Three men rode up to the First National Bank in Winnemucca on September 19th, 1900, and they left with nearly $33,000. The trio reportedly included Butch Cassidy along with Wild Bunch member Kid Curry and another man, whose never been never identified.
It would be the last holdup by the famous gang, which later had its photo, sending one to the First National where it hangs still to this day. It’s disputed whether Cassidy sent the photo or if a local resident sent it as a publicity stunt.
Some claim Cassidy’s involvement is simply a wild-west myth. Still others say it was the Sundance Kid and not Cassidy who helped pull off the robbery.
After the heist, they mounted their horses and made their getaway as the alarm sounded. Although towns folk fire fired several shots at the robbers, who returned the gunfire, no one got injured.
The gang had planned the robbery down to the last detail, including having fresh horses posted about 10 miles apart along their getaway route. This allowed them to quickly outdistanced the posse.
A man known as ‘Cowboy Joe’ Marsters recalled riding with the Wild Bunch as a 14-year-old horse wrangler. He said he liked Cassidy, but wasn’t crazy about the Sundance Kid.
“I saw him hang a man,’’ Marsters said during an 1974 interview.
Marsters also claimed to have seen Cassidy during a rodeo at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. By then both Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were reportedly dead some seven years, killed by the Bolivian Army.
Reports as recent as 2011, say Cassidy, whose given name was Robert LeRoy Parker, survived as a machinist named William T. Phillips, dying in Spokane, Washington in 1937. As for Marsters, he passed away in Doyle, California, north of Reno, in May 1978 at age 83.
The Old Blog in the Desert 
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