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New Details Discovered on the Life of Butch Cassidy

A rare book collector claims he now has a manuscript that shows a different recollection of the life of Old West outlaw Butch Cassidy.

Cassidy was believed to have died in a 1908 shootout in Bolivia, but new information revealed in a new 200-page manuscript titled “Bandit Invincible: The Story of Butch Cassidy” suggests that the outlaw may have lived past that time under another name in Washington state.

Another version of the manuscript was available previously but was only half as long and was written by William T. Phillips, a machinist who died in Spokane in 1937.

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The new version dates back to 1934, and according to Utah book collector Brent Ashworth and Montana author Larry Pointer, the text in it contains evidence that the work was not a biography of Cassidy, but an autobiography, and that Phillips was an alias used by the outlaw.

But others aren’t convinced.

“Total horse pucky,” Cassidy historian Dan Buck said, according to AP. “It doesn’t bear a great deal of relationship to Butch Cassidy’s real life, Butch Cassidy’s life as we know it.”

The “Bandit Invincible” author claims that Cassidy was kind-hearted and courageous and that he knew him since childhood.

According to Ashworth, owner of B. Ashworth’s Rare Books and Collectibles in Provo, some descriptions in the manuscript fit details of Cassidy’s life too perfectly to have come from anywhere else besides the account of the outlaw himself, including an encounter he had with a judge in 1895.

The account of the event in the manuscript gives details including the judge offering Cassidy a handshake which he refused, that no one else would have bothered to add, according to Pointer.

“What’s really remarkable to me is that, who else cares?” Pointer said, according to AP. “Who else would have remembered it in that kind of detail… about an offer of a handshake and refusing it in a prison in Wyoming in 1895?”

Buck believes that Philips knew Cassidy and was not actually him.

He dug up a grave in Bolivia in 1991 with his wife which was supposed to be Cassidy’s final resting place. However, DNA testing proved otherwise.

The earliest documentation on Philips is his marriage to Gertrude Livesay in 1908. This was three months after Cassidy’s last known letter from Bolivia, according to Pointer.

Phillips and his wife moved to Spokane in 1911, where Pointer believes Cassidy revealed who he really was, and that he did not die in the shootout in Bolivia.

William R. Phillips, the adopted son of Phillips, believed that Cassidy was his stepfather according to Pointer who interviewed him in the 1970s before he died.

Phillip’s wife Gertrude denied the claim, but Pointer believes it was only to avoid unwanted notoriety.

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