The English Westerners' Society Tally Sheet, vol. 48, no. 3, Summer 2002:
Dear Editor:
Which late 1800s Wyoming outlaw bore the nickname "Laughing" is a puzzle. Roy O'Dell was after Laughing Sam Cary. ("Fred Hans, the Bandit Hunter," vol. 48, no. 2, Spring 2002.) Some months ago I had a similar quest, equally fruitless, for Laughing Dick Carey. They might be one and the same legendary person, but whether he ever rode the Wyoming high plains, that is the question.
O'Dell noted that James D. Horan and Paul Sann mentioned Laughing Sam Carey in their book, Pictorial History of the Wild West. They quoted a New York World story about the outlaw, which described him as "grim-faced with a long string of murders to his credit." Coincidentally, a few months ago I came upon another World article, "The 'Hole-in-the-Wall,'" dated March 15, 1903, which reported that the region's "most celebrated inhabitant is 'Laughing Dick' Carey, Wyoming's most dangerous desperado." Not to confuse matters further, but a photo accompanying the article was captioned "'Laughing Dick' Casey."
As a boy, Carey was said to have "acted as a messenger and camp servant" for Butch Cassidy and his pals. Later, he was running with "Otto Chenoworth," another badlands bandit. An effort was underway, the World said, to capture Carey, because President Theodore Roosevelt was soon to venture into Hole-in-the-Wall country on a hunting trip. Who knows how much of this was true, but what a story.
There was an outlaw in Wyoming in those days named Otto Chenoweth. In his 1923 book, History of Natrona County Wyoming, 1888-1922, Alfred Mokler dissected Chenoweth's long and frankly not very exciting career, which ended with his being committed to a sanitarium in South Dakota, and then rescued by his mother.
As for "Matt Warner's belief that his old friend Butch Cassidy returned to the United States after his years in South America" (David Griffiths, review of Last of the Bandit Riders...Revisted, by Matt Warner, as told to Murray King, and updated by Joyce Warner and Dr. Steve Lacy), that is a fundamental misreading of the book. Matt not only never held such a view, he expressed the opposite. In his book and in a note to historian Charles Kelly, Warner stated unequivocally that Butch and Sundance died in South America.
Many years after Matt's death, his daughter Joyce claimed that she had met a man in 1939 who, because of his "piercing eyes," she had determined was Butch. Joyce, of course, did not know the famous outlaw from a sack of potatoes. She went on to say that her mystery visitor told her stories of his outlaw adventures, including teaming up with a new partner who was not Sundance but who went by the name of Sundance. One can accept or reject her beguiling tale as one wishes, but Matt had nothing to do with it.
In Revisited, Lacy publishes a "Dear Sir" letter sent to Matt Warner in 1937 by a man named Walter D. Morgan, who said he had known Matt in Colorado for a "brief period" in the "winter of 1889 or 1888," and that he was someone Matt "may possibly remember."
Somehow, Lacy got it into his head that this was a message from Butch: "Matt would certainly have known Butch to be the author of this letter." How Lacy could have reached such a conclusion is utterly incomprehensible. Matt and Butch, for example, were good friends for many years, from the late 1880s until 1901, when Butch went to Argentina. Butch would send Matt a "Dear Sir" letter? Please.
Coincidentally, a couple weeks after receiving the "Dear Sir" letter, which he apparently never bothered to answer, Matt sent Charles Kelly a note stating unequivocally that Butch and Sundance had been "killed in South America" -- adding, "This is straight." But not straight enough for Lacy.
-- Daniel Buck
NOLA Quarterly, July-September 2002:
Dear Editor:
In David Griffith's review of Last of the Bandit Riders...Revisited [NOLA Quarterly, April-June 2002] he wrote that the "final couple of chapters...deal with Matt Warner's belief that his old friend Butch Cassidy returned to the United States after his years in South America." Incorrect. Warner not only never expressed such a view, he believed the opposite. In his book, first published in 1940, two years after his death, Warner stated unequivocally that Butch and Sundance had died in South America, an assertion he had also made in a note to historian Charles Kelly.
Griffiths has perhaps conflated Matt with his daughter Joyce. Many years after Matt's death, Joyce stated that she had met a man in 1939 who because of his "piercing eyes," she had determined was Butch Cassidy. Joyce, of course, did not know Butch from a sack of potatoes. She went on to say that this mystery visitor told her stories of his outlaw adventures, including teaming up with a new partner who was not Sundance but went by the name Sundance. One can accept or reject Joyce's beguiling tale as one wishes, but Matt had nothing to do with it.
Griffiths also wrote that "no researcher has yet found one piece of irrefutable documentation that [William T.] Phillips existed under that name before May 14, 1908," the date of his marriage to Gertrude Livesay in Michigan, implying that this somehow supports the idea that he was Butch Cassidy. There is no such thing as irrefutable evidence. The best of evidence, such as fingerprints, a birth certificate, or DNA, can be refuted on the ground that it has been misunderstood, mishandled, wrong, faked, you name it.
It would be more accurate to say that no documentary evidence, for example, a birth certificate or a census record, has come to light bearing directly on Phillips's existence prior to his 1908 marriage. But what does that mean? People in the 19th century often sailed through life without such testaments. We lack birth certificates for Butch and Sundance, yet no one doubts that they were born. Phillips might have been counted in a census as a young man, but the probable illegitimacy of his birth and the commonness of his name have made it difficult to determine which one was him.
Nonetheless, we do have evidence about Phillips's early life, which indicate that he was not the famous outlaw. Wyoming rancher James Regan said that he knew Phillips and Cassidy in the 1880s as two different people; the former ran card games in the sheep camps and the latter was a cowboy. Phillips's death certificate indicated that he was born in Michigan and that his mother was Celia Mudge. Given that Mudge was only 13 when Phillips was born, she was probably an unwed mother, made pregnant by a neighbor. The father and/or the man who raised the boy might have been a man named Phillips. These circumstances would account for the lack of a paper trail and the convoluted memories of descendants and neighbors generations later.
In "Possible Breakthrough on William T. Phillips" (WOLA Journal, vol. IV, No. 3, Winter-Spring 1995), Jim Dullenty discussed in some detail the Phillips-Mudge-Michigan tangle.
The article was illustrated with photographs of Butch with his mother Anne Parker, and Phillips and Mudge. A casual glance at the images leaves little doubt as to which woman was which man's mother. Dullenty, who has expended more effort on this particular topic than any other researcher, concluded that it "seems quite obvious" that Phillips was not Butch.
We even have testimony from Phillips's wife Gertrude. She told Charles Kelly that her husband had been born in an eastern state and was not the famous outlaw, though he had known Butch in Wyoming.
Phillips's own manuscript, The Bandit Invincible, should be enough to dissuade all but the most gullible that he was a poseur. He wrote that Butch's real name was not Parker. That is certainly news to the Parker family. He located his ranch in the wrong part of Argentina. He had him holding up a train in Bolivia that wasn't built at the time he was there. To account for Butch's new face (as Phillips), he had him undergoing massive plastic surgery in Paris practically overnight, which is not possible today (Michael Jackson did not get his new mug at an outpatient clinic), let alone in 1908.
Phillips's 1908 wedding in Michigan presents another pesky problem; he was married in May, several months before the shootout in Bolivia he claims to have escaped from prior to his marriage.
Irrefutable evidence? Not necessary. Phillips's story leaks from all corners.
-- Daniel Buck
NOLA Quarterly, January-March 2002:
Dear Editor:
The so-called "Wild Bunch group photo" has certainly not "stood the test of time," as Jon Skovlin asserted (Letter to the Editor, NOLA Quarterly, October-December 2001). The portrait, which Skovlin said was taken in Rawlins, Wyoming, in the fall of 1889, has been the subject of controversy -- serious doubt would be a better description -- since it first appeared in Larry Pointer's article, "Probable Photo of 'Wild Bunch' Discovered," in the NOLA Newsletter in 1976.
Veteran outlaw historian Jack DeMattos wrote the Quarterly soon after publication of the article: "I remain totally unconvinced regarding the authenticity [the photo]....Nothing contained within the text of Pointer's article convinced me that the photo should be accepted as genuine...." In a 28 February 1977 letter to then-NOLA Secretary John Stewart, Skovlin himself said that although he found the photo "most intriguing" and agreed with the 1889 date, he "can't add much on identified faces." I hardly consider that a ringing endorsement.
In his letter, Skovlin went on to take issue with Pointer's identification of one of the men as Bill McCarty, correctly observing that McCarty was about the same height as Butch Cassidy, yet was several inches shorter than the man he was standing next to in the photo, whom Pointer had identified as Butch. Pointer, in fact, had hedged his bets. He said that the man next to Butch was either Bill McCarty or the Sundance Kid, but the latter was in reality taller than Butch -- certainly not half a head shorter. Moreover, Sundance had a rather long face and a light moustache. The man in the photo has a distinctly round face and a Yosemite Sam moustache.
The man said to be Butch doesn't look like him, aside from the fact that he is a white male wearing a bowler hat. He looks more like Joaquin Phoenix, but the actor wasn't born yet. And the young Matt Warner doesn't look like him. He has an austere face, whereas the twenty-something Warner had a round, choir-boy face. (Pointer had used a photo of a 69-year old Warner for comparison, which rendered the match ludicrous.) Indeed, few of the men in the group portrait look like the famous outlaws they are said to be. Several look more like well-known actors. This will give you an idea of how easy it is to hang celebrated names on anonymous faces.
The man said to be Ben Kilpatrick does appear to bear a resemblance to the Wild Bunch member, but appearances are deceiving -- there is one nagging detail. Kilpatrick was 15 years old in 1889 (and a decade away from his first Wild Bunch holdup), while the man in the photo looks to be around 25 or 30. The man said to be "Flat Nose" Currie is a dead ringer for Stacy Keach, aquiline nose and all, and is clearly in his mid-to-late-twenties. Currie, however, had a seriously smashed honker and, like Kilpatrick, was still a teenager in 1889. The man said to be Elzy Lay looks like Buster Keaton.
