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The Notorious Men of the Wild West

Khalid Elhassan December 4, 2019 32 min

21. The Mormon Kid Gone Bad

Butch Cassidy’s mugshot from Wyoming’s Territorial Prison, in 1894. Encyclopedia Britannica

Robert Leroy Parker (1866 – 1908), better known as Butch Cassidy, was born in Utah to British immigrants who had arrived in the Beehive State as Mormon pioneers. He left home as a teen to work on a dairy farm, where he was mentored by a cattle rustler named Mike Cassidy, whose surname he adopted. A subsequent job as a butcher earned him the nickname “Butch”.

Cassidy’s first brush with the law occurred at age fourteen, when he entered a closed store and stole jeans and a pie, leaving behind an IOU. He was tried, but acquitted. By age eighteen, Cassidy had graduated to heavier duty stuff, working with horse thieves and delivering stolen animals to buyers. In 1889, Cassidy, with the help of three associates, robbed his first bank in Telluride, Colorado. He then fled to a remote Utah hideout known as Robbers Roost.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.