Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

<i>In Search of Butch Cassidy</i> (review)

1978; University of Hawaii Press; Volume: 1; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/bio.2010.0130

1529-1456

Edwin Palmer Hoyt,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Reviews Larry Pointer, In Search of Butch Cassidy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977. 294 pp. $9.50. Whatever you might call In Search of Butch Cassidy you could not call it a biography. For a biography has form, and this book is formless; a biography has style and this book is styleless; a biography is a story and this book is a mishmash of stories. As a biography it is so complete a failure that the publishers wisely avoided the term in their blurbs and book-jacket copy. That is not to say that In Search of Butch Cassidy is not a worthwhile contribution to Western Americana. Mr. Pointer is an indefatigable researcher, and he has kept his nose down to the subject for a long time. Like all of us, he makes the occasional error: on page 142 he refers to the Denver News; on page 167 to the Rocky Mountain News, which is correct. There are some other problems of this nature but they are more properly the province of the eventual biographer who might take Mr. Pointer's material, shape it, give it character, and make of this fascinating story a readable book. For the story itself can in no way be faulted, and Mr. Pointer has made of me a believer in his thesis: that Butch Cassidy was not, as reported, killed, along with The Sundance Kid, in a shootout with a band of Bolivian Cavalry after careers as holdup men in South America . In fact, contends Pointer, he survived that encounter; changed his face and identity; and returned to America to live a ripe old age, only to die miserably and helpless with his boots off in bed. But all the poignancy, the soul of the man, the color of his life, is 106 biography Vol. 1, No. 2 lost in this pedantic telling, and that is why it is not biography, but a researcher's report of his findings. Mr. Pointer begins in the preface by telling us what the book is not. He follows that with an introduction which tells the story of the motion picture Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He names the actors and criticizes their performances and then launches into his spiel. The film is all fiction, and he is about to present the facts. But he does not; the first chapter is a regurgitation of the legend. Finally, however, he does come to grips with his subject, in a most lackadaisical manner. What he is telling here is not the story of Butch Cassidy, but how the story of Butch Cassidy has come to be unearthed. And in this, the book lives up precisely to its title. Anyone interested in the processes by which the truth was discovered, down to the quarrels among the discoverers, will find this book his meat. It is written, then, for a very specialized market, the Western history buffs. And for them, except for its turgid style, I would say it is fascinating material for consideration , critiques, reviews, and short talks. When Mr. Pointer is citing sources and describing his researches, he is at his very best. When he is trying to tell us something about Butch Cassidy and his West, he flounders in a sea of detail, and throws away all the drama of a romantic life. And it is not as if he did not have the material for a marvelous book thrust at him. For one of the major sources of this book is a manuscript entitled The Bandit Invincible , the Story of Butch Cassidy, by William T. Phillips, written in 1934. William T. Phillips was the name assumed by the man who had been Butch Cassidy. It is a third-person account, only occasionally lapsing absent-mindedly into first-person. Mr. Pointer has been so faithful to it that he has rendered it, page after page, with all its misspellings and grammatical gaffes. Perhaps someone should have advised him to print the entire manuscript as an appendix, with all its warts if need be, and then clean it up for readers in the book itself. Butch Cassidy had but a few years of education in his native Utah...