Butch Cassidy Got His Name Right Here

Robert LeRoy Parker was born in Utah in eighteen sixty-six to a Mormon family, the oldest of thirteen children. He drifted into cattle country as a teenager, fell in with a small-time rustler named Mike Cassidy in the early eighteen eighties, and eventually took that man's surname as an alias. But the first name, Butch, came from Rock Springs.

Sometime around eighteen eighty-four, the young man who would become the most celebrated outlaw in Wyoming history worked for a brief period as a butcher here in Rock Springs. The job did not last long. It was honest labor and honest labor was never really his calling. But the nickname stuck: Butch, from the trade, Cassidy, from his mentor. He carried those two borrowed names for the rest of his life.

Over the next two decades, Parker, operating as Butch Cassidy, assembled a loosely organized network of rustlers and bank and train robbers that newspapers called the Wild Bunch. The gang used the remote canyons and passes of the Overthrust Belt, the same rugged country you can see from this highway, as a hideout and escape corridor. Hole-in-the-Wall, in the Big Horn Mountains of Johnson County, and Brown's Park, on the Utah-Colorado border, were their preferred retreats, but Rock Springs was along their circuit, a supply town where a man with cash and few questions could resupply and disappear.

Cassidy and his partner Harry Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid, eventually fled to South America around nineteen oh one to escape the Pinkerton detectives that Union Pacific had put on their trail. The circumstances of their deaths remain genuinely uncertain. The most documented account places them dying in a shootout with Bolivian soldiers in San Vicente in nineteen oh eight, but reports filtered back to Wyoming for decades that one or both had survived and returned under new names. Nobody ever proved it either way.

What is not disputed is where the name came from. Butch Cassidy earned his alias cutting meat in Rock Springs, Wyoming.