by David Fisher
“The Ft. Worth Five,”
Their challenge was to find a place where they weren’t known. After the “Ft. Worth Five” picture had been circulated, no place in America was safe for them—unless they intended to spend the rest of their lives in some forsaken hideout. Fortunately, a lot of Wyoming ranchers were then moving to South America, in particular Argentina and Bolivia, where the weather was good, land was cheap and plentiful, and nobody asked a lot of embarrassing questions. Oh, and the nearest Pinkertons were more than five thousand miles away.
Obviously, they weren’t in a big hurry. After welcoming the New Year 1901 in New Orleans, then traveling by train to Niagara Falls, Butch, Sundance, and the lovely and mysterious Etta Place visited one of the most populous places on earth, New York City. While there, Butch bought a gold watch and Sundance and Etta purchased a lapel watch and stickpin at the fashionable jewelry store Tiffany’s, and the winsome couple posed for a “wedding portrait” at the De Young Photography Studio in Union Square. On the twentieth of January, Mr. and Mrs. Longabaugh, accompanied by her “brother,” “James Ryan,” set sail for Buenos Aires aboard the British steamer Herminius.
Without their leadership, the remains of the Wild Bunch scattered and by 1905 had passed into Old West history. Historians attribute more than twenty murders to gang members during its roughly fifteen years in existence. Fifteen members of the gang died with their boots on, and another three committed suicide. Six of them were caught and went to prison—and were killed when they got out. Elzy Lay was believed to be the last survivor. He was pardoned and released from prison in 1906 for saving the warden’s wife and daughter during a prison uprising and lived quietly in Los Angeles until his death—from natural causes—in 1934.
The “wedding portrait” of Harry Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid, and the beautiful Etta Place, taken in New York City in 1901, shortly before they departed for South America
Retirement proved to be only temporary for Butch and Sundance. Upon their arrival in Buenos Aires, Sundance deposited $12,500 in an Argentinean bank. Then the three of them traveled by steamer to Cholila, a small frontier town in the sparsely populated region of Patagonia, where they lived for a time as Mr. and Mrs. Harry “Enrique” Place and James “Santiago” Ryan. Under the terms of an 1884 law, passed to encourage immigration, they were given fifteen thousand acres to develop. A portion of those lands actually belonged to Place, making her the first woman in Argentina to receive land under this law. They built a four-room cabin on the east bank of the Blanco River, with the snowcapped Andes in the distance, and started a ranching operation. It grew to a decent size, according to a letter Cassidy wrote to a friend in Vernal, Utah. The estancia had 300 head of cattle, 1,500 sheep, and 25 horses. Their closest neighbor was almost a day’s ride away.
Sundance and Etta returned to the United States for brief visits in 1902 and again in 1904. During those trips, the tourists visited sites including Coney Island in Brooklyn and the St. Louis World’s Fair, but they also saw several doctors, and the speculation is that both of them were suffering from venereal disease.
The Pinkertons had not let go of their pursuit. By intercepting letters Sundance had written to his family in Pennsylvania, they learned that the bandits were living in Argentina. In 1903, agent Frank Dimaio traveled to Buenos Aires and from there traced them to Cholila. Supposedly the onset of the rainy season prevented him from reaching the ranch, but there is a story that Butch and Sundance killed a Pink sometime that year and buried the body, which, in a quite embarrassing episode, was later dug up by Etta Place’s dog while they were entertaining dinner guests.
Whatever actually took place, it did not appear to alarm the trio, because early in 1904, the territorial governor spent a night as a guest in their cabin, dancing with Etta as Sundance played a samba on his guitar.
Maybe their money was running out, or perhaps they just missed the excitement, but in February 1905, English-speaking bandits later identified as Butch and Sundance held up the Banco de Tarapaca y Argentina and got away with the modern-day equivalent of about $100,000. Supposedly Etta had assisted in the planning by talking her way into the vault to case the layout of the bank, and later in the actual robbery by dressing in men’s clothing and waiting outside, holding the horses. A story often told in Argentina asserts that she was such a good markswoman that as they made their escape, she was able to split the telegraph wire with a single rifle shot.
