(iStockphoto/gabor_h)

Rewriting history is no easy feat, but this week, two guys — rare books expert Brent Ashworth and author Larry Pointer — sought to do just that. They came out with a theory based on the supposition that the infamous outlaw Butch Cassidy didn’t die in a 1908 shootout in Bolivia, as most scholars think, but instead lived quietly to old age in Washington state. It’s an idea based off of a newly discovered 200-page manuscript from 1934 entitled “Bandit Invincible: The Story of Butch Cassidy,” but their hypothesis goes beyond what’s printed on the page.

On the surface, the manuscript appears to be a Cassidy biography written by William T. Phillips, a Spokane-based machinist. In it, Phillips claims to be a childhood friend of the bandit, and the story he writes has the wacky trappings of a soap opera plot, suggesting that after Cassidy escaped from Bolivia, he went on to have facial reconstruction surgery in France and assume a new identity before returning to the States to settle down. Ashworth and Pointer not only buy into this scintillating storyline, they’ve taken it a step further by proposing the biography is actually an autobiography — and that Phillips was Cassidy himself.

Here’s the thing, though: The proof they’ve gleaned from the text to support this theory isn’t exactly concrete. One of the clues, for example, involves the manuscript’s account of a February 1895 prison meeting in which Cassidy refused to shake hands with a judge.  Pointer cites this as evidence the outlaw is the author, telling the Associated Press, ”Who else would have remembered it in that kind of detail?” But without enough knowledge about Phillips (and the events in question), this subjective observation seems like a pretty flimsy basis for a conclusion.

Of course, there’s some other evidence that suggests Phillips and Cassidy were the same person — including the fact that Phillips apparently told some friends that was the case. Until there’s something a little more substantive to back it up though, I’ll tend to side with more skeptical historians, like Dan Buck. He’s called the new theory “total horse pucky,” which, unlike the mysterious manuscript, leaves nothing up for interpretation.

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