|
|
Monday, March 17, 2008
Butch Cassidy's Surrender Offer
I don't have a lot of new stuff to post - mainly watching the feeds for new articles on the Wild Bunch, and posting This Day in History segments. I'm going to try and get down to the library and dig up some more articles for the Print Archive, but until then, I thought I would start pointing you to various articles on the web that I found interesting. I'm thinking of opening up the blog to contributors, well, debating is a more accurate term. I would love to have some fresh voices on the blog, but am worried it will turn into a pissing match between the loyalists to the various theories out there. At this point it's just something I'm thinking about.
Anyway, I stumbled across this article on TheHistoryNet.com by Richard Patterson. Check it out, it's a good read.
Before fleeing to Argentina with the Sundance Kid and Etta Place to start a new life early in the 20th century, did Butch Cassidy offer to give himself up to the authorities and seek amnesty? The evidence that he did is persuasive. Did he also nearly make a deal with the Union Pacific Railroad to give up robbing its trains if he was offered a job as one of the railroad's express guards? That tale is a little shaky. There are two similar but slightly different versions of the surrender offer. One can be found in Charles Kelly's popular The Outlaw Trail: A History of Butch Cassidy and His Wild Bunch, first published in 1938 and updated by Kelly in 1959. As Kelly tells the story, one day in the fall of 1899, a "stocky well-dressed man" entered the office of Orlando W. Powers, a prominent Salt Lake City attorney. The man asked Powers if what he was about to tell him would be held in strict confidence. When the attorney assured him that it would, the man said, "My name is George LeRoy Parker, better known as Butch Cassidy," and added that he wanted to "quit this outlaw business and go straight." After reciting the recent fate of several members of his gang, Cassidy said: "Sooner or later it'll be my turn. I figured it was a good time to quit before I got in any deeper." More @ TheHistoryNet.com
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Tom McCarty
The Oregonian - my hometown newspaper - has an article up about a couple searching for Tom McCarty's burial plot. It's an interesting read.
He was "wanted dead or alive" longer than any other frontier-era outlaw. He was a mentor to Butch Cassidy. And he committed one of the boldest one-man bank holdups of the Old West. Oregon badman Tom McCarty is nearly forgotten today. But in 1899, the New York Herald termed him a "king of bandits" and "Napoleon of outlawry." His exploits "make those of Jesse James . . seem like child's play," the newspaper said. Now, an Oregon husband-wife writing team is searching for McCarty's burial place. Jon and Donna Skovlin of Cove believe McCarty lived out his last years in Imnaha and died there sometime after 1917, when he was 67. - Oregonlive
|