The photo undoubtedly came from Boyd Charter, the son of Bert Charter. That much we can agree on. Boyd told Pointer that from what he could recall of what his father had said he could identify Butch Cassidy, Tom McCarty, and John Griffith (as well as his own father), but he could not remember the other names. Anne Charter*, Boyd's daughter, told me earlier this year that her grandfather was in the photo, but that Pointer had supplied the other names. Pointer established the date of the photo as circa 1889, perhaps in the fall. How did he make that determination? He speculated that the gathering was a celebration of the 1889 Telluride bank holdup and the establishment of the Wild Bunch as a gang. (That the gang was ceremoniously founded, like a Masonic lodge, is a dubious sentiment.) Although the holdup did indeed happen in the summer of 1889, the participants, Matt Warner, Butch Cassidy, Tom McCarty, and perhaps Bert Charter, were hardly a gang, and they soon scattered. More importantly, it was years -- the mid-to-late-1890s -- before Butch, Sundance, the Logan brothers, and Ben Kilpatrick, all of whom Pointer placed in this supposed 1889 photo, were associated (and by then the McCartys and Warner were out of the picture, so to speak). In other words, Pointer speculated that these famous outlaws were in a photo together, he speculated over the date, and he speculated over what the heck might have brought them together. But he had little evidence.
Although Skovlin adheres to the original 1889 supposition, when Pointer published In Search of Butch Cassidy (1977), he inexplicably moved the date forward to "c 1896." That new guess, however, presents other daunting problems. John Logan, allegedly present in the portrait, has his right hand on the shoulder of the man in front of him. Yet Logan had lost his right arm in 1892 and was shot dead in early 1896. Tom McCarty is also supposed to be depicted, even though most researchers contend that he had vanished from the outlaw scene in 1893, following the Delta holdup debacle. Warner, also said to be present, went to jail in May 1896 and wasn't out until 1900. Pointer was still on the fence about one of the men being either Bill McCarty or the Sundance Kid, but it's the wrong fence. McCarty was killed in Delta in 1893, and the man depicted still looks like Yosemite Sam.
I do not think the photo has stood any test, not at the time it was first published or since. Readers can look at the image and judge for themselves. Useful tools to have at your elbow are a loupe, a calendar, and an outlaw encyclopedia. So who are these guys? Probably locals, contemporaries of Bert Charter, whose identifications await the arrival of a discerning Wyoming photographic historian.
-- Daniel Buck
*CORRECTION: Anne Charter was Bert Charter's daughter-in-law; she was married to his son Boyd.
WOLA Journal, vol. X, no. 4, Winter 2002:
"Even Mr. Magoo Couldn't Miss the Difference."
Dear Editor:
Jim Dullenty's reply ("Jury's Still Out on Wild Bunch," Fall 2001) to our critique of the use of the D.J. Myers letter on a recent television documentary ("The History Channel vs. History," Spring 2001) was rather beside the point. We published the Myers letter alongside known examples of Butch Cassidy's handwriting so that your readers could see what even Mr. Magoo couldn't miss. Meyers's handwriting bears no resemblance to that of Butch.
Jim responded that "most of those supporting the scenario" that Butch died in South America "live on the East Coast or even further east, in England," and that "[m]ost Westerners believe in the Butch-returned scenario." Even if that were true, what difference would it make? Is Jim suggesting some regional conspiracy? We need not ponder that question, because Jim's suggestion is not true. As he mentioned, at the WOLA convention in Craig, Colorado, a few years back, following a panel discussion on whether Butch and/or Sundance died in Bolivia or returned to the United States, a show of hands was called for.
On Butch's fate, one-third voted for Bolivia, one-third voted for returned, and one-third indicated unresolved, no opinion, or, perhaps, could not care less. There was no discernable regional bias in the voting. On a separate issue, whether Sundance returned as Hiram Beebe, the audience was virtually unanimous in the negative. As I recall, one lonely hand was raised on the affirmative side. Not that it matters, but an Eastern writer had first proposed the idea that Sundance was Beebe, which just goes to show that muddled thinking is no respecter of geography.
Jim's second suggestion was that our expression of "disappointment" in his use of the Myers letter might have been an attempt to suppress it. Hardly. We reproduced the letter in our WOLA Journal article and posted it on our website (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/danne/) along with examples of Butch's handwriting for all to see.
Our disappointment was that Jim and the documentary producers did not allow the viewers a similar opportunity to make their own comparisons. Jim is on firmer ground in saying that the controversy will continue. As Ken Kesey wrote, "the need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer." But I doubt that even DNA proof will resolve it. DNA tests did little to convert those who hold that Jesse James was not shot dead in 1882 or the Anastasia buffs who cling to the view that she survived the 1918 massacre.
-- Daniel Buck
NOLA Quarterly, April-May 2001:
Dear Editor:
"The Enigmatic Etta Place" was complete and utter nonsense. Controversy is one thing; malarkey is quite another. What's coming in future issues: "Jesse James: Elvis's Missing Twin Brother?" "Was the Loch Ness Monster at the OK Corral?" "Strange but True: Billy the Kid Was a Goat?" "Johnny Ringo: The Fifth Beatle?"
-- Daniel Buck
NOLA Quarterly, April-May 2001:
Dear Editor:
Re: the article on Tom McCarty [Quarterly, October-December 2000] -- Jon Skovlin's piece was excellent, but the photograph on page 32 of what is described as "the inaugural" party of the Wild Bunch in Rawlins, Wyoming, in the fall of 1889 is bogus. Few of the people in the photograph look even remotely like the gang members. Indeed, most of the men look like prosperous, middle-aged, small town business men, which is undoubtedly who they were. (The short man purporting to be the six-foot Sundance Kid looks more like Yosemite Sam.) Besides, the gang didn't really exist in late 1889, and only a few of them, for example, Butch Cassidy, Matt Warner, and Tom McCarty, had even met, and they were still young bandits in hiding, as Skovlin points out, following the holdup of the bank in Telluride that summer.
-- Daniel Buck
Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2001:
Lessons Learned From the World of Television and Critics
At the time Anne Meadows and I were interviewed by Susan King ("Balancing Fact and Fiction," TV Times, Jan. 21), we had not seen the "History vs. Hollywood" episode on "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," to which we had contributed as historical consultants. Now that we've watched the episode, we must report that it disingenuously attempted to breathe new life into an all but expired controversy over whether Butch died in Bolivia or returned to the United States.
For example, the program aired a 1970s interview with Butch's sister, Lula Parker Betenson, in which she said that her brother had returned to visit the family in 1925, almost two decades after his presumed death in Bolivia. Not disclosed to the viewers was the fact that most of Butch's family -- his father and other siblings, some of whom she averred were present at the 1925 visit -- said that he had never returned. Moreover, after Lula died, one of her sons, who she also said had been present at the reunion, told a writer that it never happened.
The television program might better have been titled "History vs. the History Channel," because Hollywood, although it romanticized the circumstances of Butch and Sundance's fatal shootout in Bolivia, at least got the basic idea straight.
-- Daniel Buck
Dear Editor:
In reference to "The Return of Butch Cassidy?" (Winter 1999), even if the man in the photograph of the Utah railroad crew was the Wild Bunch leader, he wouldn't have been returned from South America in 1900, the date suggested for the image, because he didn't leave the United States until 1901.
Regardless, although I agree with author Jim Miller that the man in the photo is not Butch Cassidy, I'm not sure the photo's date can be established with such precision.
Utah historian Rell G. Francis, who initially suggested the possibility that Cassidy was depicted among the railroad crew, has said that he estimated the date of the photo. He dated the image by splitting the difference between the earliest date, 1898, when the construction crew started on that track section, and the latest date, 1903, when Stanley Gardner, one of the other men in the photo, is known to have died.
By the way, the maker of the photograph is not anonymous. He was George Edward Anderson, a noted Utah photographer of the era and the subject of several studies, including Francis's Utah Photographs of George Edward Anderson (University of Nebraska Press, 1979).
A London newspaper first raised the possibility a couple of years ago that the photograph depicted Butch Cassidy after his return from South America. But because the photo couldn't have been made after 1903, when Gardner died and Butch was still ranching in Patagonia, it can't contain a "returned" Butch Cassidy.
Moreover, in 1907 when Butch was living in Bolivia, George Anderson left Utah. He didn't return until late 1913, when Butch would have been forty-seven years old (had he not died in Bolivia in November 1908), decades older than the young look-alike in the photograph.
-- Daniel Buck
Finding Fouts
I noticed that TW's photo editor is Craig Fouts. Back in 1986, shortly after Anne and I had embarked on our quest to figure out the story of Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid in South America, we were put in touch with Fouts -- by whom I can't remember -- anyway, I called him out of the blue and he kindly provided us with photocopies of a batch of Butch Cassidy's letters, news clippings from Bolivia, and outlaw photographs. Even though I haven't been in touch with him in more than a decade, I've never forgotten his thoughtfulness in assisting a couple of neophyte outlaw investigators.
--Daniel Buck
Ethel out of Place?
Allow me to expand on my brief comment rejecting the authenticity of the photograph of Ethel Place ("Letters," October 1999 Wild West). The photo fails on two counts. First, the woman doesn't look like Place. That's a no-brainer. Second, there is no provenance linking the photo to Place or her family.
Moreover, the advocates of the photo's authenticity never bothered to look into the one clue they had, the photographer's name on the card mount. I did a little checking. He was Frank Bradley, an early 1900s photographer in Auburn, Ind. In October 1908, he placed an ad in a photography magazine offering his studio for sale or trade, and his name is absent from the October 1909 Auburn phone directory, so we might surmise that he had left Auburn between those two dates. That's significant because the photo's advocates, trying to sidestep that difference in physical appearance between this woman and Place, argue that the Bradley photo must have been taken later in Place's life, in the 1910s or 1920s. The only link between the woman in the Bradley photo and Ethel Place is that each was a white female with one neck, two eyes, two ears, one nose, and one mouth.
-- Dan Buck
WOLA Saddlebag Newsletter, Fall 1999:
This Just In . . .
