SOUTHWEST USA
Out West, in Utah's Butch Cassidy country
With five national parks, Utah's concentration of grand Western scenery is unrivaled in North America, and it's also where Robert LeRoy Parker, alias Butch Cassidy, was born.
"Most of what follows is true."
That's the opening of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," the 1969 movie about two bandits born as the sun was setting over the mesas and buttes of the old Wild West.
Morally ambiguous, the movie struck a chord with Vietnam War-era audiences who stood and cheered when Paul Newman as Butch and Robert Redford as Sundance met a hail of bullets in a dusty Bolivian town, etching the final freeze frame onto my 15-year-old heart.
I didn't know it then, but the movie wrote something else there: a love of the sumptuous Western scenery, which I rediscovered on a trip last month to southern Utah.
Only part of the movie was filmed here, and the real Butch robbed banks and trains all across the West, making frequent stops at Fanny Porter's high-class bordello in San Antonio. But with five national parks, Utah's concentration of grand Western scenery is unrivaled in North America, and it's also where Robert LeRoy Parker, alias Butch Cassidy, was born in 1866.
On the Parker spread in the beautiful Sevier River Valley 200 miles south of Salt Lake City, Butch learned to be a cowboy first and, later, how to put his brand on other peoples' livestock. He trained his mounts not to shy at the sound of gunfire and to stand still when he jumped into the saddle from behind.
Apparently, he pulled only one big job in Utah, the 1897 Pleasant Valley Coal Co. payroll robbery at Castle Gate. But between heists, he and his Wild Bunch gang often hid out in isolated nooks and crannies on Utah's Colorado Plateau.
I set out to track the historical and Hollywood outlaw in Utah but got only as far as St. George when I started running into a third persona: the apocryphal Butch, who is in some ways the most interesting because of the people who told me about him.
Legend, lore and facts
Sprawling St. George is the capital of Utah's Dixie, so named because Mormon church leaders dispatched pioneers like Butch's father, Maximillian Parker, to settle and propagate cotton here around the time of the Civil War.
Downtown, at the Washington County Library, I met bear-sized Bart Anderson, a retired St. George hematologist, historian and folklorist, widely known as Ranger Bart because he has devoted his golden years to giving slide shows at nearby national and state parks.
Of the 111-program repertoire, the one on Butch is the most popular.
It features some well-known vintage photos of the outlaw, including the mugshot taken when he was sent to the Wyoming Territorial Penitentiary for horse-stealing in 1894 and a group portrait of the Wild Bunch dressed like city slickers. That picture, thought to have been taken in 1900, was proudly displayed in the window of a Fort Worth photography studio. When law enforcement officials spotted it, they used it to create wanted posters.
The Butch it portrays is a handsome, affable-looking man with a mischievous smile beneath his mustache. By many accounts, he charmed locals and lawmen, paid a penniless widow's mortgage, rode back for his dog in the middle of an escape and never took a man's life (though his Wild Bunch henchman Harvey Logan, a.k.a. Kid Curry, is often remembered as a psychopathic killer).
"Butch was a contagious fellow, well-liked," Anderson said. "The movie got that much right."
But interviews with scores of people revealed what Anderson considers fallacies in William Goldman's Oscar-winning "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" screenplay: Elzy Lay was the real brains of the gang. The relationship between Butch and Sundance's girlfriend, Etta Place, played in the movie by Katharine Ross, was far from platonic.
And, as so many locals claim, Butch didn't die in South America on Nov. 6, 1908. Instead, he and Sundance rode all the way back to Utah, stopping in Mexico to meet Pancho Villa.
Others have tried to prove the opposite, including writer Anne Meadows. In her book "Digging Up Butch and Sundance," she marshals documentary evidence about the movements of Butch, Sundance and Etta after they fled the U.S. in 1901 and reports on the inconclusive exhumation of a grave thought to contain the remains of the outlaws in the village of San Vicente, Bolivia.