There remains some question regarding whether they actually pulled this job. An official of the Argentinean government claimed to be with them on their ranch the day after the robbery, which, if true, was essentially an unbreakable alibi. True or not, governor Julio Lazana signed a warrant for their arrest, but they learned about it days before it could be executed and immediately sold part of their land for eighteen thousand pesos and ordered their foreman to liquidate the rest of their property, before sailing to Puerto Montt, Chile.
Sundance and Etta later left Chile for a trip to San Francisco, but upon their return, the three of them went back to work, holding up the Banco de la Nacion in Villa Mercedes, Argentina, and escaping with today’s equivalent of about $135,000. When the bank manager resisted, he was, depending on reports, either pistol-whipped or shot by an unknown third “man.” That third “man” could have been Etta, who had cut her hair short and had previously been described by a Buenos Aires newspaper as “an interesting woman … who wears male clothing with total correctness” and was also a “fine rider” who knew how to handle “all classes of firearms.” Posses chased them into the Andes before losing their trail, but now they were on the run, and they would never stop.
At some point that summer, Sundance and Etta Place again traveled to San Francisco, but this time Sundance returned alone. There is some evidence that she had an operation in Denver for appendicitis or a gall-bladder problem, but the woman known in history as Etta Place was never heard from again.
The trail tends to get a little murky from then on. It’s likely that Butch and Sundance found jobs at the Concordia Tin Mine in the Bolivian Andes—ironically enough, guarding the mine payroll. What better way for robbers to hide in plain sight than to protect a payroll? They probably were looking for the big score, that one legendary robbery large enough to support them for the rest of their lives. There were scattered reports of smaller heists that took place while they were living in that region, successful robberies attributed to “Yankees,” but there is no real evidence linking Butch and Sundance to them.
Eventually they appeared to focus on the bank in the mining area of Tupiza. For several weeks, while casing the bank, they bunked with a British engineer named A. G. Francis in a small town about fifteen miles south of the city. Butch regularly went into Tupiza to study the bank operations. He discovered that a detachment of soldiers from an elite Bolivian unit was quartered in a hotel across the town square from the bank—much too close—and it didn’t appear as if they were leaving anytime soon.
But while there, Butch discovered an even softer target, the Aramayo family mining interests. The family owned and operated several tin mines in the area, and the payrolls for all of them passed through their main office in Tupiza. Butch learned that an Aramayo manager named Carlos Peró would be transporting an eighty-thousand-peso payroll, about half a million in today’s dollars, from Tupiza to Quechisla—by mule. On foot. Unarmed. And without any guards.
On November 4, 1908, as Peró, his young son, and a peon who was assisting him walked up Dead Cow Hill, they were confronted by two men. Bandanas covered their faces, and their hat brims were turned down so that only their eyes were visible. They were wearing dark-red corduroy suits and cartridge belts bulging with ammunition. Each man held a Mauser carbine and had a Colt revolver tucked in his holster. One of them stepped close and told Peró he wanted the eighty thousand pesos, and he wanted it quick. Peró apologized profusely. That payroll was being carried the next week, he explained, but this week he had only fifteen thousand pesos (about n
inety thousand dollars). Obviously Butch and Sundance would not be coming back the following week, so they took the smaller payroll and a dark brown mule, then disappeared into the Bolivian wilderness.
Within a day, la guardia, military patrols, and armed miners were watching every town and village, every ravine and culvert, every train station and horse ranch, looking for two gringos with a dark brown mule.
Butch and Sundance had made it back to Francis’s place. They leveled with him, then spent the night ruminating about what might have been. Francis recalled Cassidy telling him that he’d wanted to live a law-abiding life, but that each time he tried, the Pinks had shown up and forced him to return to the outlaw road. Cassidy told him he’d never hurt or killed a man except in self-defense—making him unique among western outlaws—and had robbed only rich corporations.