The October 1999 Wild West published a letter from Frances Williams Reust, a Craig, Colorado, artist and former museum curator, in which she reports to have authenticated a previously undiscovered photograph of Ethel (aka Etta) Place taken in Indiana in the 1910s or 1920s. In an editor's note, Wild West quoted me as saying that "In my opinion, the woman . . . is not Ethel Place," but didn't explain the basis for my opinion. An elaboration would be useful because the manner in which Reust and the photo's owner (who wishes to remain anonymous, though I saw the photo and spoke with him in Craig several years ago at a WOLA convention) arrived at the authentication was incredibly convoluted.
The case that the photo depicts Ethel Place fails on three counts: (1) the woman does not look like Place; (2) there is no provenance linking the photo to Place or her descendants; and (3) the photo was clearly not taken in the 1910s or 1920s, as its owner and Reust contend, but at the turn of the century and depicts a woman who is obviously many years older than the Place we know from the 1901 DeYoung portrait.
On the first point, the image speaks for itself. The woman doesn't look like Place. The owner and Reust assert that the difference in appearance can be explained by the fact that the woman is a decade or two older than Place in 1901. More on that later.
On the second point, there is no provenance for the photograph, that is, nothing that links it to Ethel Place or her descendants. The owner has said that he bought the image at an "antique mall" in Denver, and that Place might have lived in Denver at one time. Where Indiana, the actual source of the photo, fits in this story is left unexplained. Even if Place was in Denver at some time, so were thousands of other woman.
The third point is the crucial problem -- the age of the woman in the photo and the probable date the photo was made. Because the woman in the picture is many years older (30s to 40s) than the twenty-year-old Ethel we know from the 1901 DeYoung portrait, Reust and the owner were forced to conclude that the photo was taken in the 1910s or 1920s.
So, the first question is, who was the photographer and when was he in business? According to Reust, the name on the photographer's card stock is [?] Bradley [?]uburn, Ind. She apparently looked into this telling clue no further! An Indiana photographic historian, however, told me that the photographer was F.B. Bradley of Auburn, Indiana. The only chronological information she had in her data base on Bradley was that he had put his Auburn studio up for sale in October 1908. Assuming Bradley left Auburn somewhere in that time frame, he'd have been gone years before Reust estimates the photo must have been taken, in the 1910s or 1920s. (Place, by the way, didn't return to the United States from South America until mid-1906, when she was reported living in San Francisco.)
Regardless of when Bradley departed Auburn, from the woman's dress (an 1890s blouse with a stand collar and leg-of-mutton sleeves) and hair style, and from the photo itself and the card stock it was mounted on, it appears to be a turn-of-the-century image.
Even if one were to agree that the photo was taken in the 1910s or 1920s, the woman's turn-of-the-century dress and hair style are out of date with the later time period. The owner's explanation for this anachronism was nothing short of ludicrous: Place must have been in permanent mourning over Sundance's death (in Bolivia in November 1908), thus she continued to wear the same clothes and hair style that she had worn in the 1901 portrait. In the annals of deus ex machina absurdities, the mourning clothes story ranks up there with Hiram BeBee's osteoporosis and William T. Phillips's plastic surgery.
The Bradley image of the unidentified Indiana woman is apparently going to be sold as an authentic photograph of Ethel Place by Christie's at a November auction in New York, along with, no doubt, a deed to the Brooklyn Bridge.
-- Dan Buck
The English Westerners' Society Tally Sheet, Autumn 1999:
Letter to the Editor
The question of what the Parker family knew about Butch Cassidy's fate (Review of In Search of Butch Cassidy by Larry Pointer, Vol. 45, No. 3, Summer 1999) cannot be reduced to the views of the only two members who claimed that he returned.
Over the decades, at least six family members made their views known, and four of the six said that Butch did not return: (1) Butch's father, Maximillian Parker, reportedly told rancher Jim Regan that his son never returned home from South America. (2) Butch's sister, Lula Parker Betenson, wrote in her book, Butch Cassidy, My Brother, that he returned home once, in 1925, and died in Spokane in 1937, but wasn't William T. Phillips. Yet while she was promoting the Spokane story, she was checking out rumors that Butch died in Johnnie, Nevada, in the 1940s. And she indicated to outlaw researchers in the 1970s that she was just having fun with her stories. Lula made a lousy witness.
(3) In the 1970s, Lula's son Mark told an outlaw researcher that the tale of Butch's return was just "Lula's story," and that his grandfather, Maximillian, had said that Butch never came back. (4) In the 1940s or 1950s, Lula's husband, Jose, filed a genealogical form with the Church of Latter Day Saints stating that Butch died in 1909, which at the time was thought to be the year he had died in South America. Some decades later, about when Lula was working on her book with the 1937 version, a new form was filed stating that he had died in 1937.
(5) Elinor Parker, who was married to Max, the son of Butch's brother Dan, said that Butch returned and was William T. Phillips. Even Lula wouldn't go this far. Of Elinor's story she said, "there's no truth to any part of it." (6) The daughter of one of Butch's other sisters told me a few years back that her uncles, Butch's brothers, unsuccessfully searched for years -- "into the late 1930s" -- to determine what happened to Butch. She also said that "the family was quite unhappy with Aunt Lula's book."
The best explanation for this welter of stories is that as far as the family was concerned, Butch had disappeared. He went to South America and never came back. Moreover, until the late 1980s there was no good evidence to support the notion that Butch had died in Bolivia. The family was operating in a vacuum. History, like nature, abhors a vacuum. But what is clear is that most of the family members maintained that although Butch's fate was a mystery, they never saw him again after he went to South America. Anne Meadows and I published a rather lengthy exposition on the family stories, "Did Butch Cassidy Return? His Family Can't Decide," in the WOLA Journal, Vol. VI, No. 3, Spring 1998.
On a separate issue, whether or not any "researcher has managed to place Phillips anywhere near Butch's gang," that depends on your definition of "near." In 1942, a Wyoming newspaper columnist reported that Burris rancher Jim Regan had known Butch Cassidy and William T. Phillips as two different people. When Phillips returned to Wyoming in the 1930s, Regan recognized him: "Regan is confident the man Phillips who came back here a few years ago posing as Butch Cassidy was Phillips, not Cassidy. He knew Phillips well at Lost Cabin when he ran a poker game during shearing time." Regan recalled that during the 1930s visit, "'Phillips came to my place at Burris with Bill Boyd. He wanted to see me. I recognized him as he drove in the yard and called him by name.'"
As for Butch, Regan said that he had known him as early as the mid-1880s, when the young, not-yet outlaw was cowboying near Burnt Fork. We also know that Butch ranched in Hole-in-the-Wall in the early 1890s, so he and Phillips were possibly in Wyoming at the same time and could have met (as Phillips's wife later claimed), an encounter that might have inspired Phillips to impersonate him decades later. As an added incentive, there is some evidence that Phillips and Butch shared a nickname. Jim Dullenty has uncovered information that as a boy in Michigan, Phillips might have been known as "Butch."
On page 48 of In Search of Butch Cassidy, Pointer cited the portion of the 1942 interview where Regan mentioned knowing Butch, but not the parts where he stated that he also knew Phillips, that Phillips wasn't Butch, and that Butch's father lamented that his son had not returned from South America. Although Pointer was a meticulous researcher he did not include in his book evidence that refuted his thesis, leaving the reader very much in search of the truth.
-- Dan Buck
Telluride (CO) Daily Planet, June 28, 1999:
Butch Cassidy theory discredited
The theory that Butch Cassidy did not get killed in Bolivia ("A Historical Perspective," June 11) but returned to the United States, assumed the identity of William T. Phillips, and lived into his 60s in Washington state has been entirely discredited.
Before he died in 1937, Phillips wrote "The Bandit Invincible," the story of his supposed life as Butch Cassidy. But recent research has revealed that his account was a fantasy. For example, Phillips wrote that he escaped from the famous shootout in Bolivia and returned to the United States, where he married his sweetheart. However, we now know that Phillips got married in May 1908, and the shootout happened in November. Phillips also told of holding up railroads in southern Bolivia that weren't constructed until years later, and he located Butch's ranch in the wrong part of Argentina. Sorry, Phillips was a fake.
By the way, if Butch Cassidy were alive today, he would be a spry 134 years old.
-- Daniel Buck
Mr. Editor . . .
The research team's employment of "modern forensic science techniques" to compare a photograph of Ethel Place with images of six other women ("The Sundance Women," Winter 1998) demonstrates the limits of science in attempting to resolve historical mysteries.
None of the six women looks like Place, least of all Maretta Buchtel, whose image the team concluded had "suggested a better fit than that observed in the photographs of the other candidates." No amount of fiddling with a computer can turn straw into gold, nor Buchtel into Place. In the late-1880s photograph shown, Buchtel appears horse-faced, large-nosed, and stocky, whereas Place's 1901 portrait shows a slim, oval-faced beauty. If Buchtel was Place, then she reversed the aging process, making her an even greater enigma than we ever imagined.
Laura Bullion's photograph is included among those with the "best alignments" with Place's image. It doesn't really matter if Bullion and Place's photographs ring every bell on the computer. Bullion was in jail in the United States while Place was in South America.
The report was also carelessly written. The authors state that "legend holds that Etta Place was the consort of the Sundance Kid." Legend has nothing to do with it. It is a historical fact that they held themselves out as man and wife. The authors ask whether "indeed a woman with this name [Place] really existed." What? There is no doubt that a woman using the name Ethel Place existed. The only question is what her real name was. Science has taken us no closer to the answer.
-- Daniel Buck
A Train Robbery (Story) Turned Bad
Even though nit-picking is one of the few affordable, legal pleasures left to us mortals, restraint is normally the best policy. But "A Train Robbery Turned Bad," (Old West, Winter 1998) got so many key facts wrong it deserves comment.
