugh -- the Sundance Kid.
DNA testing revealed the bones weren't the outlaws, but Buck, a writer who lives in Washington, D.C., said his research proved the two indeed died in a shootout with Bolivian cavalry in 1908.
Stories abound of Sundance living long after his time in South America. But they're outnumbered by purported Cassidy sightings.
A brother and sister of Cassidy's insisted he visited them at a family ranch near Circleville, Utah, in 1925."The majority of those who were there believed that, believed it was him that came back," said
Bill Betenson, who recalled that his great-grandmother, Lula Parker Betenson, used to talk about the visit by a man she identified as her brother, Cassidy. 
Total Members: