Today In Wyoming's History: November 6. Myth, reality, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

In today's Today In Wyoming's History: November 6: there's an item about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid meeting their demise in Bolivia in 1908. In spite of what romantics may wish, all the evidence is that the criminal pair bit the dust at the hands of Bolivian cavalry on November 6, 1908, in San Valentia Bolivia.

The story of Harry Lonabaugh and Robert LeRoy Parker, Butch and Sundance's real names, tell us a lot about myth and reality. This is so much the case that they've inspired at least two movies, one bad television series, and countless Butch survived myths.

One illuminating thing about them, in terms of this blog, is how late in history their story is. Their glory years, if that's what we'd consider them, fell between 1896 and 1901, so they're 19th and 20th Century criminals. As much time passed between the first crimes of the James Gang and the Wild Bunch as passed between the Wild Bunch and the famous gangs of Prohibition. The Wild Bunch's criminal depredations came in the early era of the automobile and concluded just before the Wright Brother's first flight. They are, in some ways, nearly of our own era.

But at the same time, they obviously lived in a Wyoming that was still so remote, and still so much of the horse era, that they were able to fairly openly used The Hole In The Wall of Johnson County as a hideout. That could only have occurred in the less mobile horse era. A few years later, the criminal Durrant, the Tarzan of the Tetons, was only able to hide for a few days, as opposed to Butch and Sundance's several years. Wyoming of 1908 was still very easy to disappear in.

The ongoing fascination with them also says something, I suppose, about ourselves. According to the Pinkertons, the Wild Bunch was the only criminal gang of the West that came close to meeting its public image, but none the less the gang killed in pursuit of its criminal objective of staying free after theft. That Lonabaugh and Parker did not is somewhat besides the point, as their gang was an armed gang that did use violence to remain free.

It was the public image that resulted in the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which remains a Western classic, and their real nature which lead to another classic, The Wild Bunch. In spite of its name, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch is not really directly about the Wyoming gang, and isn't even set in Wyoming, but Peckinpah made the movie as a counter to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the name of his film probably wasn't an accident. Peckinpah's film, sent on the border with Mexico in about 1915, depicts a different region, but arguably it portrays the fin de cicle nature of the West at that time more accurately than Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the misunderstood Peckinpah film certainly more accurately depicts the "glamour of evil" that actually attracts people's attention to crimals and their gangs than the charming Butch and Sundance film does.