"Big" Jim Blake, whose grandfather came from Co Cork, was talking to Butch Cassidy's "cousin" the other day and she swears that the outlaw did not die in Bolivia, as shown in the film. He got back to the US and died peacefully in 1931.
Big Jim mentioned this casually as he served this correspondent "a shot" of Powers in his "Cowboy Bar" on the main street of Meeteeste, in deepest Wyoming.
In fact, Butch used to drink at the handsome, hand-carved bar where we were standing and was arrested in June 1894, outside the saloon for horse-stealing by Sheriff Charles Stough, to whom he meekly handed over his two guns.
Butch, whose real name was Robert LeRoy Parker, got two years in jail but was pardoned by Governor W.A. Richards with six months of his sentence left. It was a bad decision as Butch immediately graduated from horse-stealing to robbing banks, and the rest is history, except that he did not die in Bolivia with Robert Redford and Paul Newman.
Inspired by this happy ending, I continued on my way to Cody in search of Buffalo Bill, after whom the town he founded on the edge of the Yellowstone National Park is named.
First I called on former senator Al Simpson who lives in Cody and is on the board of the Buffalo Bill Historical Centre. There are four museums which attract visitors from all over the world in search of Indian culture and the Wild West of Bill Cody's time.
Simpson has written an autobiography which includes his jousts with the Washington press corps during his years there. Called Up Your Old Gazoo, it exposes examples of inaccuracy by political reporters. However, he also confesses to a few howlers himself when he targeted certain journalists like CNN's Peter Arnett during the Gulf War and got it badly wrong.
Simpson, a Republican, is strongly supporting former Democratic governor Mike Sullivan for next US ambassador to Dublin, although they were political opponents. Simpson is also an admirer of former Labour leader anaiste, Dick Spring, whom he has met at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard where Mr Spring lectured briefly last year and where Simpson is now a professor.
The Buffalo Bill centre is sometimes called the "Smithsonian of the West" because of the high quality of the exhibits in the four museums. One has Cody's own memorabilia from an amazing life which included being a Pony Express rider, a civil war cavalryman, Indian wars scout, rancher, miner and founder of the Wild West show which toured the US and Europe for 30 years.
As the show played in front of Queen Victoria in November 1890, a nervous announcer said: "Ladies and gentlemen, Col William F. Cody - Buffalo Bill - will now shoot the glass balls off his horse." The gaffe did not stop one of Victoria's successors, Queen Elizabeth, visiting Wyoming 94 years later and when Prince Charles visited the US in 1987, he said: "I've heard that Wyoming is very nice."
In the Buffalo Bill centre, the Winchester Arms Museum, with its 6,000 firearms, probably tells you more than you want to know about the history of guns in America. The Whitney Gallery of Western Art has a great collection of pictures, sculptures and documents which vividly portray life in the western territories as the Indians and the buffalo tried to survive the new settlers. Cody is said to have killed 4,280 buffalo.
The Plains Indian Museum is a superb collection of Indian culture through art, costumes, weapons, habitat and hunting. At present, there is a special exhibition there culled from 10 north American museums called "Powerful Images" and showing how the native Americans have been represented both within and without their own culture.
It is fascinating to see how we have got our stereotype image of these people from films and literature and even advertising.
But we probably have our stereotypes of Wyoming itself which conjures up a raw Wild West of shoot-outs in Laramie and Cheyenne and brawls in saloons like the one in Meeteeste.
Wyoming is still a largely empty territory, with the smallest population in the US (453,000) but with the richest coal and oil deposits under its spectacular scenery. Also underground are intercontinental ballistic missiles ready to unleash nuclear destruction on whoever threatens the US.
There was a time when local dignitaries fought to get missile silos the way Irish councillors look for IDA factories. When Warren Air Force base near the state capital, Cheyenne, became home to the Atlas ICBMs in 1958, the mayor, Worth Story, said: "Cheyenne is proud to be the nation's number one target for enemy missiles."
The mayor must have inspired Stanley Kubrick a few years later to make the film Dr Strangelove or "How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb".
You may laugh but did you know that Japan "bombed" Wyoming during the second World War? The Japanese in 1944 launched large numbers of balloons with explosive devices into the jetstream over the Pacific. Eleven got as far as Wyoming, where they exploded harmlessly, but five children and a woman were killed by one which got to Oregon.
There are still a lot of cattle and sheep grazing on Wyoming's Big Horn plain and it is officially known as "The Cowboy State". But the magic is taken away when you learn that the 2,840 cowboys are in the official statistics as "beef cattle workers".
When AIDS began to spread, health advertisements were run which showed a condom-hatted cowboy on a horse. It had been running for four years without any bother until there was an election and the Republicans accused then governor Mike Sullivan of "disrespect" as Wyoming's official logo is a cowboy on a bucking bronco.
Sullivan, playing safe, had his officials pull the ad as "ill-advised".
And did you know that back in 1940, a number of Wyoming women founded a Cowbelles organisation? I did not meet any.