Ben Kilpatrick and Laura Bullion were not arrested together on June 8, 1901. Kilpatrick was arrested on June 5, and Laura Bullion the next morning. The arrests took place in St. Louis, Missouri, not Knoxville, Tennessee. Furthermore, Bullion didn't have her bags packed ready to flee Kilpatrick when arrested. Bullion tried to flee the next morning after Kilpatrick didn't return to her hotel. Even that doesn't make her disloyal or, as the writer put it, "almost as big a crook as Ben." What was she supposed to do, hang around and get nabbed? Besides, when she got out of jail in 1905, she relocated so as to be near her still-imprisoned lover, and waited for him until his release in 1911. How's that for devotion?
Kilpatrick's colleague in the 1912 Southern Pacific holdup was not "known to history only as 'Ole Buck.'" He was identified as Ole Beck, alias Ole Hobeck, H.O. Beck, J.D. Flood, and John D. Magner, born in Minnesota in the 1860s.
Kilpatrick, killed during the 1912 holdup, was not "one of the most vicious outlaws of the West," nor was he "possibly the last living member of the Wild Bunch." In the most-vicious derby, Kilpatrick doesn't even register. And several Wild Bunchers far out-survived him: Matt Warner and Elzy Lay lived into the 1930s; Walt Punteney died in 1954. Until the mystery of Ethel Place's fate is solved, the last-survivor honor goes to Laura Bullion, who lived until 1961.
Finally, it is admittedly still a matter of some dispute as to who participated in the July 1901 Great Northern holdup near Wagner, Montana, but I think the weight of the evidence now shows that Butch Cassidy could not have been present, because he had gone to Argentina with the Sundance Kid and Ethel Place in early 1901 and was there through the year. For more on Kilpatrick and Bullion, readers should consult Arthur Soule's 1995 book, The Tall Texan: The Story of Ben Kilpatrick, and Carolyn Bullion McBride's April 1992 True West article, "Love Behind Bars: The Thorny Rose."
-- Dan Buck
Bolivian Times, December 17, 1998:
Dear Editor,
Regardless of what your intrepid correspondent Tsjalling Beetstra might have been told ("Southwest of Tupiza," November 26), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are still buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in the San Vicente cemetery. Several years ago an American team, of which I was a member, excavated a skeleton there, but it proved to be that of a German miner named Gustav Zimmer.
Also, yareta (Azorella compacta) might look at first glance like moss, but it's actually an umbelliferous shrub related to carrots, dill, celery, parsnip, anise, caraway, and parsley. Yareta works better as fuel, however, than sprinkled on potatoes.
-- Daniel Buck
Bolivian Times, December 4, 1997:
More on the Outlaws of Bolivia
I recently saw a back issue of the Bolivian Times containing an excerpt from a 1988 interview with Oscar Soria that had been made two months before his death ("The Last Interview with Oscar Soria," April 25, 1996).
During the interview, Soria told the story of "Gringo," perhaps the most famous unproduced screenplay in the history of the Bolivian cinema. As the story goes, Soria and Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada spent a couple of years researching the history of a notorious outlaw gang called "Los Smitis," led by a man named John Smith, which had robbed Bolivian businesses and banks at the turn of the century. The gang was finally surrounded and killed by the "national army" near Eucaliptus, and all the outlaws were killed.
Soria wrote a screenplay, which Sánchez de Lozada took to Hollywood. They rejected a US$15,000 offer from a producer, only to later learn that their idea had been appropriated by Hollywood and turned into the hugely successful 1969 movie, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."
I first heard the incredible saga of the "Gringo" screenplay in 1987, when I interviewed Jorge Ruiz, an associate of Soria, while researching the history of Butch and Sundance in Bolivia. Ruiz told me a new detail: Butch and Sundance never existed. The gang that terrorized Bolivia was the Smith Gang. Later, I found the tale of the stolen screenplay in Alfonso Gumucio Dagron's 1982 book, Historia del cine en Bolivia, with an additional twist: "The battle in Eucaliptus left 23 North Americans dead." The Smith Gang had been wiped out in the bloodiest battle in outlaw history.
It's a dramatic story, but I fear that most of it is fiction. The legend of the Smith Gang and the battle at Eucaliptus is most likely a jumbling of three actual occurrences: (1) Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were active in Bolivia from 1906 to 1908, when they met their fate in San Vicente after being cornered by a handful of Bolivian soldiers. Both bandits and one soldier died.
(2) Eucaliptus was the scene of a crime, but not a bloody battle. A railroad construction camp at Eucaliptus was held up twice in 1908 -- in May and August -- but the bandits, who were never identified, escaped. No one was killed.
(3) Three Huanchaca mine employees, one of them an American named John W. Smith, held up a payroll train near Uyuni in April 1922. The trio was later captured in Argentina while burying the loot, returned to Bolivia, tried, convicted, and sentenced to eight years in jail. They strongly protested their innocence, claiming that they had "found" the 100,000-peso payroll on the ground, and demanded not only to be released but to have the money returned to them. They lodged multiple petitions with the Bolivian and U.S. governments.
Finally, in February 1928, the three men were released from prison, having served almost six years of their sentence. The last letter in the U.S. Department of State file on the case states that Smith "is leaving Bolivia for Argentina." That's the end of the Smith trio. In a decade of researching banditry in Bolivia, I have never come across any record of any other crimes attributed to Mr. Smith or of any gun battle at Eucaliptus.
As for the origin of the screenplay for the 1969 movie, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," it had nothing to do with the misadventures of John W. Smith. The award-winning screenplay was written by William Goldman and based entirely on stories about Butch and Sundance that were published in the United States from the early 1900s through the 1960s.
-- Dan Buck
Digging Up Harvey Logan
In the January 1997 "Answer Man," Chuck Parsons discussed a reader's suggestion that Harvey Logan could have been the red-bearded, Texas gunman named "Harvey" whom explorer Colonel Percy H. Fawcett met in 1906 in Rurrenabaque, a squalid jungle town on the Río Beni in eastern Bolivia.
For several reasons, Parsons was not too keen on the possibility. Here are some additional reasons. From the context of the passage of Fawcett's book, Lost Trails, Lost Cities, Harvey was probably the man's last name, not his first. Second, Harvey Logan, whose hair was usually reported as dark or black, had never been described as having a red beard. Finally, Fawcett revisited Rurrenabaque in 1913, and Harvey-the-Texas-gunman was still there. Logan, a footloose Rocky Mountain outlaw, would not have stayed put seven years in one place, least of all in a steamy, jungle-river port.
-- Daniel Buck
Mystery Outlaw Identified
Thanks to information from alert readers Barbara Hegne in Oregon and Roy O'Dell in England, the puzzle of Andrew J. "Gold Teeth" Duffy's identity noted in our article "Leaving Cholila" (True West, January 1996), has been solved. Duffy's Patagonian neighbors commonly thought he was Harvey Logan -- Kid Curry.
But Montana-outlaw researchers Hegne and O'Dell have speculated that Andrew J. Duffy was, well, Andrew J. Duffy, a Saco saloon keeper, small-time rustler, and one-time associate of "Dutch" Henry Ieuch.
According to O'Dell, Duffy was said to have left Montana for Argentina circa 1904. Close enough. He went down in 1907. Hegne came up with the clincher, Duffy's autograph from a 1904 legal document in Montana that matches his signature on a 1909 livestock receipt in Chubut, Argentina.
Duffy fell in with two other gringos, William Wilson, a Texan out of Billings, Montana, and Robert Evans, who is still waiting to be recognized. Evans, also known as Emil Hood, may have been a Montana rustler before wandering south to Argentina. All three died in Patagonia. Evans and an associate shot Duffy in 1910, and the local police shot Evans and Wilson in 1911. Dead outlaws are Montana's number-one export to Argentina.
-- Daniel Buck and Anne Meadows
WOLA Journal, Winter-Spring 1995:
No Closer Than Spokane Map Room
In reference to how many bandits participated in the June 24, 1889, holdup of the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride, Colorado ("Did the Sundance Kid Take Part in the Telluride Robbery?"), four were numbered from the earliest accounts.
The first newspaper story we've been able to locate, which ran in the June 26, 1889, Pueblo Chieftain, reports that three men entered the bank and a "fourth man held their horses . . . and the four ran away before the bookkeeper could give the alarm." (The correspondent added that "the depositors will suffer no loss, as the officers and stockholders are wealthy.")
Other newspapers added a few relay-horse holders to the gang's contingent, bringing the total to as many as eight. The bank quartet was thought to be Matt Warner, Tom McCarty, Bert Madden, and Bob Parker, later to be known as Butch Cassidy (in one account the fourth man is called "Bob Porter"), while the relay holders were variously identified as Dan Parker (a younger brother of Bob's), George Brown, Billy Madden (Bert Madden's brother or half-brother), and Bert Charter.
Brown and Billy Madden were arrested a few days after the holdup, and one of them obligingly told the authorities that the four culprits were "Bert Madden, Bob Porter, Matt Warner, and Tom McCarty."
In Matt Warner's memoir, The Last of the Bandit Riders, written almost five decades later, he counted only three bandits in the Telluride bank gang, but others recalled four. In a 1936 reminiscence with the Utah State Historical Society, old-timer Frank Silvery said that he had declined Tom McCarty's invitation to join the Telluride fireworks, and that McCarty, Bert Madden, Matt Warner, and Bob Parker "committed the robbery."
Rancher Harry B. Adsit, interviewed by the Telluride Journal in 1938, said that he had been riding into Telluride on the day of the holdup and saw Butch Cassidy, who had quit a job on his ranch only two weeks earlier, and three other men "approaching on the run" with a posse in pursuit no more than a mile behind.
As for the possibility that the Sundance Kid was in on the Telluride job, for what it's worth (not much), among his later aliases was H.A. Brown.
Changing gears and continents, the suggestion was made at this summer's Wyoming State Historical Society conference in Riverton that Butch Cassidy had indeed escaped from a shootout with authorities and returned to the United States, where he lived out his life as William T. Phillips. Since it is now known that Phillips was married in Michigan in May 1908 and the shootout in Bolivia in which the two Yankees were killed occurred later that same year, in November, the new hypothesis is that Cassidy must have escaped from some earlier shootout, which would have allowed him to return to the United States before his May 1908 wedding. But the shootout couldn't have happened too much earlier, since his last letter from Bolivia was dated February 16, 1908.
