Campy 2765 Sierra Vista Way Bishop CA 93514 Hello Ron: Thanks for your note suggesting a report on a favorite desert book. Here is one of my favorites. It's both factual and exciting. It deals with the bank-holdup and train-robbing era and the personalities who hid out in the country we've been to between the Henry, Blue, and La Sal mountains. Baker, Pearl "The Wild Bunch at Robbers Roost", Abelard-Schuman, New York, 1965, 224 pages with photos, maps, and index. The book's locale, "That high desert country in southeastern Utah, around the heads of the canyons draining into the Green and Colorado rivers on the east and south, and above the Dirty Devil River on the west, had been called Robbers Roost long before Butch Cassidy drove his stolen horses there in 1884." The author was raised there and later managed the ranch at the Roost from its headquarters at Crow Seep. She sought out and interviewed the then still living outlaw men and women and their relatives. In her words, "It is amazing that all of the trails used by the Wild Bunch (now more than a century ago] ... are in use today, and that they are the only routes threading the canyon mazes. With the exception of a few out-of-the-way grazing areas, such as the Bull Pasture, Sam's Mesa Canyon and Twin Corral Box, the trails ridden today are those laid out by the men who rode swiftly away from the main highways--looking back." I'd like to have this book along, with a backpack, and retrace some of the fascinating history and relive the personalities of these trails, and maybe look for some of the buried gold. The Hollywood film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid might well have drawn upon chapters dealing with Robert LeRoy Parker aka George Cassidy (who became "Butch" when he worked legally but briefly in a butcher shop). The Butch Cassidy film would be historically correct if it shows him wearing a mustache during the famous Winnemucca bank holdup, as he did so shortly afterward when he and the famous Wild Bunch posed for a photograph to mail back to the bank along with their thanks for the "contribution". The "Sundance Kid" was Harry Longabaugh, a Cassidy sometimes-sidekick always just one jump ahead of the law, and who also did some of his most famous outlaw work in the company of "Flat Nose George" and Harvey Logan. The Bunch did not shoot to kill and little bloodshed actually did occur, except by the hand of Harvey Logan, who was a killer.

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