Fearing that an army patrol would find them, Butch and Sundance departed very early the next morning, taking Francis with them as a guide. A day later they released him. At sundown on November 6, they rode cautiously into the mining village of San Vicente, one of them astride a dark brown mule. The corregidor, a local magistrate named Cleto Bellot, welcomed the strangers and inquired as to their business. They were on their way to Santa Catalina, they explained, and asked for supplies and directions. Bellot offered his assistance, then found them lodging for the night in a thatched adobe house at the end of a walled alley.
After Bellot left them there for the night, he went right to the place where a four-man posse, consisting of soldiers and la guardia, was staying and told them where they would find the outlaws. As the four men approached the adobe house at the end of the alley, a man later identified as Butch Cassidy stepped into the open doorway and began firing his pistol at them. The soldier Vincent Lopez was struck in the neck and would die there. The posse took up defensive positions and began firing into the house. One of them went to seek armed friends who would guard the rear and the roof to prevent an escape. Unlike in the final scene in the wonderful movie that would be made about the outlaws sixty years later, only a few anxious men surrounded the house. And there was no cascade of bullets, only several shots. Within several minutes, though, three loud screams came from the house, and then there was no more shooting.
In the early light of the next morning, the soldiers entered the house. Both Yankees were dead: Butch Cassidy was lying on the floor, a bullet in his arm and a bullet in his temple. The Sundance Kid was still sitting on a bench behind the door, his arms wrapped around a large ceramic jar, with several shots in his body and one shot in the center of his forehead. To knowledgeable people, it looked as if Butch had finished off his wounded friend, Sundance, then killed himself.
The payroll was still in their saddlebags. No one knew their names, but Peró identified them as the men who had held him up. They were buried in San Vicente.
That’s the whole story, except that the ending has long been questioned.
Several different versions of the climactic shoot-out were reported to have taken place in several different cities. One such version, written by missionary and explorer Hiram Bingham, who had coincidentally arrived in Tupiza two weeks after the shooting, was published in 1911. Bingham wrote, “… a party of 50 Bolivian soldiers went on the trail of the robbers, who were found lunching in an Indian hut. They had carelessly left their mules and rifles several yards from the door of the hut and were unable to escape. After a fight, in which three or four soldiers were killed and as many more wounded, the thatch roof of the hut was set on fire and the bandits forced out into the open where they finally fell, each with half a dozen bullets in his body.”
Although these bodies were positively identified as those of the bandits who had robbed the Aramayo payroll, there was no evidence that they were Butch and Sundance. The Pinkertons were not convinced of their identity; William A. Pinkerton himself dismissed “the whole story as a fake,” and the agency never officially ended its search for the outlaws. In fact, Pinkerton supposedly confided to an operative, “The last we heard of Longabaugh he was in jail in Peru for an attempted bank robbery. Cassidy had been with him but got away.”
Many people later claimed to have met or spent time with both men in many different places, long after their deaths had been reported. Even Bingham concluded his story by admitting, “We received a call from two rough-looking Anglo-Saxons who told us hair raising stories of dangers on the Bolivian roads where highway robbers driven out of the United States … and hounded to death by Pinkerton detectives, had found a pleasant place to pursue their chosen occupation…. We found out afterwards that one of our informants was one of this damn gang of robbers.”
Cassidy’s sister Lula Betenson claimed that her brother had visited her in 1925 and related yet another version of the story. Two men were indeed killed that night in San Vicente, but they were identified as Cassidy and Sundance by a friend of theirs from the Concordia Tin Mines named Percy Seibert, who did it to allow his friends to start a new life without living in fear of the law.
The bodies of the two men who died that night have been lost to history, so DNA testing can’t be conducted, ensuring that the question of who really did die in that small Bolivian village will never be definitively answered. For the many people enamored with the romantic tale of the gentlemen train robbers and the beautiful Etta Place, who want to believe that Butch and Sundance lived long lives under assumed names, this is a perfect ending.
Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy and Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid depicted the legendary friendship between the outlaws in the classic 1969 movie. Nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning four, it guaranteed that Butch, Sundance, Etta Place, and the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang would live forever in the legends of the Old West.
A MOVING IMAGE: CREATING THE WILD WEST ON FILM
No medium has done more to shape our image of the Old West than the motion-picture industry. It was a fortunate coincidence that moving pictures became easily accessible to most Americans at just about the same time in our history that the Wild West became settled. Western stories were perfect for the rudimentary technology then available: The large cameras required a lot of light, so most films had to be shot outdoors. Because there was no sound, plots had to be uncomplicated, and it had to be easy for the audience to instantly tell the good guys from the bad guys. A new genre was created, a world of adventure and suspense in which a man’s character could be determined by the color of his hat.
Movies were pure entertainment; they were not intended to be history. The real challenges faced and conquered by the explorers and homesteaders of the West lacked the instant excitement of stagecoaches being chased by outlaws, settlers fighting Indians, and quick-draw shoot-outs, so those and other similar elements were magnified and exaggerated and very rapidly came to define the West in the minds of moviegoers.
Although Edwin Porter’s 1903 ten-minute-long Great Train Robbery is usually cited as the first Western, in fact, Thomas Edison was experimenting with films such as Sioux Ghost Dance a decade earlier. Ironically, those early Westerns were filmed in New York and New Jersey and featured lush landscapes replete with lakes, streams, and forests rather than the vast plains that would later become the easily recognizable West. And in many of those early films, Indians were noble and trustworthy people who guided whites through perilous adventures, often having to save their lives; it would be another decade before Indians morphed into the cunning and heartless enemy. Brave cowboys such as “Broncho Billy” Anderson and Tom Mix, with his “wonder horse,” Tony, were the first movie stars.
By the 1920s, Westerns had evolved from inexpensive one-reelers shown in nickelodeons to epic films. The most popular film of 1923, The Covered Wagon, was based on a dime novel. In 1924, director John Ford, who probably did more than any other person to create and shape the myth of the Old West, filmed The Iron Horse, which featured an army cavalry regiment, 3,000 railroad workmen, 1,000 Chinese laborers, 800 Indians, 2,800 horses, 1,300 buffalo, and 10,000 cattle.
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p; It was the necessity of filming outdoors that eventually caused the motion-picture industry to move west for the year-round sunny skies of Hollywood. America’s passion for movies sparked another kind of California gold rush, and the studios began producing countless low-budget B movies. Inexpensive western series and serials, with their formulaic plots, usually including deception, betrayal, stampedes, and showdowns—and just a hint of romance—filled theaters around the country, spreading the gospel of the straight-shooting cowboy defending the weak and exploited against unscrupulous outlaws and untamed Indians.
Since the founding of the motion-picture industry, the incredible true-life adventures of the men who tamed the West have served as source material—which was then turned into the larger-than-real-life legends we celebrate.
In the 1950s, television created a whole new audience for these films, further guaranteeing the survival of this mythical vision of the West. When those studios moved from showing their old movies to producing new western TV series, they stayed true to the myths, portraying real men such as Davy Crockett, Wild Bill Hickok, Bat Masterson, and Wyatt Earp as mostly fictionalized characters. By 1958, eight of the ten most popular shows were Westerns, and the three networks were broadcasting forty-eight different western series, thirty of them in prime-time hours.
Unable to compete with the action-packed series, the movie studios began using the western backdrop to tell deeper human stories. In 1953, for example, the allegorical Western High Noon was nominated for seven Oscars, winning four of them. In movie history, only sixteen Westerns have even been nominated for Best Picture, and three of them—Cimarron (1931), Dances with Wolves (1990), and Unforgiven (1992)—have won.
Awards or no, the motion-picture industry molded the image of the Wild West that has become so much a part of American history.
