Announcer:

From the Library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad streets in New York city, you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision in global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE and indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now, at the NYSE and at ICE's Exchanges and Clearing Houses around the world. And now welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.

Josh King:

Call this the rewatchable season, cooped up in our homes, access to iTunes Movies, Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, SHOWTIME ANYTIME and now Disney+. Everything good and maybe not so good from the span of our content consuming lifetimes. It's just a few bucks and a password away. It's what we do when the debut of new original series has slowed to a trickle and the exhaustive efforts of major league baseball, the NBA, NHL and other pro sports have struggled to return to even a fan-free field of play. So as I wait for my Red Sox to do something more dramatic than live televised batting practice and wonder which hotel ballroom in Orlando my Celtics might be practicing in, I'm rewatching some of the classics and then studying them some more.

Josh King:

Two nights ago, it was Jaws and last night, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The classic 1969 Western directed by George Roy Hill, written by the great William Goldman and starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. It tells the story of the outlaw Robert Leroy Parker, also known as Butch Cassidy and his partner Henry Longabaugh who went by the name of the Sundance Kid. I watched the movie, then listened to Bill Simmons Rewatchables podcast where he and Sean Fennessey joined by the legendary screenwriter Aaron Sorkin broke the film down act by act.

Josh King:

The threesome agreed that the movie is one of America's best ever, eminently rewatchable and a film, which allowed Bill Goldman to claim the mantle of one of the country's greatest storytellers. But we should all be warned when we accept Hollywood's version of history as fact, just as we must exercise caution when accepting the prevailing narrative of any cultural icon. Ty Cobb was a violent racist on his way to recording Hall of Fame numbers. Donald Trump had the Midas touch as a real estate developer before becoming president. In the hands of a skilled sportswriter or a ghostwriter, these legends can become reality, as long as facts serve only as guidance open to interpretation.

Josh King:

Our guest today ought to know. Charles Leerhsen has seen revisionist history from both sides. Among his five books the author of Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty and out this week from Simon & Schuster Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw. Charles is also the cowriter along with the future 45th president of the United States of the 1990 Random House release, which spent seven weeks on the New York Times best seller list, Trump: Surviving at the Top. The Donald's follow-up to the art of the deal co-written by Tony Schwartz. As I said, this is the rewatchable season but maybe it's also the reconsideration season guided by facts of stories we've long held as true. Our conversation with the author Charles Leerhsen right after this.

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In our time of greatest need, we want to thank the true heroes around the world for stepping up, for taking care of us and keeping us safe with your expertise, your commitment, your sacrifice and your selflessness. We'll work together to create a brighter future and we thank you for reminding us what really matters. From all of us, thank you.

Josh King:

In my intro, I've talked about some of the stuff I've rewatched during the pandemic lockdown. Among other things was The Right Stuff, which I took in with my young friend Andrew [Seward 00:04:21] who at only 11 has become a consummate Chuck Yeager fan and lots of episodes of Seinfeld brought to NBC by programming legend Brandon Tartikoff. So when you think of American characters like Butch Cassidy, Ty Cobb, Donald Trump and Yeager and Tartikoff, a connective thread between them all is Charles Leerhsen, a longtime writer for Sports Illustrated, Esquire, Rolling Stone, the New York Times Magazine and Smithsonian, who's out this week with Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw. In this rewatchable and reconsideration season, Charles, it's great to have you Inside the ICE House.

Charles Leerhsen:

Wonderful to be here with you, Josh.

Josh King:

So Charles, what's it like bringing a book out in the middle of a pandemic?

Charles Leerhsen:

Yeah, usually it's like a book party and then they send you off to ... It's a rather ridiculous process and I think publishers are finally realizing that. They send you to some place and you sit there and talk to the people. Then they come up and then eight people come up and give you a book to sign. You stayed in a hotel that costs $400 dollars and throwing it out there and all that. So that process, if that gets swept aside by the pandemic and the accommodations, I think publishing will be all the better for it. But it is, I enjoy myself listening to podcasts and authors talking about their books and their methods and their frustrations. So I guess not only will it continue but probably it's going to take a new prominence in the process and I'm all for that.

Josh King:

So let's start off a little bit with the author himself and Charles, your bio notes you have three daughters. I do a little bit of armchair research and it suggests that one of them is an actress. Another a banker and a third, works as the Chief of Staff for the Chicago Transit Authority. My kids are still under our roof in these crazy times but entertainment, banking and especially public transportation are all in the spotlight during the pandemic. What's Nora telling you about the challenges of moving a couple million people out of the suburbs to downtown every day in Chicago?

