Butch Cassidy's First Bank Robbery

On a summer morning in June of eighteen eighty nine, a young cowboy named Robert LeRoy Parker walked into the San Miguel Valley Bank, right here on Colorado Avenue, and walked out with a fortune. History would come to know him by another name. Butch Cassidy.

And this was the very first bank he ever robbed. He was not alone. The plan belonged to a hard case named Matt Warner, and two of the McCarty brothers rode with them.

The scheme was simple and it was smart. Warner leaned across the counter and pushed a pistol under the teller's nose while the others emptied the drawers. Accounts of the take vary, but most put it near twenty thousand dollars, an enormous sum for the time.

The genius was in the getaway. The gang had strung fresh horses along the trail out of the box canyon, so that when their first mounts tired, they simply leapt onto rested ones and kept flying. A town posse gave chase but never caught them.

Before long, word of who the robbers were got out. Telluride sat at the dead end of a steep mountain canyon, connected to the outside world by only a few punishing roads, which is exactly what made it appealing to men who wanted a head start. For the young rider from Utah, then in his early twenties, it was the beginning of a career that would carry him to the Wild Bunch, to trains and banks across the American West, and eventually, so the legend goes, all the way to Bolivia.

Accounts still differ about precisely how much money left the vault that day, but the essential facts have held for more than a century. It started here, on this quiet street, in a small mining town at the end of a canyon that has never entirely stopped telling the story of the morning it launched the most famous outlaw of the American West.