13 April: Butch Cassidy

On this date in 1866, Butch Cassidy, notorious US train and bank robber, was born. Here are ten things you might not know about him.

1. His real name was Robert LeRoy Parker.
2. He was born in Beaver, Utah, the eldest child of Maximilian Parker and Ann Campbell Gillies. The couple had converted to the Mormon religion in Britain and had responded to Brigham Young’s call for overseas members of the Church to help establish communities in Utah. His family were cattle farmers. His parents went on to have 12 more children, so always struggled to make ends meet.
3. Butch was raised as an honest kid. As a teenager, he went to town to buy a pair of jeans. The shop was a long ride from his home and when he got there, the shop was closed. He then committed his first criminal offence - he broke into the shop and stole the jeans, and a pie. However, he left a note for the shopkeeper promising to return and pay for what he'd taken. The shopkeeper, however, had Butch arrested. He was acquitted, but it shook his opinions of the law and people in authority.
4. So how did he come to be called Butch Cassidy? He left home at 13 and worked at numerous jobs in cattle farming and trade. For a time he worked in a butcher's shop and got the nickname "Butcher", which was shortened to Butch. He'd disassociated himself from his family. In due course he met a cattle rustler named Mike Cassidy who mentored him until Cassidy had to flee town to escape the law. Butch began asking people to call him Butch Cassidy in honour of his mentor. That's the official story, although Mike Cassidy's family claim he was born in 1868, which would make him younger than Butch, so who knows?
5. Butch Cassidy's first bank robbery took place on June 24, 1889, when he and several companions absconded with over $20,000 from the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride, Colorado.
6. In 1890, he bought a ranch near Dubois, Wyoming. The ranch was never hugely successful and is thought to have been a façade for dodgy dealings and involvement with local outlaws.
7. The popular view is that Butch Cassidy was the leader of a gang called The Wild Bunch, and that his best friend was Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, aka The Sundance Kid. Historical records suggest neither is true. Historians studying the records of Joe LeFors, a lawman who pursued the gang, found that Butch Cassidy was mentioned only once, and the Sundance Kid not at all. They concluded that the leaders of the gang were actually Harvey Logan (Kid Curry) and Will “News” Carver. Butch's best friend is now believed to have been William Ellsworth “Elzy” Lay, who he'd known since 1889, and the Sundance Kid was merely another member of the gang.
8. He may have been a bank robber, but he was not by nature a violent man, and is said to have been proud of the fact that he never killed anyone. People who knew him described him as a polite man who avoided violence.
9. Butch Cassidy eventually fled to South America to flee the law, and bought property there with the Sundance Kid, which is probably where people get the idea they were best friends, although it's likely Sundance rocked up in South America at a later date.
10. According to the official story, Butch and Sundance were killed in 1908 in Bolivia during a shootout connected with a payroll robbery, believed to have been carried out by Cassidy and Sundance. When strangers arrived in a village three days after the robbery, suspicious villagers called soldiers in and the strangers died in the ensuing fight. The bodies were buried in unmarked graves in a San Vicente cemetery. However, there is no evidence that Butch and Sundance had anything to do with the robbery or the shootout. 20th century researchers had the bodies exhumed from the San Vicente cemetery and determined that they were not Butch and Sundance. Nobody knows, then, what happened to them, but there were alleged sightings of Butch in America by people who knew him, as recently as the 1920s. There's a theory that he returned to the US, adopted the alias William T. Phillips, married, and died in Spokane, Washington in 1937.

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Closing the Circle

A stable wormhole has been established between Earth and Infinitus. Power Blaster and his friends can finally go home.

Desi Troyes is still at large on Earth - Power Blaster has vowed to bring him to justice. His wedding to Shanna is under threat as the Desperadoes launch an attempt to rescue their leader. 

Someone from Power Blaster's past plays an unexpected and significant role in capturing Troyes.

The return home brings its own challenges. Not everyone can return to the life they left behind, and for some, there is unfinished business to be dealt with before they can start anew.

Ben Cole in particular cannot resume his old life as a surgeon because technology no longer works around him. He plans a new life in Classica, away from technology. Shanna hears there could be a way to reverse his condition and sets out to find it, putting herself in great danger. She doesn't know she is about to uncover the secret of Power Blaster's mysterious past.

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Completes The Raiders Trilogy. 

Other books in the series:

Book One

Book Two