Butch Cassidy

April 27, 2020
Biographer Leerhsen (Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty) delivers a lyrical and deeply researched portrait of Wild West outlaw Butch Cassidy. Born into a family of British Mormons in Utah in 1866, Robert LeRoy Parker worked as a cowboy at ranches in Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana before adopting the alias “Butch Cassidy” and launching his criminal career as leader of the Wild Bunch. According to Leerhsen, Cassidy and his compatriots deliberately engaged in criminal enterprises, including cattle rustling and bank and train robbery, that damaged rich and powerful corporate interests without endangering the wealth or safety of ordinary settlers. Leerhsen hits all the well-known highlights, including romantic entanglements with outlaw rancher Ann Bassett and her sister, Josie; dustups with the notorious Pinkerton Detective Agency; and life on the run in South America, but enriches the story with a nuanced reading of social and economic conditions in 19th-century America. The Cassidy that emerges in this version of events is more of a populist outlaw than a swashbuckling gunslinger. Leerhsen is a nimble storyteller whose revisionist agenda doesn’t get in the way of crowd-pleasing drama. Old West history buffs will be thrilled. Agent: Kris Dahl, ICM Partners.

May 15, 2020
A lively, necessarily speculative biography of the notorious desperado. Journalist Leerhsen, former executive editor of Sports Illustrated, correctly points out that while the hit 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, made Butch Cassidy's (1866-1908) name familiar to most readers, Cassidy and his circle did not often put pen to paper, so contemporary evidence consists largely of legal documents, police reports, and newspaper accounts of his crimes. Modern biographers often fill the gaps with fiction, personal theories, or highly suspicious memories from Cassidy's descendants, and movies muddy the water with a romantic portrait of life on the frontier when in fact it was usually miserable. The eldest of 13 children of a hardscrabble rancher, Cassidy had his first brush with the law at age 12, and he left home permanently just before he turned 18 to take up a life of crime. "Crime" on the frontier mostly involved stealing cattle or horses; it was rarely lucrative, and Cassidy regularly worked as a ranch hand to make ends meet. After years of low-paid labor, petty thievery, a prison term, and companions with similar loose morals, added to a talent for leadership, he took up a full-time life of crime, and newspapers happily recorded a series of spectacular bank and train robberies. This spree lasted only a few years before advancing technology and the end of the frontier made this life too risky. No psychopath like Billy the Kid or Jesse James, Leerhsen's Cassidy is likable and mostly sensible. He escaped to Argentina in 1901 with considerable cash and a companion (the Sundance Kid, a more shadowy figure). For several years, they apparently worked as honest ranchers but returned to robbery in 1905, when they "dropped any pretense of being law-abiding citizens." They moved to Chile and Bolivia, where, cornered by soldiers in 1908, they probably committed suicide, an event absent from the movie. Perhaps the most successful of the frontier outlaws, Cassidy receives an entertaining and likely definitive account.

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May 15, 2020

Though most people associate outlaw Butch Cassidy with Paul Newman's performance in the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Leerhsen (Ty Cobb) offers a fuller portrait in this entertaining biography of an American legend. Born in 1866 to English immigrants who had settled in Utah, Cassidy, whose given name was Robert LeRoy Parker, grew up poor and largely unsupervised: a background that impacted his outlook on survival and adventure in later years. He started small, stealing cattle and horses, and later graduated to robbing banks. Leerhsen separates fact from the fiction surrounding Cassidy, including his reputation as the Robin Hood of the American West and the daring escapades of his "Wild Bunch" gang. Despite Cassidy's skills as a cowboy and his ability to orchestrate clever heists, he was no match for the Pinkerton detective agency, which was hired by railroad barons who were fed up with Cassidy's infamous train robberies. Eventually Cassidy and his accomplice Harry Alonzo Longabaugh (better known as the Sundance Kid) relocated to South America, where the schemes continued. VERDICT While not as detailed as Kerry Ross Boren's Butch Cassidy: The Untold Story, Leerhsen's biography is an accessible, quick read that is sure to delight fans of the genre.--Mattie Cook, Flat River Community Lib., MI

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