The movie takes a middle ground by leaving their fate to the imagination but faithfully underscores the passing of the outlaw era in the scene in which Butch takes Etta riding on a bicycle, a newfangled contraption at the time not about to supplant the horse, in his opinion. The scene, set to Burt Bacharach and Hal David's "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head," was filmed in the ghost town of Grafton on the Smithsonian Butte Road Scenic Backway, a graded dirt road southwest of Zion Canyon National Park.
At the cleaned-up cemetery, I found a historic marker and artificial flowers on the hard earth graves of Mormon pioneers. They settled here around 1860 just down the Virgin River from the magnificent red rock cathedrals of Zion Canyon, but floods, disease and hostile Indians made the colony unsustainable. By 1910, most of them had moved on, leaving Grafton to Hollywood location scouts who found backdrops in southern Utah for a passel of westerns, including "The Deadwood Coach," with Tom Mix (1924), "My Friend Flicka" (1943) and John Ford's "Rio Grande" (1950).
Down the hill, the same historic preservationists who rehabbed the cemetery have fixed up an old Grafton homestead and the schoolhouse that Butch and Etta passed on their bicycle. Cattle still graze in nearby pastures and, of course, the Navajo sandstone cliffs behind the ghost town never needed restoration.
After that, I drove east through the red-and-white slick-rock country along Utah 9, then turned north on U.S. 89, another showstopper of a road that runs through the hamlet of Orderville, where shops sell porcelain dolls and custom-made coffins. In the late afternoon, the lowering sun highlights the edges of the nearby Markagunt and Paunsaugunt plateaus with colors you would never find in a paintbox and searches into side canyons for bad guys on the lam.
I turned east on Utah 12, headed for Ruby's Inn, on the threshold of amazing Bryce Canyon, whittled from limestone into a gallery of pinnacles and spires known as hoodoos. Mormon pioneer Ebenezer Bryce, who gave his name to the landmark that is now a national park, once said, "It's a helluva place to lose a horse."
It would be just as hard to find a horse -- or, for that matter, a fugitive from justice -- in Red Canyon, an overture to Bryce a few miles west of the national park turnoff. Its Cassidy Trail fingers north into a network of gulches, lined by tangled cedars, scree, hoodoos and vermilion-colored cliffs, where locals say a posse tracked a teenage Butch when he took up rustling.
Bryce Canyon Pines, a nearby motel, offers daylong trail rides to the remains of one of the stone cabins where he is thought to have stashed fresh horses for the Pony Express-style relay escapes he perfected. But with snow on the ground when I was there, all I could do was clamber up the side of Cassidy Draw to ascertain that Butch knew a good hide-out when he saw one.
The next day, I drove west to the ranching town of Panguitch, with a main street made wide enough for a wagon to turn around. Its block-long business district has old-fashioned, Western storefronts occupied by cafes and shops, including Cowboy Collectibles, where I found reproductions of Wild Bunch wanted posters.
Panguitch is where Butch's youngest sister, Lula Parker Betenson, spent her last years after writing "Butch Cassidy, My Brother," published in 1975. The book confounded Western scholars with its assertion that Butch arrived at the Parker home in nearby Circleville in 1925 driving a new black Ford, unscathed by the bullets of federales who supposedly had killed him and Sundance.
Lula was just a toddler when her big brother left home, but in the 1930s she believed widely publicized claims that William T. Phillips of Spokane, Wash., was Butch. Later, she changed her mind, saying she knew where the real Butch was buried but planned to take the secret to her grave. She died in 1980.
Fame, Hollywood style
Ranches, barns and pastures line the 20-mile stretch of U.S. 89 north of Panguitch. West of the road just before Circleville, I spotted the lonesome old Parker homestead beside an alfalfa field and a poplar windbreak. It is privately owned, but there was no one to stop me from inspecting the wood cabin with a loft where Butch likely slept as a boy.
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