"The content of these historic inscriptions, of course, varies. Most are a name and a date, though many are simply a name or initials, while some contain only a date. Occasionally additional information is given: where they were from, where they were going, what they were doing or had done. But all of them proclaim to the world in one form or another that ‘I was here. I am a part of history.’"
- from the Introduction to Butch Cassidy Was Here

From overpass walls to bathroom stalls, we humans can’t seem to pass up an opportunity to leave some evidence of our passing through. This urge is hardly a contemporary phenomenon and the beginnings of such activity surely date back beyond the beginnings of written language.

In 1960 James Knipmeyer took the first of many vacations to the Colorado Plateau region of southern Utah and northern Arizona. During his years of hiking and camping he grew fascinated with the names and dates carved on canyon walls and painted onto rock boulders. In 1976 he set himself the "modest" goal of locating and photographing all of the old, historic inscriptions to be found in the area dated prior to 1900—thinking there might be some two or three hundred which he could collect in four or five years. More than twenty-five years and almost 1,600 inscription images later, his work has resulted in Butch Cassidy Was Here.

Spanish missionaries and colonizers, Mormon pioneers, amateur archaeologists, outlaws, miners, and pack mail carriers all have left their mark on southwestern history—their names and dates scratched into rock with knives; carved with chisels; painted on with axle-grease from a wagon, a fire blackened stick, or even the lead of a bullet. Knipmeyer gathers them all together in a narrative survey of the West brought