Butch Cassidy’s Surrender Offer

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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.’

It’s no surprise that Butch was ready to call it quits. He was not your typical outlaw. In fact, he was not unlike the character portrayed by Paul Newman in the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. (For once Hollywood might have gotten something right.) Butch could be amusing and disconcerting, and at times self-deprecating–traits that would seem out of place for a turn-of-the-century criminal.

Butch was hardly cut out to be a fugitive. He enjoyed the friendship of law-abiding citizens. Even while wanted by the law, he spent much of his time peacefully in communities where he not only seemed to get along well with his neighbors but also tended to develop close relationships–Wyoming’s Dubois, Lander and Star Valley; the Brown’s Park area of Colorado; and in later years, Cholila, Argentina.

Prior to walking into Orlando Powers’ office that day in 1899, Butch and the attorney had never met. But they had previously done business. In 1896 Butch’s friend Matt Warner and two others, Dave Wall and E.B. Coleman, had been arrested for the murder of two men in a dispute over a mining claim near Vernal, Utah. Warner and Wall were without funds, and Butch made arrangements through his Wyoming lawyer, Douglas Preston, to hire Powers and his partner, D.N. Straupp, to defend them. To obtain the money for the lawyers’ fee, Butch robbed a bank in Montpelier, Idaho. (Powers later denied this, claiming he was paid by relatives of E.B. Coleman.)

At the meeting in Powers’ office, the lawyer patiently listened to Butch Cassidy insist that he was not as bad as people painted him, that he had never killed a man in his life, and that he never robbed individuals, only banks and railroads. When Butch was through, Powers asked, ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Just this,’ Butch answered. ‘You’re the best lawyer in Utah. You know who’s who and what’s what. You’ve got a lot of influence. I thought maybe you could fix things with the governor to give me a pardon or something so I wouldn’t be bothered if I settle down and promise to go straight. I’ll give you my word on it. Is there any way it could be fixed?’

According to Kelly, the lawyer’s reply was not encouraging. He told Butch that he would like to help him, but there were obstacles. For one thing, he said, the governor of Utah, Heber M. Wells, could only issue a pardon for crimes committed in Utah, and so far Cassidy had not been convicted of any crimes there. He was suspected of the 1897 robbery of the Pleasant Valley Coal Company payroll at Castle Gate, Utah, and if he pled guilty to that crime, or was tried and convicted for it, a pardon by the governor would be effective in Utah, but it would offer no protection against warrants for crimes Butch might have committed in other states. ‘No, Cassidy,’ Powers said, ‘I’m afraid you’ve gone too far to turn back now, at least to settle in any of the Western states. The best advice I can offer you is to leave the country and make a new start someplace where you are not known.’

Butch thanked him for the advice and said: ‘You know the law, and I guess you’re right; but I’m sorry it can’t be fixed some way. You’ll never know what it means to be forever on the dodge.’

There is another version of Butch Cassidy’s meeting with Powers–in A.F.C. Greene’s ‘Butch’ Cassidy in Fremont County, a monograph that appeared around 1940 and was reproduced by Jim Dullenty in The Butch Cassidy Collection (Hamilton, Mont., Rocky Mountain Press, 1986). As in Kelly’s version, the scene is the attorney’s office in Salt Lake City. Greene was more descriptive. He says Powers’ stenographer ushered a man into the office who was’somewhere in his forties, although some of the lines on his big face might have come from hard living in the open, or from whisky; his hair, which had been flaxen, was shot with grey; a rough looking customer, dressed in overalls and a blue denim jumper.’

According to Greene, this conversation took place:

Cassidy: Is what I say to you to go as a client consulting his lawyer from now on?

Powers: You mean, a privileged communication?

Cassidy: That’s it.

Powers: All right then.

Cassidy: I’m Butch Cassidy.

Powers: Well, what can I do for you?

Cassidy: I’ll tell you. There’s a heap of charges out against me and considerable money offered for me in rewards. I’m getting sick of hiding out; always on the run and never able to stay long in one place. Now, when it comes to facts, I’ve kept close track of things and I know there ain’t a man left in the country who can go on the stand and identify me for any crime. All of them have either died or gone away. I’ve been thinking. Why can’t I go and just give myself up and stand trial on one of those old charges?

Powers: No use. You’ve robbed too many big corporations in your time. I do not doubt what you say, but if you were ever to go on trial you can depend on it, some one of those companies would bring someone to the stand who’d swear against you. No, you’ll have to keep on the run, I’m afraid.

In substance, the two versions vary little, and had either author paraphrased the conversation, the slight differences would have likely gone unnoticed. However, both Kelly and Greene chose to report the conversation verbatim. Even then, the most notable difference concerns how Butch Cassidy was dressed. Kelly says ‘well-dressed,’ which suggests city clothes, while Greene says ‘overalls and a blue denim jumper,’ as if Cassidy had recently come off the trail. Granted, this is a minor inconsistency, but it does raise one’s curiosity.

Something else in Kelly’s version is bothersome. He says Butch introduced himself to Powers as ‘George’ LeRoy Parker. Cassidy’s real name was Robert LeRoy Parker, a fact later verified by his family and by church records. It’s true that during his outlaw career Butch did use the name George Cassidy, and throughout his book Charles Kelly mistakenly refers to him as George. However, if Butch chose to bare his soul to Powers and seek his help, would he not have used his real name? Again, this minor discrepancy would mean little if it were not that Kelly was purporting to provide a verbatim account of the meeting.

Partly because of this slip, I chose Greene’s version over Kelly’s for my book on Cassidy, reducing Kelly’s account to an endnote reference. Another reason I favored Greene is that he had been a contemporary of Cassidy’s and might have even known him personally. What’s more, it’s rumored that Greene was related by marriage to the John Simpson family, who were Butch’s neighbors and close friends when he had his ranch near Dubois, Wyo.

As minor as these discrepancies were, I couldn’t let them alone, so recently I dug a little deeper into the matter, hoping to find the source (or sources) of the two accounts. Thanks to a tip from Wild Bunch writers Dan Buck and Anne Meadows, it did not take long to learn where Greene’s version came from. He took it word for word from Frederick R. Bechdolt’s 1924 book Tales of the Old Timers, a source that I had failed to track down when I was writing my biography of Cassidy.

I was aware of the Bechdolt book at the time, but it had been out of print for years, and after a brief search for a copy I gave up looking. Frankly, I was put off by the title, thinking it was just one of those many potboilers on the Old West cranked out in the 1920s. After all, Bechdolt was primarily a novelist and short-story writer whose stories occasionally had been adapted by Hollywood for early two-reel Westerns.

I had underestimated Bechdolt. It seems he also turned out some decent frontier history.

So, if Bechdolt’s book was the first published account of the story of Butch’s offer to surrender, what was his source? Bechdolt’s Tales of the Old Timers was mostly about southwestern frontier characters. He devoted only one chapter to Butch Cassidy. Like Charles Kelly and A.F.C. Greene, he did not include footnotes or endnotes, but he did provide a single page of ‘Acknowledgments.’ Among the names mentioned there with a connection to Cassidy were W.A. Richards (Wyoming governor during part of Butch’s outlaw career), Will Simpson (prosecutor at Butch’s trial in 1894) and James Simpson (Will Simpson’s son). Governor Richards and Will Simpson were at least possible sources for Bechdolt’s account of the Cassidy-Powers meeting. However, neither man was on the scene at the time of the meeting nor even indirectly involved in the incident.

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