Charles Leerhsen:

Well, it's funny you should ask because I was just talking to her today about should I go for my annual doctor checkup? What does she think as a professional? She's in Chicago. I'm in New York but so she was giving me this nuanced take on things. It all comes down to try to get in a train car with no one else in it. That's probably the best of all possible worlds, better than a taxi even. But we only have so much control over that so and my wife right now is on the way to a doctor's appointment. She's taking the water ferry, a water taxi from the bottom of the Brooklyn Bridge. It's an hour and a half each way to her doctor's appointment instead of maybe half hour. These are the times we live in so Nora's advising me both as a daughter and a lawyer. Telling me really the same thing is like, "Shut up and stay home."

Josh King:

Another one of your daughters, Charles, Deborah, is stationed in Hong Kong as head of global banking for HSBC. That's NYSE ticker symbol HSBC. Hong Kong has been on the frontlines of the corona virus. They were quick to close schools, issue stay at home orders, as a leading indicator of the trouble that might be heading our way back in January, February or March. What was she telling you, that she was seeing on the ground in Asia?

Charles Leerhsen:

HSBC's in an especially difficult position. Everyone's in a difficult position in Hong Kong right now. Their position is that they are and they aren't of Hong Kong and Hong Kong isn't of China. So it's like two levels of shaky ground. I think whatever is going on now, they expect this to be sort of a transitional period. But it's hard to say on the way to what. I don't think anyone knows. We're in a position now, where governments and philosophies are at war and how much they're willing to spend financially to be on for the sake of principle, is an open and interesting and kind of scary question right now.

Josh King:

Yeah. Charles, you had a long run in American magazinedom during the heyday of the printed periodical with turns at SI, Newsweek, People, Us Weekly. Your dad sold parts for the Mack Truck Company. Your mom was a waitress. How did you get your start putting pen to paper?

Charles Leerhsen:

It's the great American story. You don't have to be what your parents were and what they were, was great. My mom is still alive. She just had her 100th birthday a week ago.

Josh King:

Congratulations to her.

Charles Leerhsen:

Yeah, and still remembers all the coffee shops she worked in. I don't know, it just seemed like the natural thing for me to do. The people I admired, I wanted to imitate and do that. I went to Fordham. I was a working class Bronx kid and stumbled and bumbled my way on. Magazines were very glamorous then, not just to me but to a lot of people. They were a very alluring goal to work your way towards and I eventually was able to do that. That was my life for a long time before that world changed. I used to love horse racing and magazines. I worked for a horse racing magazine very early in my career and now, both of those things, the ground has shifted under them. They're things that we thought would last forever suddenly look very tenuous.

Josh King:

Things that would last forever suddenly tenuous. Charles, Sports Illustrated now owned by Authentic Brands Group. Newsweek's been through a string of owners and it's now a shell of its former self. People Magazine, one of the last big titles still held by Meredith after its acquisition of Time Inc. Us Weekly now owned by American Media, publisher of the National Enquirer. Given all that other than that there's other people publishing long-form journalism in different outlets. What's your take of where the world stands for the long-form magazine writer or article writer?

Charles Leerhsen:

Well, first of all I should say maybe I don't really like that term long-form. I think it's kind of off-putting. No one ever sits down and says, "Hey, I want to read something long." It's rough. I used to teach too, at CUNY City of New York Grad School of Journalism and I got to the point where I felt guilty sort of encouraging these kids to go on to this career. I didn't know what the career was. The career in fact had changed. Everyone now brought a cell phone with them and took video. I sound like an old codger when I complain about that. I'm not really complaining about it. I'm just it's not what it used to be.

Charles Leerhsen:

But meanwhile, there's certain little embers that are still flickering, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic. As we know, certain newspapers have become very important, more important than they were before even, more well read. The Washington Post, The Times but meanwhile, there's so many fewer newspapers. So I have to believe there's always be a market for good writing. Maybe it's shifting into books. Books are doing rather well, even in the pandemic. So I don't see that hunger and that desire disappearing from human nature or the social scene anytime soon.

Josh King:

But as you said, book's doing well even in the pandemic. I got my copy of Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw in the mail the other day. Given all the people that you've written about, I would say Butch Cassidy might be a mixture of both the doer and the personal image shaper. Why did you settle on him and how did you go about separating fact from fiction on a story that has had plenty of fiction over the last century, as you note all of the people who've tackled this topic?

