Butch Cassidy Danced Here: Outlaws in Wayne County
Near Torrey, Utah
The remoteness that made farming in Wayne County difficult made hiding easy, and the canyons south and east of Torrey were among the finest hiding places in the American West. The most famous outlaw in the region was Robert LeRoy Parker, better known as Butch Cassidy, who grew up in nearby Circleville and came to know these canyons the way a fish knows water. Cassidy and his loose confederation of outlaws called the Wild Bunch used a desert refuge in the remote canyon country to the southeast, a place they called Robbers Roost, as a base between raids on banks and trains across the West.
After a robbery, they could vanish into the slickrock maze where no posse could follow. Local legend in Torrey holds that Cassidy and his companions sometimes rode into the small farming communities of Wayne County to attend dances at a gathering place locals called the Big Apple. The townsfolk, the story goes, knew exactly who these men were and danced with them anyway.
In a country where the law was far away and outlaws sometimes meant the difference between a hard winter and a disastrous one, the boundary between respectable and dangerous was easy to blur. Cassidy left Utah for good around nineteen hundred and one, eventually heading to South America. Robbers Roost remains deep in the canyon country to the southeast, unchanged and accessible only to the determined.