The suggestion prompted us to take another look at Phillips's manuscript, The Bandit Invincible, in order to determine, following the manuscript's narrative, if Cassidy could have departed Bolivia on or after February 16, 1908, and reappeared as Phillips in Adrian, Michigan, at his wedding on May 14, 1908.
According to the narrative in The Bandit Invincible, Phillips escaped from a shootout near La Paz and journeyed down the Andes, across Amazonia, over the Atlantic to France for a spot of plastic surgery, and then back over to the United States and on to Adrian in time for his May 14 wedding.
Such a journey is improbable, given the enormous distances and the time constraints imposed by the two dates mentioned above and by Phillips's narrative. With February 16 as the earliest he could have left Bolivia, he had but twelve weeks to make the entire trip. According to The Bandit Invincible, Phillips spent ten weeks stranded along the way: one week in Perare, two weeks in Pará (today Belém), four weeks in Pernambuco (today Recife), and three weeks in Paris. That leaves him two weeks to descend the Andes, cross Amazonia, sail the Atlantic twice, and arrive in Adrian at the appointed hour. Not bloody likely.
La Paz, Bolivia, to Belém, Brazil, is roughly 1,600 miles as the crow flies and in excess of 3,000 miles following the Beni River to the Madeira (994 miles), the Madeira to the Amazon (1,113 miles), and the Amazon to the Atlantic Ocean at Belém (1,000 miles). Phillips says that he paralleled the Beni on horseback, then switched to boats for the Madeira and Amazon segments. Our guess is that such a journey would have taken him at least a month.
An Atlantic crossing in that era took about two weeks by steamer, so a double-crossing means a month. Toss in a few odds and ends, such as Liverpool to Paris and back, plus New York to Adrian, and you're looking at a minimum of ten weeks of pure travel time. Combined with the ten weeks he says he spent stranded, Phillips was on the road at least twenty weeks, which makes him two months late for his wedding, to say nothing of any prenuptial courtship.
Other aspects of Phillips's narrative of his life in Bolivia cast further doubt on the veracity of the document. He claims to have escaped from a shootout near La Paz in which two bandits and more than fifteen Bolivian soldiers were killed, yet no evidence of such a calamitous event has ever come to light. (We surveyed about a dozen Bolivian newspapers of the period at six different libraries -- three in La Paz and one each in Oruro, Potosí, and Sucre.) By contrast, the November 1908 shootout in San Vicente was widely reported in Bolivian newspapers, even though San Vicente is a tiny village in the far south and only one soldier and two bandits died.
Phillips claims he robbed a train near Cotagaita, a town northeast of Tupiza in southern Bolivia. The southern Bolivian railroad (which doesn't really run near Cotagaita, anyway) wasn't built until years later -- the Uyuni-Atocha segment opened in 1913, and Atocha-Tupiza opened in two segments, in 1924 and 1925. How could he rob a train that didn't exist? (He couldn't be referring to the two documented train robberies at Eucaliptus, because Eucaliptus is in central Bolivia and the holdups took place in late May and August 1908, after his marriage in Michigan.)
Indeed, none of the holdups Phillips claims to have pulled off in Bolivia -- a train near Cotagaita, a "supply pack train between Oruro and Cochabamba," "several holdups between Camargo and Puna," and one "near Challapata" -- turned up in any of the newspapers of the period.
In short, the Bolivian sections of The Bandit Invincible do not lend credence to Phillips's story that he was the famous outlaw. We suspect that Phillips never got any closer to Bolivia than the map room at the Spokane public library.
-- Dan Buck & Anne Meadows
The New York Times, November 6, 1994:
Butch Cassidy et al.
Butch Cassidy in Patagonia is anything but mythical ("Magellan's Route in Tierra del Fuego," Oct. 9). As the author of Digging Up Butch and Sundance, I can report that not only did Butch spend four years ranching peacefully in Northern Patagonia's Cholila Valley with the Sundance Kid and Etta Place in the early 1900s, but that he and Sundance later robbed* a bank in Río Gallegos, Argentina, a mere 50 miles from the Strait of Magellan. What is mythical is the Hollywood version, which skipped the Patagonian chapter in the saga of the Old West's most affable and peripatetic outlaws.
-- Anne Meadows
*Evidence that came to light after the publication of this letter indicates that Butch and Sundance probably were not the actual perpetrators of the Río Gallegos holdup, although they were the prime suspects in the crime and had to flee the country to avoid being detained by the authorities for questioning.
WOLA Journal, Summer-Fall 1994:
A Kid Curry Blooper
Before an alert member of the gotcha posse gallops in to ridicule my Kid Curry blooper ("Just Found in Montana -- Kid Curry's Long Lost Knoxville Manuscript," Spring 1994) and consign me to outlaw-history purgatory, allow me to correct it myself. For the usual reasons (carelessness, amnesia, etc.) I wrote that Curry had been arrested in Knoxville "for passing stolen banknotes." As every school kid knows, Curry was arrested for assaulting two Knoxville police officers, R.T. Saylor and W.M. Dinwiddie. He was later tried and convicted in federal court for signing and passing stolen bank notes.
As for the authenticity of the manuscript, I agree with Jim Dullenty that Walt Coburn's letter certainly helps establish its provenance and makes it more likely that it was either written or dictated by Logan. In other words, much of the available evidence points in that direction.
But there are a few stray ends. For example, in the April 1, 1962, letter, which Dullenty referred to, Coburn wrote that during their camping trip, James Thornhill "mentioned the diary the Kid had written and smuggled out to him. And Jim said he'd 'loaned' it to Bob [Coburn] and he never had returned it. Mebbyso Jimmer had cut out a page or two. Or most mebby Bob had cut out a page or two that could have been dynamite."
Thornhill might have been referring to a document other than the one now at the Montana Historical Society, which is in the form of letters to the editor of a newspaper, most likely never mailed, not a diary, and appears to have been written after Logan's escape, rather than smuggled out while he was still in jail. In other words, the Curry diary and the Curry letters-to-the-editor could be two different documents. On the other hand, Coburn might simply have been loosely referring to the letters as a diary and in error as to their having been smuggled out of jail.
To complicate matters further, apparently referring to the same camping trip, Coburn said that Thornhill "fetched along some letters from Kid Curry and some newspaper clippings and a few pictures." In other words, we haven't seen the last of Kid Curry memorabilia.
There remains the problem of the brief section clearly in a handwriting distinct from that of the rest of the document. Perhaps Logan was suffering from writer's cramp and got spelled. Another possibility is that the document in the possession of the Montana Historical Society is a contemporaneous handwritten copy of the original, which has since disappeared. Nonetheless, the possibility that the document was forged, perhaps only as a joke, should remain a consideration, if only to give outlaw historians a bone to chew on.
-- Daniel Buck
WOLA Journal, Summer-Fall 1994:
Helpful Rummaging
The Journal's accolades are appreciated, but I don't feel that stumbling upon an array of Sundance Kid material, most of it already published, just over the Canadian line qualifies as much of a discovery. Suerte de chancho (pig's luck), as they say in Bolivia, is more like it. Come to think of it, rooting around in archives for the documentary equivalent of acorns is how outlaw researchers spend their days.
A number of individuals and institutions were helpful during the rummage, starting with Gordon Muir (no package yet); Lindsay Moir and Lynette Walton, Glenbow Institute; Donna and Paul Ernst; Simon Evans, Environment Canada Parks Service; Gord Tolton, an outlaw folklorist up in Coaldale, Alberta; Alan Boras, Calgary Herald; and Vicky Kelly Williams.
-- Dan Buck
Gnawing Questions
From Joseph F. Rylchak:
"I have been following Dan Buck and Anne Meadows' work on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in True West and Old West and on the October 12, 1993, Nova television episode about the San Vicente dig, 'Wanted: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.' I respect Buck and Meadows' work and am grateful for all they have done to shed more light on the mystery. But I hope they will answer four questions that have been gnawing at me.
"First, why would Cassidy, who always set up relays of horses for his getaway, have to take a mule from the hold-up victims? It almost appears the Aramayo mine payroll bandits were afoot, which Butch and Sundance never would have been.
"Second, why would Butch and Sundance shoot the first soldier who advanced toward them in the courtyard? They surely would have tried to talk things over first, which also would have given them a chance to get closer to their rifles. This 'shoot first and ask questions later' approach strikes me as amateurish.
"Third, why would Butch shoot himself, much less his pal? They were not wanted for murder. Sundance had cracked out of a couple of jails before. I suggest their style would have been to surrender and find some way to bribe the guards later. If Butch and Sundance were shot, I would hypothesize that it was by soldiers who probably split up the money the outlaws had with them over and above the payroll heist.
"Fourth, and most bothersome of all, why would the people of San Vicente pay to place a large headstone, encircled by a chain fence, over the graves of Butch and Sundance? Maybe that area of the cemetery was once a pauper's plot, and the body of another person (the Mr. Zimmer identified on the gravestone in an earlier picture) was buried above the bandits later. But that theory does not play out well.
"With all of those questions, along with the fact that no evidence of the bandits we know and love to study was found in the grave, I wonder why Buck and Meadows and Clyde Snow are so confident that the San Vicente cemetery is the outlaws' final resting place."
Buck and Meadows's Response:
Mr. Rychlak's questions are excellent. Because Nova is a science show, it focuses on the forensic, rather than the historical, aspects of the story. That limited focus didn't permit an exploration of the kinds of questions Rychlak has raised, but we are glad to have an opportunity to answer them here.
Carlos Peró, the Aramayo mine company manager Butch and Sundance robbed, wrote that the bandits were on foot when they surprised his party on the morning of November 4, 1908, but that "his servant noticed various animals hidden in the ravine" nearby. According to A.G. Francis, a Briton who was overseeing the transport of a gold dredge and with whom the outlaws had been staying, they returned from the robbery on horseback, "leading the mule they had taken." They had waited for nightfall before passing through the Tupiza area, then continued to Francis's camp, in the Tomahuaico ravine, about fifteen miles south of Tupiza. We don't know whether they had set up relays between the holdup site and the camp.