Charles Leerhsen:

It sure has, yeah. It's kind of a throwback to old-school journalism how I came to settle on in the sense that I worked at Newsweek when Newsweek was really a fantastic place to work. It was like the major leagues and I was so proud to work there. The people on either side of me and up and down the aisles were all such great talents. But one of the ways that Newsweek worked was that you'd come in on a Monday and a editor would come by and say, "How about this? How about doing this?" The story might be, in my case, it might be go to Sylvester Stallone's house in Beverly Hills. Or it might be go to China to cover some sports story. Or go to Milwaukee or just do some story that you never thought about before.

Charles Leerhsen:

By the end of the week, this is the story of journalism itself. By the end of the week, in that case it was a weekly cycle, you were an instant expert and now you were telling the whole world what the deal was. On Monday, it may not have been something you paid a special ... They didn't come to you because they knew you were a buff about something or an expert in something. So that's how the Butch Cassidy thing came along. I had finished Ty Cobb and I was looking for something else to do. I started to go down the road with Yogi Berra and a book about Yogi Berra came out. I just couldn't get into Yogi Berra. It wasn't that interesting to me. Not that he wasn't a great player but I just couldn't get into it.

Charles Leerhsen:

So after a couple of months of poking around, I said to my editor, "Look, this is not going to be my thing." So he said, he's a kind of a Western buff, my editor at Simon & Schuster. He said, "How about Butch Cassidy?" which I knew nothing about. I hadn't seen the movie in about 40 years and I didn't know too much about Western history, only what I remembered from school. So I took it on as a challenge and I got into it. I got very lucky in the sense that he turned out to be ... With a Western outlaw, here you often find out that Hollywood has already coated them with varnish and painted them up nice and made them a hero and a glamorous figure.

Charles Leerhsen:

Then when you go to really do book research, book level research, you find out well, actually they were like drunken pimp and now, what am I going to do? But I didn't have that problem with Butch Cassidy because he actually turned out to be better in a way, in some ways. At least as good as the legend and in some ways better.

Josh King:

At 25 years old, you write, he possessed the complete cowboy skillset. It's not the dash of the movie, it's a bleak life of the monotony of the Intermountain West. Tell us about this poor Mormon farm boy that you first discovered in Utah's Circle Valley.

Charles Leerhsen:

Yeah. Well, he was just like I said the American way as you grow up and you have a germ or a spirit in you just not necessarily to do what your parents did. Sometimes it is and very often it isn't. In his case, his mother and father were dirt-poor even by local standards, farmers, Mormons. Both his mother and father had been born in England and converted to Mormonism over there when the Mormons, they wanted to establish a Mormon community. They picked Utah to do it and then they needed people to come there and farm and fill up the space. So one of the things they did was they went to England and had a missionary effort there. Two of the people they swept up were the people who became Butch Cassidy's mother and father.

Charles Leerhsen:

He grew up in a place around Centerville, Utah. Was born in Beaver, Utah and they moved soon after. It's just a simple wooden cabin and there were 13 children in there and two parents. It's really kind of hard to believe. One of the ways it was tough, you alluded to it was that it was boring. The life in the West, the cowboy life, the Western life was incredibly boring. I think that was a big motivating fact for him. You can see outside the cabin door there's a rock, where I guess with a hand drill, probably the kids in the family just drilled holes in the rock to pass the time of day after a certain point when the chores had been done.

Charles Leerhsen:

Butch looked around and he was like a lot of first-generation born people in this country, sons and daughters of immigrants said, "I don't want this to be my life. I want to do something better." whether you were born on the lower East Side of Manhattan or in Southern Utah. So he wanted, he dreamed of something better. He's a reader from an early age too and so he was able to see what was outside and what was beyond Southern Utah. He aspired to do that and his life as a criminal was actually, I think part of like a show business instinct that from an early age he was putting on shows with the local kids and all. He wanted life to be entertaining and a little bit more easy and lighthearted than he found it in the West.

Josh King:

So Bob Parker arrives in Colorado in 1884. He fits the mold maybe of a tramp about whom the poet Walt Whitman saw and you quote Whitman saw among the vast core of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, nomadic, miserably-waged men wandering far from home as proof that our Republican experiment notwithstanding its surface-successes is at heart an unhealthy failure. Whitman, from his perspective might have been writing about today, Charles. Mr. E.H. Harriman had another perspective though. What was America like in those final two decades, the 19th century both from the haves and have-nots as you rediscovered it through writing the book?

