No one who relished every second of George Roy Hill’s brilliant and now cult 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid can be surprised to learn that the real life Butch and Sundance made a lasting impression on everyone they met. Leaving no diaries or personal accounts, they wrote few letters, but managed to write themselves handsomely into the history books and the legends – and they are still writing.

We know that Robert LeRoy Parker, alias Butch Cassidy, and Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid, were something special. Both were respected by most who knew them, and had been born to caring families in the West and East respectively. Both were restless youths who left home early, eventually meeting to discover a shared love of adventure and a cheerful disregard for the law.

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All written and oral records confirm that talented screenwriter William Goldman and megastar actors Paul Newman and Robert Redford got the basic characters just about right: Butch was affable, good-humoured and intelligent while Sundance, warier but still friendly, was the quieter of the two – though he liked sharp suits and monogrammed clothing. Both were criminals rather than killers. Indeed some historians believe that right up to the final shoot-out in Bolivia neither Butch nor Sundance had blood on their hands. If true this is likely to have been a matter of sheer efficiency rather than conscience – for years they were clearly happy to ride and rob with some very desperate and bloody men.

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What is certainly true is that Butch and Sundance were consummate professionals at their craft, undoubtedly the best in their business in every way: longer active careers, more sophisticated planning, higher success rates, less prison time and greater financial returns for a given investment of risk. However, as law enforcement entered the telegraph age and the frontier finally closed in aspects of a hard, violent but heroic, action-packed era. We would ride, as nearly as possible exactly as they did, the almost inaccessible trails that linked the robberies, escapes and hideouts of the two most elusive and successful outlaws of the Wild West.

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Where we went and what we experienced we have recorded faithfully and placed in their proper (and sometimes improper) historical context, which in turn is as accurate as five years careful prior research could make it. As well as our adventures and the many colourful characters we met, we have described baldly the life-threatening hazards, hopes and fears, tensions and often angry dissentions and confrontations of riding the Outlaw Trail, whether then or now.
Enjoy the read.

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Simon Casson & Richard Adamson