by Tim Slessor
Shortly afterwards, following up on the wish that the UP might indeed “go to hell”, Cassidy sent word to the Wild Bunch’s inner circle. According to The Bandit Invincible, he told them what he had in mind: “Say, fellows, I understand the UP is looking for more trouble. They tell me that they have a bunch all lined up and ready for the emergency. (Presumably this referred to that rapid response unit.) What do you say if we give them a little exercise?”
The team evidently thought well of the proposal and a few weeks later, at a place called Tipton, on 29 August 1900, the Union Pacific was relieved of $55,000. The hold-up was an almost exact re-run of the previous summer’s robbery at Wilcox. Once again, Cassidy and his crew made their escape along a well-planned route; once again, relays of fresh horses were waiting for them; once again, the Union Pacific stuck to an established and modest formula: it admitted to a loss of just $54.
The Bandit Invincible tells us that, in getting away from Tipton, “Butch was quite happy that they so complitly out witted the posies [sic]”. The narrative then moves on to outline the plans for the next raid, which would come just three weeks later: 500 miles away at a small mining town far out in the semi-desert of central Nevada. Winnemucca’s First National Bank was chosen because it was “in that part of the country where they was not much known and every body was hunting for them in other parts of the world”. Once again, Cassidy, Sundance, Harvey Logan and Will Carver took their time with the preparations:
“The Hold up being so thorough and quiet they were well out of town and heading for the hills before any one was ware of the hold up... the boys were fifty miles away in the cotton wood range of the hills by night fall... they divided the money between the 4 of them which was $32,000; after a short rest for men and horses they rode all night.”
The famous 1900 Fort Worth photograph; from left to right: Sundance, Bill Carver, Ben Kilpatrick, Harvey Logan and Butch
That account, written more than 30 years later, might have added that the robbery was so far from the normal stamping ground of the Wild Bunch that it was several days before they were even suspected of having been the culprits. By that time they were in Texas, more than 1,000 miles away.
Nearly 80 years later, some Western historians came up with a theory that the Wild Bunch had nothing to do with the Winnemucca raid. How, they asked, could Butch and Co., in just three weeks, not only ride across the 500 miles of mountains and semi-desert that separate Winnemucca from Tipton, but also then have the time to carry out the unhurried reconnaissance that was so much a hallmark of the way they worked? Not possible. So obviously this must have been the work of an altogether different crew, a much more local bunch of bandits. Winnemucca’s merchants, led by the town’s mayor and council, the Chamber of Commerce and the recently renovated Buckaroo Hall of Fame, would have nothing to do with such a stupid theory. After all, since that movie, Butch Cassidy had become the town’s big draw, its leading tourist attraction. Now, if those pesky history people got away with such a blasphemy, it could be the end of all the hoopla (and dollars?) that came together during the holiday season, and more especially during the town’s annual Butch Cassidy Days. Probably half the motels and bars, including the one called The Hole-in-the-Wall, would be out of business. Disaster.
In fact, those history know-alls were only turning up the volume on a whisper that had been around since the beginning. But what if Butch and Co., traveling separately and incognito, had made most of the journey by train? Then, reunited, and while some distant off, they bought the best horses they could find. There is strong evidence that this is just what happened: the crew bought a bunch of strong, fast horses from an understanding rancher in southern Idaho, 100 miles away. After the raid, the rancher conveniently waited several weeks before disclosing the sale. So, it seems that the Chamber of Commerce and all the other merchants in Winnemucca can rest easy...
The distant Texas rendezvous was to celebrate the marriage of Will Carver to a Fort Worth girl; he wanted his friends in on the celebrations. Butch and the crew hardly needed the excuse: they must have reckoned that it was high time they started to enjoy the proceeds of their various exertions. Where better than Fort Worth? It was renowned as a “good time” town or, as a newspaper described it, “a bibulous Babylon of bars, bordellos and, no doubt, brotherly love”. It seems probable that, in the run-up to the wedding, the bridegroom and his three thirsty friends enjoyed themselves too enthusiastically; why else would they now make a quite uncharacteristically careless move? Together with one other Wild Bunch arrival, they rolled down the street and had their photograph taken. It has become a famous picture. There they sit, duded up like a bunch of self-satisfied bankers: shoes polished, ties knotted, watch chains dangling, derbies tilted, mustachios neatly trimmed.
It is said that the photographer, impressed by the largesse of these visiting high-rollers, put a framed copy of the photograph in his studio window. A well-informed passerby recognized one or more of the men in the window and quickly alerted the authorities. One can reckon that, within a week, copies of that photo were on the wall of every lawman’s office across the West. Pinkerton detectives rushed to Fort Worth - but the birds had flown.