Charles Leerhsen:

Well, one thing I discovered was the West had its own unique history and from what was happening out there the government owned almost all of the land out there. This situation developed where corporations, railroads, banks, big cattle, wanted to, saw a chance for profit out there. But they needed people to move out there so they encouraged. They advertised, they propagandized through public relations efforts. John Fremont went out to Oregon and wrote about it the great adventures and try to get people to go out there. They encouraged them and in the process they lied to them. They told them, "It'd going to be easy out here to grow crops. You don't even have to use a plow. You just throw the seed on the ground and the crops come up."

Charles Leerhsen:

A lot of people believed that and went out there. Even some people who'd done a little research, they said, "Well, actually there's like half inch of rain a year, where you're telling me to move and to farm. How do I manage that?" And they said, there's a famous line where one of the promoters said, "Don't worry. The rain will follow the plow." In other words if you start farming, it'll start raining on ... Clouds will gather above you and soon you'll have enough water to grow crops and raise cattle. That didn't happen and that made people very desperate. Then what happened was in the East, you'd get about, I think it was 80 acres you could get if you applied for a homestead.

Charles Leerhsen:

But then the West they said, "Well, because the amount per square foot can't produce the crops, we're going to give you twice as much land, 162 acres." Well, that sounds great but what that created was isolation between people and depression. So you had people miserable, depressed, starving and at great distance from each other too, especially during the long winters. It created a weird, dystopian, horrible situation out there that was very different than what we see in the cowboy movies.

Josh King:

It's during this time, Charles, that our protagonist goes from Bob Parker to Butch Cassidy by way of as you write about it rapid movement and much horse thievery. Track him on this journey from Colorado to his thievery of a $40 dollar steed and his ultimate pardon by the governor of Wyoming with strict instructions to behave. This sort of prequel to Butch Cassidy that we don't see when we look at the DVD of the movie.

Charles Leerhsen:

Yeah. Well, here's this young man that wanted to ... He took this it's almost like a year abroad. He rode around the West looking and finding out what he could, just looking at things, looking at the world, looking at what was going on. There was something going on then called the cattle bubble where a lot of people were investing in cattle ranches from England, the British Isles and the United Kingdom and other places in Europe. All over America, average people back East were investing in this because it was said to be an investment that you couldn't fail at. Your money would double and triple in a year. Well, the cattle bubble burst and then that created a lot of problems too.

Charles Leerhsen:

He went around observing this. He went around to Montana where the copper mines were and copper mining was booming because back East, electricity was going in all over, in all the big cities. They needed the cables and the wires and the copper for that. So he observed that. He watched that. The story of Butch Cassidy is the story of a guy who swings back-and-forth between when he's trying to be a peaceful, law-abiding rancher and a decent young guy. He's very bored but then when he becomes, when he knocks off a bank or railroad or rustles a lot of cattle or horses and the authorities start chasing him, he doesn't like that either.

Charles Leerhsen:

He doesn't like having to, never being able to sit with his back to the door and always be wondering and worried. It just wasn't worth it. He and the Sundance Kid said too, in interviews actually, "No, this life is not worth it. The game is not worth the candle because you could knock of a train and the guy on the train doesn't know the combination to the safe and you get like $17 dollars, which you've got to split six ways with your compadres. You risked your life and now, you have wanted posters all over the state." Butch Cassidy spent some time in prison too. He had that taste of two years almost in prison, in the penitentiary in Laramie and he didn't want to go back there.

Charles Leerhsen:

People who'd been in those prisons, in those Western prisons tended to not want to go back there. A lot of them would kill themselves or very often they would kill themselves if they felt cornered and trapped. Basically they saw that they were going to be captured and sent back to prison. So it was this hard life but a life that he swung back-and-forth with between being ... Peace always looked better when he was far away from it. When he got into it, it seemed boring and his life was ... He was a young man trying to figure out what the American dream was.

Charles Leerhsen:

We should note, I probably should have said this even earlier that the thing about Butch Cassidy was that his mission in life was to bedevil the corporations, the banks, the railroads, the big cattle men who were out there. He never took money from the common man. When he'd rob a train, the passengers would be scared and they'd be offering their watches and their wallets. Butch and the gang would say, "No. We don't want your money. We want what's in the safe." because he was all about sticking to the man and he was not about hurting the little man physically or even financially.

