The Southwest U.S. is rife with tall tales and legend of lost gold mines, lost treasures, stagecoach and bank robberies and more. One such tale begins in the small community of Castle Gate, Utah. In 1897, the Pleasant Valley Coal Company was shipping its payroll in by rail. On that April day, three cowboys were loitering in town waiting for the train. When the two guards and the paymaster unloaded the money (an estimated $8,800), the three cowboys held them at gunpoint and road away in broad daylight. The paymaster immediately attempted to call the sheriff, but the phone lines had been cut.

As it turns out, the three cowboys were members of the very first Butch Cassidy gang, with Butch Cassidy himself playing the central role in the robbery. He and his men probably rode to a hideout in a place called Robber’s Roost along what was known as the Outlaw Trail. Located in southeastern Utah, Robber’s Roost was one of Cassidy’s favorite hiding places.

Attempts were made to follow the gang, but the money was never recovered. Mostly likely, the gang spent the money somewhere else in the Southwest before pulling their next job.

Born Robert LeRoy Park, Cassidy was born in the small town of Beaver, Utah, one of 13 children. His Mormon parents were ranchers and moved to Circleville when Roy, as he was called then, was 13 years old. His first known run-in with the law was when he let himself into a shop, took a pair of blue jeans, and left a note promising to pay later. Butch drifted for a while working ranches all across the West. It was at one of these ranches that he met an old rustler, Mike Cassidy, who became his mentor. At one point, he also worked in a butcher shop where he officially earned the nickname “Butch.” When he turned to a life of crime, he took the name Butch Cassidy so as not to besmirch his family name.

Butch Cassidy’s first official crime was in 1889, when he robbed the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride, Colorado and we went by the name of George Cassidy. He and the gang got away with $20,000 and rode to a hideout in Utah. Cassidy was one of the first bandits to develop the Outlaw Trail. The trail, known only to the bad guys, ran a mysterious path from Mexico, through Utah and ending in Montana. Along the way, gangs like Cassidy’s Wild Bunch linked together a series of hideouts and ranches for safe places to stay after pulling a job (places like Carlisle Ranch near Monticello). Coincidentally, Robber’s Roost is very close to Carlisle Ranch and Cassidy probably holed up there for the first time after the Telluride robbery.

Butch Cassidy and his Hole-in-the-Wall Gang established their most famous hideout at the Hole-in-the-Wall, Wyoming — a natural geologic feature that offer great protection and wide views of the surrounding country-side. This hideout came in handy after during the gang’s stint as horse thieves. Butch was eventually caught and spent a few years in jail in Wyoming then drifted south and turned to cattle rustling along the Utah-Arizona border. It was here he began to collect a group of hardened outlaw cowboys that he formed into the Wild Bunch. Members included Dick Maxwell, Elzy Lay, and Harry Longabaugh (the Sundance Kid), Henry Wilbur ‘Bub’ Meeks and Harvey “Kid Curry” Logan, Ben Kilpatrick (“Tall Texan”), Harry Tracy, Deaf Charley Hanks, and Tom Ketchum (“BlackJack”).

The Wild Bunch’s reputation was such that every crime committed in the West was laid at their feet. However, they specialized in train robbery and the gang was sometimes called the Train Robbers’ Syndicate. Though not every crime was committed by them, they certainly racked up an impressive total number of jobs. These outlaws held up banks and trains in South Dakota, Wyoming, New Mexico and Nevada, with dollars amount increasing on each job — like an estimated $70,000 for the holdup of a Rio Grande train near Folsom, New Mexico.

So great was the gang’s success that the Pinkerton Agency created a special file and recruited men all across the Southwest U.S. to track and find the Wild Bunch. Unlike many western gangsters, Butch Cassidy was smart. He disbanded the gang and headed to Europe and eventually to South American, where he, the Sundance Kid, and girlfriend Etta bought a ranch. Unfortunately, a Wyoming deputy or some other agent of the law either traveled to Bolivia and saw him by accident or tracked the gang there deliberately. At that point, Butch was on the lamb again and went back to robbing trains, banks and payrolls, this time in South America.

Legend says that Butch Cassidy died in Bolivia in 1908 in a great shootout with the Bolivian Army. However, that may not be the end of the story. His youngest sister, Lulu, swears that 16 years after his supposed death, he stopped in to visit her, and that he spent his remaining years in Washington state as a hunter and trapper, eventually dying of natural causes in 1937. Other evidence suggests that he faked his own death, sailed to Europe for a facelift and moved back to America to become an entrepreneur in Washington.