Perhaps Butch and Sundance now decided that the West, for outlaws, was no longer the user-friendly environment that it had been only a few years before. Dammit, bigger and bigger rewards were being offered for the capture of any train robber, alive or even dead! The UP had even taken to building its mail cars of reinforced steel, and its safes too were getting heavier and more difficult. It was putting extra guards on valued cargoes; there were even rumors of Gatling guns. Clearly, it was time to be thinking of an easier and safer life.
So, one asks if this is when they hatched a plan to take off for South America? Probably. Certainly we know that Sundance and his lover, Etta Place, were in New York within a few weeks of leaving Fort Worth. We know this from a photo of the couple taken at a fashionable Broadway studio. They posed (in both senses of the word) as Mr. and Mrs. Harry Place. Presently, Butch arrived. He let it be known that he was Etta’s brother. Sure of their anonymity, the threesome saw the sights, went to theatres, shopped in Tiffany’s and, no doubt, dined at the best restaurants. Money was not a problem. Then, if The Bandit Invincible is to be believed, James Ryan (Etta’s “brother”) bade a temporary farewell to Mr. and Mrs. Place; he would join them later. So while they took ship for Buenos Aires, he headed back to the West.
Sundance and Etta Place in New York, just before leaving for South America
On 3 July 1901, the Coast Flyer, on its way to the Pacific, was stopped in broad daylight on a lonely stretch of track in northern Montana, up near the Canadian border. The bandits used the same procedures that they had used so successfully in the past. Some accounts say that they rode away with more than $60,000. Posses gave chase but soon lost the trail. The Bandit Invincible closes the episode with “Butch suggested they split the bunch and make their way in pairs and after shaking hands, separated for the last time...”
Although that hold-up was the last adventure of the Wild Bunch, individual members of the gang would continue to live by the gun (or the threat of it) for a few more years, or rather for only a few more years. Consider the fates of the three men who, in 1900, stood with Butch and Sundance for that Fort Worth photo: Will Carver went down to a sheriff’s bullet in Sonora, Texas; Harvey Logan was shot and killed trying to rob a train of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad; Ben Kilpatrick lasted until 1912 when he was shot dead by a clerk during a bungled raid on a Southern Pacific mail car.
But back to Butch... After that Montana raid, he returned to the east coast. Evidently he found that it would be several weeks before a ship was due to sail for South America, so he was advised that his best course would be to take passage across to Liverpool. From there, with the burgeoning trade between Argentina and Britain (meat coming in, manufactured goods going out), he would easily be able to get a sh
ip to his final destination. Again, The Bandit Invincible implies that Butch had several days to kill in Liverpool before the next ship left for South America. It is surely difficult to imagine that he just checked into some dockside rooming house and sat chatting to the landlady. Maybe he took a trip to London? Here are intriguing possibilities for a novelist with imagination.
When, eventually, Butch joined Sundance and Etta in South America, they headed south for nearly 1,000 miles to the remoteness of Patagonia. There, in the foothills of the Andes, after they had looked for the right spot, they filed for ownership of 25,000 acres of empty public land. They began stocking the place with sheep and cattle; they built themselves a small ranch-house; they employed several gauchos to help with the livestock; they made friends with a scatter of distant neighbors; they settled to a life of well-behaved and rather lonely pastoral pioneers. Perhaps, being so far away from anywhere that knew their past, they became complacent and may even have let slip their real names. Anyway, in time, the Pinkerton Agency back in New York worked out their whereabouts. The Agency suggested to the UP that for $5,000 (much less than that earlier dead-or-alive reward) an expedition could be mounted that would bring the criminals back to the US. The UP was not responsive. Why, it may have reasoned, bring them back when there was no chance that the railroad would ever recover any of the stolen money. And anyway, once home the fugitives would certainly try to escape, and if successful, the railroad would just be faced with yet more robberies; better to leave them where they were, well out of the way.
If Butch Cassidy was indeed the author of The Bandit Invincible, he explains why, after three years of peaceful living, he and Sundance decided to return to a life outside the law. In 1905 a stock buyer called Apfield was passing through their corner of Argentina. “He had at one time been a sheriff in Wyoming and he had known Cassidy quite well. Apfield thinking that he might be able to collect part of the large reward began negotiations for the arrest of Cassidy and Maxwell [Sundance sometimes used yet another name]. Realizing that there was little chance of peace for them in any part of the world they decided to resume their life of banditry.”
That last sentence makes it sound as if there may have been some reluctance to return to the risks (and excitements?) of the old days. Maybe there was. Or maybe they had become bored with the quiet and nothing-much-happening life? Another theory is that they abandoned their ranch when they heard they were under suspicion for a bank raid in the extreme south of Patagonia, a raid they had not committed. The fact is that we will never really know what turned them back to their old ways.