Josh King:

As we veer into bedeviling the corporations and sticking it to the man, what we always like to do here Inside the ICE House is looking at how your story pertains to an NYSE listed company. In this case, the Union Pacific Railroad, NYSE ticker symbol UNP, which is now, trading near its all-time high of about $170 dollars a share. Charles, tell me about the Overland Limited and what it meant to America's Westward expansion.

Charles Leerhsen:

Well, it meant a lot. If you went by horse, it took you months to go just from one end of Utah to the next. So the railroad was a huge deal and huge technological improvement obviously. But one interesting thing I found about Butch Cassidy was he was at the very tail end of the train robbery era. The train robbers were getting to be kind of almost quaint and old-fashioned. I mean, they could stand there with a red lantern and tell the train to stop. Then hop on board and rob what they could and move on. It was very ... As soon as the telegraph came in, it was very easy to track these guys and put an end to them. So Harriman, there was a little overlap there where Harriman was very much agitated and annoyed by them.

Charles Leerhsen:

But it never really got too far beyond that. Now, the movie, tells a different story. The movie tells a story of Harriman being outraged and sending these where William Goldman invented this word the super-posse. It amounts to just loading on a couple of dozen guys in a boxcar and then having in the next couple of boxcars some horses. They go someplace, they leave the boxcars and they go hunting for crooks. So that's what the super-posse was but it played actually a very small part in Western history and a very small part in the story of Butch Cassidy.

Charles Leerhsen:

Although, there is this nice element where after the Wilcox train robbery in Wyoming that because of the telegraph, that Harriman could wake up in his 5th Avenue mansion and have a newspaper that told the story of what had happened that night while he was sleeping in Wyoming and that one of his trains got knocked off. So that was a nice little overlap but it wasn't ... By the time Butch and Sundance left for South America and ran away, the era of the train robber and the Western outlaw was coming to a rapid end. As William Goldman said about in the movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is a lot about how it's getting harder and harder to be an outlaw in the American West.

Josh King:

That Wilcox Station job, Charles, June 2, 1899 I guess the haul is according to some $55,000 dollars in cash and baubles from two safes of the train. The New York Times writes at the time, the passengers were badly scared but the robbers made no effort to molest them. You spent a lot of time with microfilm and microfiche. What impressions did you come away with about journalism at the time, telling these stories you say communicated back by telegraph to Mr. Harriman in his 5th Avenue mansion? But was anyone digging deep and really trying to get to the bottom of what was going on here with the Wild Bunch?

Charles Leerhsen:

No. Journalism was, especially Western journalism was kind of really not dependable. I was just coming off a book about ... I wrote a book about Ty Cobb and baseball they publish a roster of who's on the team. Then there's a schedule so you know where everyone was at certain day. Then there's like seven newspapers in each of these big cities and they tend to be Eastern cities. Covering outlaws is a very different affair because you have these newspapers in the West, which were sensationalist and trying to scare people and titillate them. I mean, the Wild Bunch as a group there was probably never more than six or eight of them at any one time that were committing a crime together.

Charles Leerhsen:

But if you read the local Western papers, sometimes they'd be like, "150, 200 outlaws swept out of the hills and robbed a bank or knocked over the train." Butch Cassidy died more than, historians have counted more than 50 times his death was reported and none of those were correct. So I was always on very marshy ground but some of the stories and the one about the Wilcox coverage was sort of an exception to what I'm saying. It was more traditional. There was a lot of quotes and lengthy quotes from the conductors and the guys who worked on the train and the guards. The papers reported it was like a 50 or $55,000 dollars was taken.

Charles Leerhsen:

The railroad reported $50 dollars was stolen so that's quite a disparity but I found that to be a pattern where the banks and the railroads would always try to minimize their losses. So they'd report this BS-y figure of about how little it was. The papers were probably sensationalizing it and reporting a larger amount on the other side. But in general I think in that case the newspapers were more reliable than the corporations.

Josh King:

Another famous brand that was heralded in the movie as well as in series like David Milch's Deadwood were the professionals of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, which is now, part of publicly traded company Securitas. The Pinkertons assigned Charlie Siringo, the original cowboy detective to follow Butch and his men. What did you learn about the Pinkertons in the course of your research to separate fact from fiction? What success did they have in hunting them down?

