Little left of Butch's life in Circleville

Editor's note: Columnist Lee Benson is bicycling the length of Utah along U.S. 89, a k a State Street, starting at the Arizona-Utah line and ending at the Idaho-Utah line. His columns will chronicle what he sees, hears and avoids along the way.

CIRCLEVILLE — The house where Butch Cassidy was raised is unmarked.

And so, if you believe the locals, is his grave.

I arrived at the Circleville city limits early on a morning washed clean by thunderstorms the night before. As a rooster crowed nearby, I pulled into the parking lot of Butch Cassidy's Hideout Cafe, where the eggs were already cooking inside. I asked a friendly teenage waitress named Ashley the obvious.

"So where's Butch's place?"

Ashley answered without a flinch. "Just before you come into town is the house where he grew up," she said. "It's just off the highway; you can go see it if you want."

So I did, retracing my route two miles just beyond mile marker 156 on Highway 89, where sure enough, about 100 yards across a hay field stood an old wooden house with mud mortar between the planks.

I approached the structure cautiously even though Utah's most notorious outlaw has been dead for more than half a century. I didn't want no trouble. I just wanted to look at the one-room house, all 400 square feet of it, where Annie and Maximillian Parker moved after their son, Robert LeRoy Parker, was born in Beaver. Robert spent his boyhood here with his family, before moving on to organize the Wild Bunch, rob banks and travel to Bolivia with the Sundance Kid, all under his alias, Butch Cassidy.

Who'd have thought this would lead to that?

I rode back to the cafe and asked Ashley if any of Butch's kin might still be in Circleville, and she referred me up the road to a gas station and convenience store called The Station. "You'll get more details there," she said.

She was right. Kirk Fullmer was behind the counter, and not only did he verify that the wooden shack on the outskirts of Circleville is the old Parker place, but he was a wealth of additional information. He said he is old enough to remember when Butch's sister, Lula Parker Betenson, was still alive.

"I talked to Lula when I was a boy," he said. "She's the one who wrote the book about Butch never dying in Bolivia like they said. When he heard that he was dead, he just came back here and laid low. Which was fine with him. He worked for a while as a security guard in Nevada and then died of natural causes."

Kirk's voice dropped a notch as he added conspiratorially, "Lula said she could walk from here and put her hand on his grave — but she wouldn't tell anyone where that was, not even her own children."