Butch and Sundance apparently had planned to hide out at Francis's camp, but on the morning after the robbery, a friend arrived from Tupiza with a warning that Bolivian soldiers were coming after them. A new plan was in order: The bandits told Francis that they knew a place in northern Bolivia where they could lie low. After breakfast, they saddled up and fled, "Parker leading the stolen mule." Francis did not specify what they were riding when they left Tomahuaico, but the next day they were seen on mules, according to testimony at the inquest into their deaths.
Mules, being stronger and more sure-footed than horses, were used as riding animals and beasts of burden in the Andes. Both Butch and Sundance had worked in the mule trade: Sundance had helped drive a herd up from Argentina, and Butch had been in charge of the mules at the Concordia mine. It is not surprising, therefore, that they would have stolen the Aramayo company's prize mule to use as a pack animal or a spare mount.
We can only guess at the reason Butch shot the soldier. He most likely was startled when two soldiers and one police inspector with rifles at the ready passed through the only small gateway into -- or out of -- the courtyard. The belief that the bandits' rifles and ammunition were across the courtyard from their lodging -- a story that Dan unfortunately repeated on camera for Nova during an impromptu tour of an adobe compound similar to Butch and Sundance's -- is incorrect. According to witnesses at the inquest, Sundance had his rifle inside the house where they were found dead the following morning, and both bandits had bullets in all their pockets.
Butch and Sundance's personal money, the amount above and beyond the payroll, was meticulously accounted for in the inventory filed with the court in Tupiza. What happened to it later is anyone's guess.
A.G. Francis said that Butch was ill, and there were reports that the outlaws were quarreling. They had botched the holdup by striking a week too soon, and their escape plan had gone awry, forcing them into an arduous trek through the Andes at altitudes reaching 15,000 feet, for which they were not prepared. (The inventory of their belongings showed no cold-weather gear, an absolute necessity at those altitudes.) Moreover, the bandits were wounded in the brief gun battle and were at least a day's ride from even basic medical attention.
Having killed the soldier, they faced the prospect of a military firing squad or a long stretch in a Bolivian prison. The best they could have hoped for was extradition to the United States to face charges here. These are speculations, however. About all we can say for sure is that their luck ran out, which tends to happen in the bandit trade.
The grave mixup was not very well explained on Nova, in part because Gustav Zimmer did not surface, so to speak, until most of the documentary had been shot. Moreover, until the DNA analysis had been completed, which did not occur until the last moment, the physical evidence pointed toward Sundance as the probably occupant of the grave. We now know that the grave we excavated was not the one in which the bandits were buried, so the headstone had nothing to do with them.
The reason we dug up that particular grave is simple: There were no other choices. Froilán Risso was the only villager who had any knowledge about the bandits, and he identified this as their grave. All of us had reservations about his story, but it was dig there or nowhere. We later learned that he apparently got his ideas from an American couple who visited San Vicente in 1972 and found no one in the village who knew anything about the story. The couple took photographs of various graves, including that of Zimmer. (Risso appears in one of the photos.) We surmise that after the Americans departed, Risso got it into his head that this was where the Yankees were buried: After all, a German is a gringo in Andean argot, and one gringo is as good as another. The grave was later stripped of its plaque, padlocks, cross, and chain. By 1984, when another outlaw pilgrim photographed it, the concrete headstone was bare.
Witnesses at the judicial inquest stated that the bandits were buried on November 7, following the inventory of their possessions, and exhumed about two weeks later when Carlos Peró arrived to identify them. The inquest file does not contain a specific statement that they were reburied, but presumably they were dumped back into the same grave. Officials would have noted any other disposition.
Andean village cemeteries customarily do not have pauper's plots. Graves are dug wherever there is space -- alongside or on top of existing graves. As a result, over the years the older graves are destroyed and their bones scattered. Because the bandits were unknown and had no family in the village, their grave may never have been marked. If it was, the marker has been obliterated by subsequent burials.
The only remaining clue about Butch and Sundance's final resting place comes from Victor Hampton, an American engineer who was in San Vicente in the 1920s. Hampton told historian James D. Horan that the bandits were buried near or alongside a German and a Swede or Dutchman. Zimmer could be the German, but many Germans -- not to mention English, Scots, Slavs, and Americans -- were managing mines, building railroads, prospecting, or running mercantile establishments in Bolivia during that period. La Paz, Oruro, and Cochabamba, for example, all had German Clubs in the early 1900s.
We are confident that San Vicente is the bandits' final resting place, although we don't know the exact spot. We believe they are in the cemetery, but they may have been buried in unconsecrated ground outside the cemetery walls. We have seen references to such burials in Andean travel accounts.
Our reasoning about Butch and Sundance's having been killed in Bolivia is set out in "Showdown at San Vicente" (True West, February 1993). The results of our research are presented in greater detail in Anne's ironically titled book, Digging Up Butch and Sundance, to be published by St. Martin's Press in June 1994.
We participated in the Nova project in hopes of finding scientific proof to back up what we feel is a strong circumstantial case that our favorite bandits were killed in San Vicente, but the exhumation's failure has done nothing to alter the documentary evidence that a shootout occurred in San Vicente on November 6, 1908, and that two English-speaking bandits fitting Butch and Sundance's descriptions were killed and buried there.
An additional clue recently surfaced in the State Department records at the National Archives in Washington. In May 1913, a Missouri carpenter named Francis Lowe sought assistance from the American Legation in La Paz after being arrested by the Bolivian authorities on suspicion of being George Parker (as Butch Cassidy was commonly known at the time), who had used the alias James Lowe in the United States and Bolivia. After receiving "assertions by certain Englishmen and others that a man known as George Parker (whom the La Paz police were seeking) had been killed in one of the provinces two or three years ago while resisting arrest," legation officials persuaded the La Paz authorities that it was a matter of mistaken identity, and Francis Lowe was released.
We have two comments in reference to our recent article, "Skulduggery" ( True West, December 1993). First, our statement that, in addition to the skeleton thought to be that of Sundance, Clyde Snow had exhumed "a fragment of a Caucasoid skull," was incorrect. The skull fragment turned out to be from a Native American. Second, a relative of William Hutchens told us that he was "full of it" and had a habit of firing off crazy letters on every subject under the sun. In a letter to the US Cavalry Association, for example, Hutchens claimed that his grandfather had raised Jeb Stuart's orphaned son and that his father had sold horses to Frank James and Cole Younger.
The English Westerners' Society Tally Sheet, Autumn 1993:
San Vicente Correspondence
Michael Bell's "San Vicente Correspondence" was carefully researched and well-written. It is a valuable addition to the history of the Wild Bunch in South America.
Permit us a few additions and clarifications to the story. Frank D. Aller (1867-1944) was an 1892 graduate of the Colorado School of Mines. He was sent to Chile in 1900 by the American Smelting & Refining Company, and returned to the United States in 1918. According to the Register of State Department, a logbook of the names and service dates of U.S. diplomatic officials (at the National Archives in Washington), he served as the U.S. vice-consul in Antofagasta from June 15, 1903, through June 30, 1906, when the post was downgraded, whereupon he became the consular agent. He served in that capacity until his June 18, 1907, resignation, which was perhaps precipitated by his move up the coast to Gatico, where AS&RC presumably operated a facility.
Other records at the Archives indicate that the consulate in Antofagasta opened in 1983, was downgraded to consular agency in June 1906, upgraded in January 1910, downgraded in May 1915, and finally closed altogether in 1949. We fear that the untangling the story of who was in Antofagasta at what time doing what might tax the patience of even your most devoted outlaw researcher. Our notes, for example, indicate that a Samuel C. Greene, the son of the late Charles C. Greene, was commissioned consular agent in June 1907 to replace Aller, but he was soon accused of embezzling fees. In December 1908, the Department of State instructed the consul in Iquique: "Close Antofagasta Agency. Store records in your office." Whether the consul did so is unclear, because John B. Beazley appears on the scene as Greene's replacement. Then a November 27, 1908, note from A.A. Winslow, the American consul in Valparaiso, refers to Aller as the "American Consular Agent at Antofagasta." Perhaps Winslow just wished that Aller was there, because a July 18, 1910, letter in the Valparaiso post files names the consular agent as "a Scotsman named Beazley." Finally, a February 14, 1912, refers to the acting consular agent at Antofagasta as Alfred W. Grimes, who was officially commissioned consular agent on May 17 of that same year.
The fact that Aller resigned his consular appointment in 1907 might explain why none of his 1909-through-1911 correspondence appears in the Department of State Chilean post files at the Archives, although as Bell points out, the records are spotty, and Aller might have been later reappointed in some capacity. Significantly, however, none of the letters to or from Aller on the subject in question includes any consular title. He was apparently acting as a private citizen.
Moreover, vice-consul Aller had had contact with Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, aka the Sundance Kid, in late 1905, but no record of that encounter appears in the Chilean post files, either. Perhaps he did not want his Department of State patrons to know what kind of company he was keeping.
As to which outlaw carried which alias, according to a January 26, 1906, memorandum from the Pinkerton's Detective Agency's Philadelphia office, which paid informants to read the Longabaugh family's mail, the fugitive, "under the assumed name of Frank Boyd," had recently "got into some difficulty with the officials of the Chilean government, which cost him $1,500 to settle." The settlement had been arranged through vice-consul Aller. The Pinkerton memo also reported that Longabaugh "is now in the Argentine Republic." Whether contained in the letter or inferred from the postmark, that information was probably correct, because he and Butch Cassidy -- with two others, perhaps including Etta Place -- reportedly assaulted the Banco de la Nación in Villa Mercedes, San Luis, Argentina, on December 19, 1905. Other sightings during that period have them in Buenos Aires and Cordoba, Argentina. After the holdup, the four bandits were thought by the police to have fled over the Andes to Chile.