Charles Leerhsen:

Well, they're an interesting organization in a way because law enforcement was very thin on the ground in the West. You'd have one sheriff and a deputy here and then there might be 400 miles before there was someone else there. So this encouraged cattle rustling and on up from there in the chain of crimes. America as a country had no national police force, no FBI. The public private sector saw a need that could be filled and the Pinkertons came along.

Charles Leerhsen:

The problem with the Pinkertons was that they didn't have any checks on their behavior. They could and well, technically they couldn't but there was no one to enforce the laws against what they did. In the case of Butch Cassidy they paid off postal workers and just stole mail to intercept the letters that Butch and Sundance were sending, to get their mail to find out what they were up to and what their locations were.

Charles Leerhsen:

In other cases too, they didn't hesitate to just shoot and kill people. As I say in the book, they were more like exterminators than a police force. Corporations hired them to keep away the pests and the pests at that point were the outlaws. One other thing, the Pinkertons always exaggerated the outlaws like the newspapers. They exaggerated the outlaw's powers and scariness to try to whip up business and get more corporate contracts, to keep capitalism running smoothly.

Josh King:

When we come back after the break, more with Charles Leerhsen, author of Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw. The story that brings us from North America all the way down to South America, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. That's right after this.

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Josh King:

Welcome back. Before the break, we were talking with Charles Leerhsen, author of Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw, out this week from Simon & Schuster about the reality of being a cowboy on the frontier West. Now, Charles, Butch is trying to turn over a new leaf first going back to a civilian job at the WS Ranch and then on to Salt Lake City in the first months of the 20th century. Was he able to leave his past behind? The transcript with his lawyer suggests he was given some pretty tough medicine.

Charles Leerhsen:

Yeah, well one of the things that had happened, he had a rule, unwritten and maybe even unstated but everyone understood it that no one was to get hurt. They wouldn't physically injure the people that they were robbing and that rule got violated in one case where the gang split up. There were about three of them in each little party when the authorities were pursuing them. In the party that he wasn't in, a sheriff got shot and killed by one of his gang mates. So that put him in a position where he was connected to that murder.

Charles Leerhsen:

His plan to get amnesty and to confess to a lesser crime and get his record clean and be able to live in America peacefully that was upended by that unfortunate bit of behavior that was not characteristic of the Wild Bunch that they weren't ... Even though they were murderers sometimes on their own on other occasions, when they were around Butch they were not allowed to shoot or kill anyone. There was only one exception to that besides the one I mentioned, involving Butch himself and that, I don't want ... It's a spoiler and I know it comes late in the book but there is one asterisk on there.

Josh King:

In pursuit of this amnesty, Charles, Governor Heber Wells of Utah gets involved. One of the ideas was that Butch would even become a trained cop for the UP, sort of like Cary Grant's character in To Catch a Thief.

Charles Leerhsen:

Yeah. That was supposedly one of his ideas and it may actually have been but Harriman would never have gone for that I don't think. He was never going to hire someone to be head of security who'd robbed one of his trains. I don't think that was the kind of thing Harriman was flexible enough to pull off. I say overall, the thing about these guys was what they were doing was really basically for excitement. It wasn't for money that they were robbing because there wasn't enough money involved sometimes. They had to split it so many ways and then there was this weird machismo ritual where they had to blow just about all of it almost instantly on a big party for everyone in the ... town. That was part of the deal.

Charles Leerhsen:

So money really wasn't the object. They weren't doing this to get rich. They were doing it to be outlaws. Butch grew up in the West and saw this and saw this opportunity for excitement. The Sundance Kid grew up in Pennsylvania and read about it in dime novels. Went out West as a teenager to pursue this life. Eventually they connected fairly late in both their stories. But they were doing this for fun and I think we have to keep that in mind. It was a dangerous kind of fun but so were a lot of dangerous sports or dangerous ... It was more in the line of that like a dangerous sport than anything else I think.

Josh King:

Talk about fun, Charles, there's the key that you've included in the book taken in Fort Worth, Texas before the fortunes of the Wild Bunch went in different directions. Not unlike the positioning of their heads in that shot, this is where Bill Goldman's movie gets its iconic Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head interlude. What really happened on that long winding trip that segued through New York City ultimately to South America?

