Butch Cassidy robbing an Idaho hood



By Jim Banholzer


Butch woke up on the right side of the bed. He had slept with a chew in his mouth and it still tasted fresh. He looked out on the ruby red sky to the north and saw that this would be another fine day. A gruff old Indian man had been car-ing for his bay horse for a fortnight. He tossed the man thirteen silver dollars and all of them landed head’s up on a bench. Butch’s horse was glistening. It even had some gold teeth. Butch could afford such things.
Still early, he tramped into the Bountiful, Utah bar, asking for a shot and shave. In those days, you needn’t join a club to get a jolt of red-eye to open the morning wound. He told a group of young lads that he would be back later with a special treat for them, as they hung on his every word. Butch tipped the barber and barkeep handsomely, and then held up a map of Montpelier to the crimson light. He was familiar with this Idaho area from borrowing money from stagecoaches. Butch’s motto was that you could never case a joint too closely; you just want to make sure you did it surreptitiously –enough to blend in, like a snake sagging unnoticed, in an old wagon wheel rut, but geared up and raring to strike.
Snakes have purposes too though. Snakes get rid of rats and Butch was fully intent in cleaning out that Idaho bank from some of its diseased money, that lazy August afternoon. It was actually August 13. The thirteenth deposit of the day had just been made; thirteen dollars at 3:13. Thus, it was marked as an unlucky day for the banks records. Butch galloped evenly into town and tied his bay horse across the street from the grand depository. He sauntered by the front door, and then quickly yanked the lone teller in by the ear. He fastened tight the window-blind and taped a “back in five” sign to the door’s beveled glass.
The unauthorized withdrawal was over easy –like a two-minute egg with little mess. A hailed police officer gave half-hearted chase on a borrowed bicycle, but soon gave up. Butch then obeyed all traffic rules and customs of the area. Appearing to be a shining paragon of kindness, he tipped his hat gently to the ladies he passed along the length of the trail. He giggled their googling babies by tossing morsels of scrumptious candy into their perambulators, never missing a basket.


A thousand crystallizing points of light lit up across Idaho bars that night. Something huge had happened and the news spread over telegraph wires like a quicksilver comet. Miners and brakemen weary from their daily drudge now had a great tale to romanticize and perhaps embellish a little bit on their own. Drunkards were heard to yell “Have you heard what he’s gone and done did now?” Pinkerton agents handed newspapers like the Hailey Times “Wanted Dead or
Alive” posters and the tabloids wildly speculated for decades about what they did with the money. Readers were fed precisely what they hungered for; some real live west action for chatting about in backgrounds behind whips cracking at rodeos. Even today, on this far side of two Halley comets, when motorcycle mama’s pass through Montpelier on sidecars, they imagine the actual event and began making up their own wild versions replete with impossible angles. Some of these stories even contemplate that everything Butch did that day –including robbing the bank were pure acts of a gentleman hero, since the bank had that week, foreclosed earlier than what was necessary on some poor potato farmers.
Butch kept his word too, to the kids back in Bountiful. Late that winter, one evening when the snow had temporarily warmed, he quietly came through town like a late Santy Claus, heaping out his jingle-bell change of thirteen silver dollars, all landing heads down in the gutter for the kids to wake up to and chip out from the hardened ice the next morning. He figured that if these young rapscallions are going to get a little gold tooth grin, like the horse they gotta to do a little work for it.