The Last Outlaws - Thom Hatch

For all that I do love (some) Westerns, I haven't read much about them. The reality is often not so gripping and neatly resolved as the fiction. But my dad included The Last Outlaws: The Lives and Legends of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in the last batch of books, so it seemed like a good place to start, especially since I don't know a lot about either of them (that's a Western I've never gotten around to seeing).

So I didn't know that both of them were strongly opposed to shooting anyone, or to robbing average folk. Well, robbing them in terms of rifling through their pockets. If they had money in a bank or on a train, they were out of luck. I didn't realize the two of them had been operating independently for years before they teamed up, and that it was largely Sundance joining Butch's preexisting group. Frankly, Sundance wasn't terribly successful as a bandit operating on his own. He doesn't seem to have possessed the patience and foresight Cassidy did.  I didn't know that both men would leave banditry behind for periods of time, working at mines or ranches, usually with horses or mules. Sometimes they left because they got the itch to go, and sometimes they had to leave because the law came sniffing around.

Not that the law necessarily had much success catching them. Butch was the more gregarious of the two, well-liked most everywhere he went, but both of them had a knack for making friends anywhere they stayed for long. Probably because they were generous with time and money to their neighbors, and had generally courteous manners. Sundance was more likely to get heavily drunk, but neither was the type to get soused and start trouble, which is the sort of thing people come to appreciate. Which is how you get outlaws with plenty of people willing to shelter them, guide them, even speak to the governor about amnesty for past crimes on their behalf. Think of The Fugitive, and how none of Kimble's friends were interested in help the marshals.

One frustrating aspect is the gaps in the story. Records from the 19th century aren't as extensive as I might like, so there are significant stretches where Hatch has to guess at what they were up to, whether or not they could have been involved with a particular heist. Etta Place (Sundance's longtime lady love) is the source of a lot of that, since there's no record of who she was before joining the group, and there's no concrete evidence of what happened to her. She simply drops out of the story after a theft she may have taken part in Villa Mercedes (it's interesting that on the maps included at the beginning, that theft is listed as "alleged", rather than the Rio Gallegos bank robbery, which Hatch argues in the book has less evidence for being Butch and Sundance). I understand Hatch's need to try and fill in the blanks, but the suppositions do run a bit long. There's a stage at which all the guessing becomes pointless. There are also segments of the book where he begins describing other relevant people and their backstories, and it feels too much like a list. Hatch tries for natural transitions, using one person's history to lead to the next, but it doesn't always hold, and as thin as some of the details are, it might have been better to skip a few to maintain narrative momentum.

I wasn't terribly interested in the last two chapters, which deal with the possibility Butch and Sundance lived longer than is suspected, and with their longevity in the public mind. I know both of those go to the "legends" aspect touted in the title, but it's not something I'm concerned with, as I barely knew the "lives" part prior to this. The Last Outlaws is a good starting point if you're as familiar with Butch and Sundance, their lives, and their cohorts, as I was. It should be easy to follow and not a difficult read, and you can peruse the bibliography to see if there are other sources to track down for a more scholarly approach.