The Pinkerton memo indicates that Aller knew Longabaugh, and that the outlaw was using the name Frank Boyd in Chile. (That particular alias actually appears on Pinkerton WANTED flyers as early as January 1902.) But it does not necessarily follow that Aller knew Boyd's real name or occupation.
In his letters, Aller wrote that Boyd used the alias "H.A. Brown," whereas Alexander Benson, the acting charge d'affaires at the American Legion in La Paz, referred to him (perhaps inadvertently) as "W.H. Brown." Aller was probably correct, because Longabaugh often used the initials H.A. (For Harry Alonzo); in Argentina, he combined them with Place, his mother's maiden name, to become H.A. Place. Aller's initial letter confused Longabaugh's alias with that of Robert LeRoy Parker (aka Butch Cassidy and Santiago Maxwell), referring to Boyd's companion as "Maxwell or Brown." In his subsequent letters, Aller got it straight.
Longabaugh's use of the Brown alias and Parker's use of Maxwell can be substantiated from a contemporaneous source, Percy Seibert, the American manager of the Concordia Tin Mine in Bolivia who had hired Longabaugh and Parker as guards in 1907 or so. Annotations scribbled on a September 12, 1908, Harper's Weekly, article "American Bandits: Lone and Otherwise," found in his scrapbook indicate he knew Longabaugh as "Brown" and Parker as "Maxwell." (Coincidentally, the article declared that Parker had been stabbed to death in Paris in 1904!) Moreover, a November 12, 1907, letter, found in the same scrapbook, from a "J.P. Maxwell" in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, "To the Boys at Concordia," was credited to Parker by Seibert. Finally, most Wild Bunch chroniclers -- including Charles Kelly, Arthur Chapman, and James Horan, all of whom relied on Seibert to one extent or another -- have agreed that Maxwell was Parker's alias in Bolivia.
Chapman and Horan added that Parker also used the alias "Lowe" in Bolivia. He was known to have called himself "James Lowe" in the United States, and the name was among several attributed to him on the Pinkerton flyers. In May 1913, a Missouri carpenter named Francis Lowe sought assistance from the American Legation in La Paz after being arrested by the Bolivian authorities on suspicion of being George Parker -- which was yet another of Robert LeRoy Parker's well known aliases. Legation officials reported to the Secretary of State on May 21 that, after receiving "assertions by certain Englishmen and others that a man known as George Parker (whom the La Paz police were seeking) had been killed in one of the provinces two or three years ago while resisting" arrest, they had persuaded the authorities that it was a matter of mistaken identity, and Francis Lowe was released.
Whether Aller suspected that Longabaugh was an outlaw in 1905 is not evident, but he described him as such in his 1909-10 letters to the American Legation in La Paz.
In reference to the missing 10-page report, although the document probably wouldn't offer major revelations because the bandits were buried as unknowns, it could at least tell us the official, though probably sanitized, version of the shootout. We have combed the Foreign Ministry archives in La Paz and found their copy of the report's cover letter, but not the report itself. Aller himself is another dead end, so to speak, having died in 1944 in Colorado. We have been unable to determine what became of his personal effects, if any.
Bell remarked upon Aller's statement that the Bolivian authorities had not responded to his inquiries, concluding that they were "endeavoring to hush up the matter." Aller was right. Even the Bolivian Foreign Ministry in La Paz had difficulty persuading departmental and provincial officials to respond to its inquiries. More than a year passed before the ministry had a report to pass on to Aller. Perhaps the authorities in southern Bolivia were afraid that they would be punished for killing two U.S. citizens. This was, after all, the era of gunboat diplomacy -- even though Bolivia had no sea ports for gunboats to menace.
On a separate matter, the accomplice of Harrison G. Yerkes in the September 8, 1906, Penny-and-Duncan mine-payroll heist near Huanuni was an American named William Arthur Scott, whom Bell identified as having been arrested in 1907 for yet another holdup. As for the 1906 crime, Bolivian post files at the Archives and contemporary Bolivian newspaper stories indicate that Yerkes, a young man from Binghamton, New York, was arrested the very next day, and, while in handcuffs, shot dead by an outraged mine employee, Charles Edward Webber, identified variously as a British subject and a Chilean, who was promptly arrested for murder.
A few days later, Scott was captured after leaping from the train at the Uyuni station. He confessed to the payroll assault and blamed alcohol and the bad influence of Yerkes, who was wanted in Antofagasta and Calama, Chile, for a variety of minor offenses, including the theft of a Winchester rifle. According to a June 6, 1907, letter to the Secretary of State from the American Legation in La Paz, Scott and Webber had escaped -- together -- soon after their arrests and had not yet been recaptured. Six months later, on January 14, 1908, the American Legation complained in a letter to the Bolivian Minister of Foreign Affairs that Webber was still at large, even though his whereabouts were "more or less publicly known." No mention of Scott.
Decades later, in conversation with Wild Bunch historian James Horan, Seibert added the Huanuni job to the growing list of crimes perpetrated by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in South America. In this case, they were innocent.
-- Daniel Buck & Anne Meadows
San Antonio Express-News, July 10, 1993:
Tintype image not Cassidy
Based on your story about the tintype portrait of Butch Cassidy ("S.A. collector may have lassoed rare portrait of Old West robber," June 21), I would hazard an opinion that the image is not Cassidy.
First and foremost, the image doesn't look like Cassidy, who had a well-defined lantern jaw.
Second, according to the most recent research, Cassidy left New York for Argentina in 1901, and there is no record that he was in New York in 1902, the reported year of the tintype.
Third, the theory behind the New York tintype, that Cassidy was attempting to repeat the success of spreading multiple copies of the famous Fort Worth photograph, which depicted him and four confederates, in order to throw the police off his trail is wrong. He did not make "thousands of copies" of the portrait; the police did.
Fourth, by 1902 the tintype was an archaic process. And in any event, a tintype doesn't readily lend itself to making copies.
Fifth, the fact that the men in the Fort Worth and New York photos are wearing derby hats and watch fobs is hardly a startling coincidence. That was the style of the era -- often such formal attire was supplied by the photographer himself so that the subjects would look their best.
-- Daniel Buck
Lugares, 1993:
About Butch
You did an excellent job trying to make sense of the tangle of stories about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. That is a formidable task because very little serious history has been written about their activities in South America. Most of what has been published in the English-speaking world, including Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia, has drawn on old-timer tales, folk legends, etc., which confuses rather than clarifies. For example, Chatwin confused Butch and Sundance with Wilson and Evans. (But then, Chatwin is, by his own admission, a story-teller, not a historian.)
Two Argentines are serious students of the North American outlaws. Francisco Juárez, a journalist in Buenos Aires, has done extensive research (most of it unpublished) on the outlaws' lives in Argentina. Second, Todo es Historia recently published an article, "Río Gallegos, Butch Cassidy, ¿Cabecilla del Robo?," by Osvaldo Topcic, a historian in Río Gallegos, which astutely weaves the history of the early years of the town with the mystery of who actually robbed the bank in 1905.
Anne Meadows and I became interested in the story during a trip to Patagonia in the mid-1980s, when we encountered Aladín Sepúlveda at the Cholila ranch. Our curiosity was piqued, and we made several subsequent trips to Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia. We had two goals: first, to attempt to tell the true story of Butch and Sundance's life and death in South America, using primary source documents, contemporary records and periodicals, etc.; and second, to tell the popular history of Butch and Sundance -- the old-timer tales, the legends and the confusions. Of course, keeping these two goals distinct is not always possible.
One case in point: Butch's sister Lula Parker Betenson, whom one might think would be an authoritative source about her brother's life, is not. For example, her assertion that Butch returned from South America and died in 1937 in the state of Washington is false. Why did she make up this tale? She appointed herself the Parker family historian and rather than explore the mystery of what happened to him, and perhaps have to conclude that she didn't know the answer, she preferred to announce a solution, even if it was wrong.
Another case in point: Chatwin wrote that President Barrientos dug up the San Vicente cemetery looking for the bandits' bodies. As best we can tell, that is a hoax. The entire story is based on an affidavit from an American who claims he was with Barrientos at the time, but no other solid evidence has ever been found to document that the expedition actually happened. Stranger still, according to the description in the affidavit of the Barrientos expedition's route, they went to the wrong San Vicente -- to the one in the Department of Cochabamba, rather than in the Department of Potosí, where the bandits were actually shot and buried.
Other mistakes that pop up in articles stem from confusions that occurred years ago. For example, Harvey Logan (Kid Curry) escaped from jail in 1903 and so the Pinkertons added his photograph to the WANTED posters that they sent to Argentina. There is no evidence, however, that Logan ever left the United States, and most historians believe that he committed suicide in 1904 after being wounded by a pursuing posse. Yet his photograph remained on the police posters in Argentina, so his presence in your country became a "fact."
The only error in your article worthy of note is the misidentification of Butch and Sundance in the two small photos on page 55. Sundance is the man on the left in the upper photo, and Butch is in the middle in the lower photo.
Finally, a couple of anecdotes in your article were new to me, so I was wondering if you could give me more information. First, the sale of the outlaws' ranch to a man named Duarte. What is the source for that story? Second, Albert Gibbon's letter to the Chubut police. How can we get a photocopy?
-- Daniel Buck
Han hecho un excelente trabajo tratando de dilucidar, entre las mil versiones que hay, la historia de Butch Cassidy y el Sundance Kid. No debe haber sido tarea fácil, ya que es muy escaso el material serio sobre sus actividades en Sudamérica, y la mayoría de lo publicado en inglés, más que aclarar, confunde. La razón es que están basados en historias que pasaron de boca en boca, en leyendas, etcétera.
Sólo dos argentinos han investigado en profundidad el tema. Me refiero al periodista Francisco Nabor Juárez, que realizó intensas y extensas búsquedas (la mayor parte sin publicar) sobre la vida de estos forajidos en la Argentina, y a Osvaldo Topcic, quien hace poco publicó en Todo es Historia la nota "Río Gallegos: Butch Cassidy, ¿Cabecilla del Robo?" Topcic es un historiador galleguense que astutamente entreteje los primeros tiempos de su localidad con el misterio de quienes asaltaron el banco, en 1905.
