The robbery itself is the clean part of the story. On June 24, 1889, Robert LeRoy Parker, not yet fixed in the public mind as Butch Cassidy, entered the San Miguel Valley Bank with Matt Warner and Tom McCarty and left with $20,750. The escape is harder to reduce to a single line. The men did not simply ride away from Telluride. They rode out of a boxed mining town with fresh horses already waiting beyond the first alarm, using the mountain road as a machine for exhausting pursuit.
The first leg ran west out of Telluride toward Keystone Hill, where the earliest reliable accounts place a change of horses. From there, the trail turns from bank robbery into logistics. The riders had used the valley enough to know that a posse starting late on tired mounts would be forced to follow evidence rather than men. The route bends south toward the high country, over the Lizard Head country and into the Mancos Mountain region, before the record thins into the more forgiving geography of canyon roads, ranch acquaintances, and Utah hideouts.
Sheriff J.A. Beattie’s posse followed quickly, but quickly was not the same as well-positioned. The robbers had chosen a route where speed mattered less than replacement: a spent horse could be abandoned, a fresh one taken up, and every hour gained widened the difference between a chase and a report. Later accounts point toward the Robbers Roost country in eastern Utah as the larger destination, but the fragment preserved here concerns the Colorado portion only, where the escape was still visible enough to leave marks.
The payroll problem begins after the horses disappear. The official amount, $20,750, is stable across the better-known accounts, but the archive file preserves a smaller and more irritating question: what portion of the money was actually moving as mine payroll, what portion was ordinary bank cash, and whether all of it stayed together after Telluride. Local recollections collected later do not agree on denominations. That may be ordinary memory rot. It may also be the sign of a split made before the posse had any chance to matter.
The fragment map below is not presented as a complete escape map. It is a working reconstruction of the route described in period accounts, with three later annotations copied from a loose archive tracing. Those annotations mark possible stops that do not appear in the public version of the pursuit: a creek crossing below timberline, a timber relay, and a cut toward the Mancos road. Their value is not that they solve the robbery. Their value is that they make the route behave like a real route again, full of timing, weight, weather, and bad choices.