Charles Leerhsen:

Well, yeah. The famous picture of them is in Fort Worth, where one of the gang members got married in a whorehouse to a whore. There were three big whorehouses in the Hell's Half Acre like anchor stores in the Hell's Half Acre and they went around there. That was their last, really last time together. The heat was on and Butch realized he couldn't go back to the Intermountain West. He was too well-known and too wanted there. So what beckoned was South America and we don't know exactly why they picked that. But South America was emerging in magazine articles in National Geographic as a place where you could go. The place it would become later in the 20th century like when the Nazis went there after to get lost or to escape or to start all over again.

Charles Leerhsen:

There were a lot more Europeans doing that than Americans at the time. That's probably where they got the idea. So they worked their way east to New York because that's where the ships left from. Sundance and Ethel Place his girlfriend took a kind of circuitous route and went through New Orleans and all. But then they met up in New York. They had an interlude there where they probably went to the movies and the movies in those days were like 12 minutes long. One of the movies they may have seen was the Great Train Robbery, oddly enough. Then they took off from Brooklyn from the Red Hook Pier not far from where I'm talking to you from. It was a 33-day journey to Buenos Aires in those days.

Charles Leerhsen:

They went there because we're shrugging off the life of the outlaw finally once and for all. We're just tired of it. We're tired of it and it's also getting a little too scary for us, so we want to go down there where we're out of the reach of the Pinkertons and out of the reach of local law enforcement. So that's why they went there and they went to ... It's not in the movie but they went to Argentina first and they stayed there about five years. They were straight and it's kind of touching almost to see them. What they were doing South America in those days was very bureaucratic and there was a lot of paperwork. So there's a big paper trail of them applying for brands, the iron brands that they would brand the cattle with and their distinctive logos on them.

Charles Leerhsen:

Applying through the system down there for homestead rights and whatnot and land in Argentina, in Patagonia there in Argentina. So they went through all that and for five years, they did it and they were pretty successful. But then they got a whiff again, of the Pinkertons in Buenos Aires coming down. The Pinkertons were trying to whip up business for themselves so they came down to Buenos Aires. They distributed some fliers and pamphlets and wanted posters. Talked to some people and Butch and Sundance got a little, and Ethel, who's called Etta in the movie but her real name was Ethel, they got a little nervous.

Charles Leerhsen:

One day, they just ... Well, I'm leaving out some stuff. The local authorities crept up on them, came around, knocked on the door, asked some questions about friends of theirs. Then one day, they just hightailed it out of there. There's letters. They sold everything, the cattle they had, the land that they were able to sell. They took off towards Chile and then eventually towards, into Bolivia. On the way, they knocked off a bank, maybe to get the rust off. Then they wound up in Bolivia, where they committed this last robbery, which was intercepting an old-fashioned payroll transportation.

Charles Leerhsen:

I should say, where there was on a couple of mules were all this like the equivalent of $200,000 dollars on the backs of the mules going through the wilderness in the mountains. They knew where their route was and they stood there and they robbed those guys. Then they were pursued and their end comes. I won't divulge too much.

Josh King:

Well, I'm going to ask you just one question about that because in your endnotes you say that you made two research trips to South America for the book, one to Argentina in 2016 and the other to Bolivia in 2017 to meet with experts and visit the places where Butch and Sundance had been. What was beyond maybe that final act because we see it in a freeze frame in George Roy Hill's film? What was the truth you uncovered and how did you uncover it? Who were the people who gave you the information? How did you discover it? You were sure to advise us not to try to do this ourselves. Only the professionals go because that museum dedicated to Butch and Sundance in San Vicente is not really much to build a trip around, is it?

Charles Leerhsen:

No. It's scary and it involves going to Bolivia, which is not the same experience as going to Argentina. It's very much not a first world country, you might say and then you have to get a guide. There's rental cars and things like that in Bolivia are ... I guess they exist but they're hard to come by and it's easy to get lost. So you get a guide, you drive nine miles over bumpy mountain roads, you get to this town of San Vicente and then there's like a guard house I mean, at the entrance. You've got to talk your way into the town and the guy's obviously looking for a bribe. Or you can either just try to wear him down by begging or give him a bribe and the there's this pathetic little museum there.

Charles Leerhsen:

There was an accidental ending kind of. They made a wrong move but it was kind of an accident. They wound up spending the night right nextdoor to troop of local militia men and neither of whom knew the other was there for a while. So in some ways, William Goldman didn't do any research. He said he didn't want to be constrained by the facts but there's a couple of places in the story where the real story is actually not just better but more cinematic almost than Goldman's screenplay.