Anne Meadows y yo empezamos a interesarnos en el asunto durante un viaje a la Patagonia, a mediados de los '80, donde conocimos, en el rancho de Cholila, a Aladín Sepúlveda. Nuestra curiosidad aumentaba, y así decidimos hacer otros viajes a la Argentina, Chile, y Bolivia. Nos pusimos dos metas: la primera, tratar de contar la verdadera y documentada historia sobre la vida y muerte de Butch y Sundance en Sudamérica; la segunda, contar la leyenda popular de ambos, los misterios, las suposiciones, las tradiciones orales. Demás está decir que mantener separados ambos enfoques a veces resulta francamente imposible.
Un caso en particular: Lula Parker Betenson, hermana de Butch, podría considerarse una fuente válida, y no lo es. Lula asegura que Butch volvió de Sudamérica y que murió en Washington en 1937, una falsedad. Otro caso: Bruce Chatwin escribió que el presidente boliviano Barrientos hizo "dar vuelta" el cementerio de San Vicente para encontrar los cuerpos de Butch y Sundance, y esto es otra falsedad.
Otros errores que aparecen en diferentes artículos surgen de viejas confusiones. Por caso, Harvey Logan, Kid Curry, se escapó de la cárcel en 1903, de modo que los Pinkerton agregaron su foto al cartel de "Buscados" que se envió a la Argentina, aunque no existe evidencia de que Logan haya dejado los Estados Unidos.
El único error que vale la pena señalar en la nota de LUGARES (número 10) es la mala identificación de Butch y Sundance en las fotos que aparecen en página 55. Sundance es el hombre de la izquierda en la foto superior, y Butch está en el medio en la foto de abajo.
Debo decirle que un par de anécdotas que aparecen en la nota fueron nuevas para mí: la venta del rancho de Cholila a un tal Duarte (¿de dónde sacaron este dato?) Y la carta de Albert Gibbon a la policía del Chubut (¿podría tener una copia?).
-- Daniel Buck
South American Explorer, May 1988:
Mule Never Know
Outlaw Update: In our article, "The Aramayo Mule (SAE 16)," we may have unintentionally committed mule fraud.
After submitting the article for publication, we spent six weeks in South America retracing the trail of Butch Cassidy. In Tupiza, Bolivia, we found letters and telegrams sent by the Aramayo, Francke and Company in the wake of the November 1908 payroll holdup that Hiram Bingham described in his book, Across South America. According to Bingham, the dead outlaw's mules were captured and sold to Santiago Hutcheon, who then provided one to Bingham. We assumed that the mule pictured in Bingham's book, which appeared to have a brand "A" on its neck, was the Aramayo mule stolen by the outlaws during the holdup.
The documents we found in Bolivia cast doubt on that conclusion. During the holdup, which occurred on the morning of November 4, 1908, the two outlaws took one mule, branded "Q" for Quechisla, the name of the town where the Aramayo company maintained its headquarters. Following the November [6] shootout (which lasted about [15 minutes], not all night), the Bolivian police took the stolen mule and payroll to Uyuni and placed them under the custody of the court. They were still in Uyuni on November 19, when Aramayo officials complained that they had been unable to recover their property and that the Uyuni judges were giving them more trouble than the bandits had given them.
Thus, Bingham almost certainly could not have acquired the Aramayo mule during his stay in Tupiza from November 16 to 18, although he might have obtained one of the outlaws' own mules, which are unaccounted for in the Aramayo correspondence. In any event, Bingham had only Hutcheon's word that the mule had previously belonged to the outlaws.
One can imagine Hutcheon's sales pitch: "This is a fine mule, good condition, low mileage, only ridden to church on Sundays by Butch Cassidy."
-- Daniel Buck and Anne Meadows
More on Río Gallegos
A significant reference to the Banco de Londres y Tarapacá* assault came to our attention after the publication of "Wild Bunch Holdup in Argentina" (NOLA Quarterly, Winter 1988).
A Yankee in Patagonia, Edward Chace (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), is Robert and Katherine Barrett's vivid account of Edward Chace's adventuresome ranch life in southern Patagonia from 1898 through the late 1920s. As Chace told the Barretts:
There was told North Americans robbed the bank in Gallegos while I was around there. Two young fellows, a tall one and a little one, nice-appearin' and pleasant. They hung around town for a while. They was supposed to be lookin' for camp to take up. They got to be chums with the bank fellows. One mornin' one of 'em says to the other in Maurice Braun's store, "What time is it?" And the other says, "Time to get that money from the bank." They'd made a deposit when they first come. They went along, and a few minutes later the storekeeper he heard horses' hoofs poundin' down the street and he says, "By God, I'll bet them Americans have robbed the bank!" There was a couple of hundred soldiers in Gallegos then -- all the Argentines have to serve in the militia. They put out after 'em and a lot of fellows went too on fast horses but they didn't get 'em. They'd planned it all out good. They knew the day the bank would have a lot of cash in to pay shearin' checks and they'd been so friendly with the bank clerks that when they went in and said, "Stick 'em up," the cashier said, "Don't bother me with your nonsense. I'm busy." And they said, "This is business. Stick 'em up?"
They'd come down from the north from Neuquén. They had splendid horses they'd stolen from the police up there -- had the police mark on the hoofs. And they had 'em trained to cross any kind of water. They'd stopped with Frank Lewis on the Río Gallegos a while and every morning they'd chase their horses into the river and swim 'em across and back. Frank says, "Why do you do that? They says, "We might have to cross a river in a hurry some day." And they'd found fords in the river no one else knew. They was careful about themselves too. The little fellow once -- somebody asked him to take another drink and he held his arm out straight, lookin' at his hand, and he says, "No, I've had enough. I don't ever want my hand to tremble." The United States police sent that little fellow's picture down to the Argentine police. They wanted him for some murders and holdups.
There was a woman in the gang, but she wasn't there then -- come from Texas, I heard. She'd set up six bottles on the ground and come along at a gallop and break every one of 'em. She got shot up in Chubut. There was another young American that disappeared the day before they robbed the bank. He'd been up to the Klondike and he'd drifted down to Gallegos. He was a piano tuner.
Some of them fellows down there think North Americans are a pretty wild lot. They don't see many of 'em. There's only a few in the coast towns and not any anywhere else. I didn't see hardly a one for a long time after I come to Patagonia [in 1898] and I never see any in the back country exceptin' three fellows that I took up out with me once. They [the Argentines] see movies of the Wild West in the port towns and they read about Buffalo Bill in Spanish. I had a Texas saddle and a cowboy hat and they used to give me a wide berth.
Chace's story of the Río Gallegos bank holdup was much like the February 1905 Buenos Aires newspaper accounts.
As for the female gang member "shot up in Chubut," Chace probably confused Etta Place, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid's confederate at Cholila, Chubut, with Elena Greenhill (or Grennhill), an Englishwoman-turned-bandit -- nicknamed "La Bandolera Inglesa" -- who was shot and killed by Argentine police March 31, 1915, at Laguna Fria, Chubut. She is buried in the British Cemetery in Buenos Aires.
The English, Scots, and Welsh predominated among Anglos in Patagonia at the turn of the century, but Americans were not unheard of. The first rancher at Lake Nahuel Huapi, about a day's ride north of Cholila, was a Texan out of Bosque County named Jarred Jones. Before starting his Nahuel Huapi ranch in 1889, he ran cattle to Chile for John Crockett, a relative of Davy Crockett, and Ralph Newbery, a transplanted New Yorker. In 1894, Ralph's brother, George, started a ranch near the Jones spread. The American community in northern Patagonia was not large, and Jarred Jones and George Newbery both had occasion to meet the Wild Bunch trio. But that is another story.
-- Daniel Buck and Anne Meadows
*After publication, we learned that the bank's name had been reported incorrectly by the Buenos Aires newspapers; it was actually the Banco de Tarapacá y Argentino Limitado.
The Mines Magazine, October 1987:
Information Sought on Frank D. Aller, E.M. '92
Frank D. Aller, E.M. 1892, was aquainted with famous Western outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid during their years in South America, according to a pair of Washington, D.C., writers who are researching the bandits' lives.
Aller joined the American Smelting and Refining Company (now ASARCO) in the early 1900s and represented the firm in Chile from 1904 to 1914.
From 1903 to 1907, Aller also served as U.S. vice consul and consular agent in Antofagasta, Chile, where, according to a memorandum in the archives of Pinkertons, Inc., he assisted the Sundance Kid out of a scrape with Chilean authorities.
Aller corresponded in 1909 with the American minister in La Paz, Bolivia, about rumors that two Americans, using aliases that Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were known to have used, died in a 1908 gunbattle with Bolivian police.
CSM alumni records on Aller are sparse. After leaving Chile, he was the director of "Experimental Plant" at the school in 1921, and he died in 1944.
Daniel Buck and Anne Meadows . . . are researching the lives of Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in South America and would appreciate hearing from anyone who has information about Frank D. Aller or the whereabouts of his family.
American Heritage, July-August 1987:
First, Not Last
Harry Tracy ("History for Rent," April 1987) was hardly "the last survivor of Cassidy's Wild Bunch."
The 27-year-old Tracy was found dead, an apparent suicide, August 6, 1902, in a field near Creston, Washington, after leading dozens of lawmen on a bloody, two-month chase through Oregon and Washington, following his June 9 escape from the Oregon State Penitentiary.
Whether Tracy was even a Wild Bunch member is a matter of some dispute. In any event, he died boots on, before most of the gang, including Cassidy (d. 1908?), the Sundance Kid (d. 1908?), Kid Curry (d. 1904?), Ben Kilpatrick (d. 1912), Matt Warner (d. 1938), Elzy Lay (d. 1934), Bub Meeks (d. 1912), and Walt Punteney, the last survivor of the Wild Bunch, who died in his late eighties in Pinedale, Wyoming, April 19, 1950.
-- Daniel Buck and Anne Meadows