Butch Cassidy's First Bank: Telluride, Eighteen Eighty-Nine

Robert LeRoy Parker was twenty-three years old on June twenty-fourth, eighteen eighty-nine, and had not yet become anyone famous. He had worked briefly as a butcher in Rock Springs, Wyoming, from which he had borrowed a nickname. He was the oldest son of a Mormon family from Beaver, Utah. He had worked cattle and odd jobs across Wyoming and Utah. He had a talent for horses and a facility for calculating odds.

That morning, he and two companions rode into Telluride, walked into the San Miguel Valley Bank on Colorado Avenue, and walked out with approximately twenty thousand seven hundred fifty dollars. Nobody was killed. The operation was quick and orderly. Parker and his companions rode south out of town and disappeared into the canyons.

The Telluride robbery is documented as the first confirmed bank robbery attributed to the man who would eventually be known as Butch Cassidy. The Pinkertons did not yet know his name. The dime novelists had not found him. He was just a young man from Utah who was good with a horse and better at calculating risk than at conventional employment.

He went on to rob Union Pacific trains and organize the loose network of outlaws and safe-houses known as the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. He and Harry Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid, fled to South America around nineteen hundred one. What happened after that depends on which version of the evidence you credit. The Pinkertons believed he died in Bolivia around nineteen oh eight. Some of his family believed he came home. A historical marker near the bank site on Colorado Avenue marks where it began.