Last April, SAE contributing editors Dan Buck and Anne Meadows trekked to Tupiza, Bolivia, on an osteal mission, delivering two cartons of bones excavated in December 1991 from the cemetery in San Vicente, a mining village some 14,500 feet in the Andes in the province of Sud Chichas, Potosí. Although an initial physical examination by forensic scientists had indicated that the bones might be those of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a subsequent series of tests, comparing DNA from the bones with DNA extracted from known relatives of the outlaws, has disproved that notion.
Buck and Meadows, who have written extensively about the escapades of Butch, Sundance, and Etta Place in South America . . . , were historical consultants to the scientific expedition headed by forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow.
According to Buck and Meadows, the historical documentation shows that two English-speaking bandits, using aliases Butch and Sundance were known to have used, died (probably suicides -- sorry, Hollywood) in San Vicente on November 6, 1908, after being wounded in a brief shootout with a four-man military police patrol that had been searching for them following the holdup of an Aramayo, Francke y Cia. Payroll two days earlier.
In 1987, during Buck and Meadows's first journey to San Vicente, they met Froilán Risso, who took them to what he claimed was the outlaws' grave. According to Risso, the monument had once sported a cross and a plaque inscribed in a foreign language as well as a chain fence and two padlocks to keep the bandits' spirits from escaping. He added that his father had been a boy during the events in 1908 and, while showing him the grave years later, had predicted that "one day gringos will come looking for it."
After the 1991 excavation, Roger McCord, an American who had visited San Vicente with his wife in 1972, contacted members of the expedition and showed them photographs he had taken of the same monument, which had a plaque inscribed in German memorializing a miner named Gustav Zimmer. The spirit-guarding padlocks, secured to a pair of U-bolts, had actually served to lock Zimmer's plaque to the monument -- unsuccessfully, inasmuch as someone clipped the locks and stole the plaque.
At the time of the 1972 visit, no one in the village knew anything about gringo outlaws, let alone where they reposed. The McCords, however, had shared with the villagers details of the bandits' adventures, thereby seeding local folklore, and had directed attention to Zimmer's relatively elaborate monument by photographing it. Risso, in fact, is bending over the tomb in one of the photographs.
Risso, whose family has roots in San Vicente dating back at least to the turn of the century, absorbed the stories and became something of a local expert on the outlaws. Over the past twenty years, he has escorted several outlaw pilgrims to Zimmer's grave, its square concrete monument now barren of any accoutrements or identifying marks. There, Risso relates in vivid detail the story of Butch and Sundance's fatal 1908 stop-over and sometimes draws a diagram in the dirt to illustrate how the shootout occurred.
Ironically, though Risso had the wrong grave, he might have been in the right neighborhood. According to an American mine engineer who worked in the San Vicente region in the 1920s, the outlaw pair were buried near a German miner who had accidentally killed himself while defrosting dynamite on a stove. The explosion might not have been an accident: People in Andean mine camps were known to use dynamite to kill themselves. Anyone who has been to San Vicente would understand.
Originally published in South American Explorer, June 1993.