Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The Most Wanted Bandits! True facts about The Wild Bunch. Historian and author Mike Bell tells the true story about Butch, Sundance, and the Wild Bunch. At one time the most wanted men in the West who were made into heroes by Hollywood. “Butch Cassidy is a bad man. He is the worst man in four states…The achievements of Jesse James and his followers pale into tawdry insignificance before those of “Butch” Cassidy and his 500….As a killer he has earned a reputation during the last ten years probably equaled in the West only by “Wild Bill” Hickock,” said a letter to several major newspapers in March 1898. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid remain two of the most popular outlaws of the old west. But
much of what is believed about them derives from the mythmaking of the popular press, the railroads and the Pinkerton Detective Agency as the nineteenth century became the twentieth, a process that continued with a revival of interest in the outlaws in the nineteen thirties. The 1969 movie about the pair introduced audiences to a new, laid-back, light-hearted, wise-cracking version of the pair of outlaws, but reinforced some of the myths and created new ones. The hunt for the real Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid goes on.