Charles Leerhsen:

I think this is one of the moments that you could imagine like there's a moment where they realize, "Wait a minute. We've just taken the last room in town. It happens to be next to this inn, which is loaded with these soldiers who are looking for us." It's like a classic moment from the movie but it's not in the movie. That eventually led to their demise and it was a strange and sad and surprising in a way demise because of how exactly it happened. Again, I don't want to spoil it for the reader.

Josh King:

Let's let the reader find it on themselves and we'll pivot to here and now, Charles, because it is a great story that ends in a fascinating way and not the way that we remember from a movie now 50 years old. Fast forwarding 50 years to the present, as a sports writer, what's your anticipation for shortened seasons for major league baseball and the NBA? I read an interview with you following the release of your Ty Cobb book when you reminisced about growing up in the South Bronx trying to get autographs outside the Yankee Stadium. There won't be many autographs this year. Can sports survive without live fans like little Charlie begging for a signature?

Charles Leerhsen:

Yeah. What we're seeing now is just take baseball for example. Suddenly it's does baseball really ... Does anyone care really how far a guy can hit a ball with a bat and how fast he can run around bases? It somehow, the reduced season reduces the game to those elements where I personally don't care about that. I don't know who would. It's when you take the storyline out of it and the drama and the rhythms, this is what you're left with. I don't know.

Charles Leerhsen:

Maybe it'll seem more like baseball with a capital B when it starts and we get into it and we forget that we're missing 100 games of the season. Take away the rhythms of the plot ... Take away the plot and you're just left with the elements. If sports can take this, it can take anything because once you take away the mystery of looking around the edges of something and just see it for want it is or prove that you can live without it, that's what we're doing. We've broken the habit I think and I don't know. I'm pessimistic.

Josh King:

You wrote about Carl Fisher one of America's great promoters in Blood and Smoke: A True Tale of Mystery, Mayhem and the Birth of the Indy 500. Another great promoter, Marion Willis Savage called by some at the time, the second P.T. Barnum in Crazy Good: The true story of Dan Patch, the most famous horse in America. If you think about the other great American self-promoters like Preston Tucker, Thomas Edison, what is it about the American psyche formed over 244 years that puts promotion on a similar pedestal with performance?

Charles Leerhsen:

Well, I guess promotion is about hope. You engender hope. You create hope in someone that there's ... If you hold up the patent medicine, you create hope that this medicine can make you feel better or cure what ails you. If you're selling hope, then you're in a pretty good business I think. That's what those promoters did. Yeah, they promoted themselves a lot but they also, they promoted this idea of faster cars, faster horses and I think that's what the appeal was.

Charles Leerhsen:

I'm writing a book right now about Anthony Bourdain and he wasn't a promoter like that at all but his life was ... The lesson of his life was that you could be a late bloomer because he didn't really ... He was kind of a second or third-rate chef until he was in his 40s. You could be a late bloomer and still conquer the world. That lesson is all about hope and if you have hope, you have everything. If you don't have hope as Bourdain showed at the end of his life, nothing. So that's where I think we're all about hope as people.

Josh King:

At the beginning of Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw you write, the woman who said that Cassidy is not worth studying searches for him daily still. He's nothing but a lowlife Dan Buck said. Our world remains full of lowlifes. Charles, in the end, what do we take from studying Butch Cassidy?

Charles Leerhsen:

I think we take the story of a young man who's story is really a story of the 19th century, which is a struggling towards the light and a struggling to try to avoid being mowed down by the big corporations that are coming along. Retaining your identity and making a mark in the world without hurting anyone else. That's what he was trying to do. He was a reaction I think to the rampaging capitalism of the late 19th century and to some degree, to a great degree I think he succeeded.

Josh King:

Well, on that note, everyone should pick up the book. Thanks so much, Charles, for joining us Inside the ICE House.

Charles Leerhsen:

Sure, Josh. My pleasure.

Josh King:

And that's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Charles Leerhsen, author of Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw out this week from Simon and Schuster. If you like what you heard please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. If you've got a comment or a question you'd like one or our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or Tweet at us @ICEHousePodcast. Our show is produced by Pete Asch and Ian Wolff. I'm Josh King, your host signing off from the remote Library of the New York Stock Exchange here in the Catskills of Upstate New York. Thanks for listening. Stay safe, socially distanced and we'll talk to you next week.

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