Photo #1 - Historian Bill Betenson was the featured speaker at the “An Evening with Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid” event at the Broadway Theater in Rock Springs on Saturday

 

(Sweetwater County, Wyo. - September 24, 2024)     The special fundraiser “An Evening with Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid” played to a full house at the Broadway Theater in Rock Springs on Saturday.

Hosted by the Sweetwater County Museum Foundation to benefit the Sweetwater County Historical Museum in Green River, the event commemorated the 55th Anniversary of the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Newman portrayed Cassidy (real name Robert Leroy Parker), and Redford the Sundance Kid (Harry Longabaugh). Etta Place, the Sundance Kid’s consort, was played by Katharine Ross.                              

Cassidy’s great-nephew Bill Betenson, noted historian and author of Butch Cassidy, My Uncle and Butch Cassidy: The Wyoming Years, provided commentary regarding the film’s historical accuracy. Cassidy and his Hole in the Wall gang had numerous connections to places in Sweetwater County, including Tipton, Rock Springs, and the Currant Creek Ranch. Sweetwater County lawyer Douglas Preston represented Butch, Matt Warner, and other of their outlaw cohorts in several legal cases. Some accounts tell of Cassidy meeting Preston secretly at Boar’s Tusk north of Rock Springs for counsel and to pay legal fees.         

Katharine Ross, who has been married to actor Sam Elliott since 1984, was unable to accept an invitation from the Board to attend the event, but sent along her best wishes to Dave Mead, the Sweetwater County Historical Museum’s executive director.

A special edition of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was shown after dinner and Betenson’s presentation.

Mead expressed his special thanks to board members Randy Walker, Budd Allen, Fay Quiroz, James Quiroz, and Bridgette Nielsen for their hard work in creating “An Evening with Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid.”