True West Magazine
Jim Hoy’s highly personal biography of the Kansas Flint Hills, two new biographies of Butch Cassidy, Bill Neal’s autobiography and Deborah Swenson’s debut Western novel.
From my earliest years, I remember my parents sharing with me their love of the American West and their app-reciation and knowledge of the West’s writers, artists, educators and filmmakers. I discovered quickly that I could travel great distances from North Hollywood, California, across the West through the pages of Western writers whose personal experiences and imaginations allowed me to saddle up right along with them and realize “firsthand” the majesty of the Rocky Mountains, the magnificent mystery of the Grand Canyon and the endless, waving, undulating sea of grass of the Great Plains. I know that if I had been given Jim Hoy’s
GREEN RIVER Author and biographer Bill Betenson paid a visit to the Sweetwater County Historical Museum in Green River this week.
Betenson is the great-nephew of Robert Leroy Parker – better known as Butch Cassidy, the legendary western outlaw. Betenson has spent decades researching his famous relative and his first book about him, Butch Cassidy, My Uncle was published in 2012.
Betenson’s latest work,
Butch Cassidy: The Wyoming Years, was released last year by High Plains Press. It chronicles Cassidy’s life with special emphasis on his time in Wyoming.
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Between 1890 and 1901, when, along with Harry Longabaugh (the Sundance Kid) and Etta Place, Cassidy fled the country for South America, he rustled livestock, served a hitch at the Territorial Prison in Laramie, owned a ranch near Dubois, and robbed banks and trains.