Likewise, we will never know which of a succession of bank raids, railroad hold-ups and highway robberies that took place across the huge spread of Argentina between 1905 and 1907 can reasonably be charged against Cassidy, Sundance and Etta. There were, at the time, at least three other bands of bandidos yanqui, to say nothing of a slew of home-grown villains on the loose in Argentina. But that our duo (trio?) did target banks and railroads is not in doubt. The Bandit Invincible admits, with some pride, to several successful heists: banks, trains and, in the mountains, mule trains. But the robbery that really matters happened not in Argentina but away to the north, in neighboring Bolivia...
Sometime toward the end of 1906, Butch and Sundance (now calling themselves Santiago Maxwell and Enrique Brown) turned up looking for a “straight” job at a tin mine, the Concordia, high in the Bolivian Andes. They must have impressed the manager, for they were both taken on. Indeed, within a few weeks they were entrusted with the job of riding to La Paz, 75 miles away, to collect the mine’s monthly payroll. But it was only a matter of time before their true identities became known; it is said that someone, while on vacation from the mine, had seen a “wanted” notice over in Argentina. Even so, they were still trusted and, evidently, they honored that trust. Indeed, the mine’s under-manager at the time, an American called Percy Siebert, is reported in a 1930 edition of the American Elks Magazine as saying that although he knew their background, “they were scrupulously honest as far as we were concerned... Butch Cassidy was an agreeable and pleasant person... he allowed no other bandits to interfere... I never had the slightest trouble getting along with them.” He also recalled that, in the end, Butch told him that, because their true background was now widely known among the mine’s management, they would have to move on. “There’s always an informer around. Once you have started, you have to keep going, that’s all. The safest way is to keep moving all the time.”
While there is no certainty, it is quite possible that over the next few months Parker and Longabough (let’s go back to their real names) were the bandidos yanquis who pulled off several hold-ups in the high country of Bolivia and Peru: a stagecoach and at least two mule-trains carrying supplies and cash to a mine. It was with one of those mule-trains that the much-debated dénouement begins.
On 8 November 1908, somewhere on a rough mountain track, two masked and well-armed men ambushed a small convoy of mules. The man in charge, the paymaster of the nearby Aramayo mine, would later report that the bandits spoke American-English. They relieved him of a sizeable bundle, containing the mine’s wages. Then, taking one of the mules with them (to carry the loot?), they made off. Three days later, that paymaster and the manager of the Aramayo mine received a message to say that the two bandidos had been killed in a shoot-out with a detachment of Bolivian gendarmerie in a lonely mountain village called San Vicente; the missing money had been recovered. But that brief narrative contains about as much as we know for sure. Beyond that all is conjecture, and conjecture that not merely allows debate but positively generates it.
Most of the ingredients, true or enhanced, that constitute the legend of Butch and Sundance (of which the above is an outline and on which the Hollywood film is based) are found in that 1930 article in the Elks Magazine. The author, Arthur Chapman, a freelance journalist who had never been to South America, had talked at length to the mine manager, Percy Siebert, who by that time was retired and living back in the US. How far Chapman enhanced what he was told we do not know. But there are some curious elements of his account that have become embedded in the Butch Cassidy legend.
First, if those two bandits were indeed Butch and Sundance, it seems totally uncharacteristic that, in three days, they had only bothered to make less than 80 miles from the scene of the hold-up. Further, whoever they were, they were surely foolhardy in the extreme to arrive well-armed and seeking overnight accommodation in a village where it was quite likely that the inhabitants would already have heard rumors of a recent hold-up and would obviously be suspicious of incoming strangers, especially American ones. Finally, arriving with a “borrowed” mule which carried the brand of the Aramayo mine would immediately suggest that the animal was not traveling with its legitimate owners. In short, if we are to believe Chapman’s account, those two bandidos were totally inept - complete beginners. So one has to doubt that they really were Cassidy and Longabough. One’s skepticism is reinforced by yet one more anomaly...
As might be expected, a villager did indeed alert a nearby detachment of gendarmerie; they quickly mounted up and rode into the village. When they called on the bandidos to surrender, the reply came in several well-aimed revolver shots; one of the detachment was killed. But, incredibly, according to the standard version of events (and the movie), the bandidos had left their main weaponry, their Winchester lever-action repeating rifles and ammunition, on the far side of the courtyard from the room in which they were now besieged. Again, this was wholly uncharacteristic. Of course, in trying to reach their rifles those bandidos were shot down. Their bodies, it seems, were quickly bundled into a grave; there was no attempt at a formal identification. It was enough that the robbers were dead and the loot had been recovered. But could it be that, within a day or two, Percy Siebert deliberately put it about that the corpses were those of his two ex-employees - his friends who had told him that if they had the chance, they wanted to go straight? W
as he, by saying that they were now buried in San Vicente, giving them that chance? It is an attractive possibility; one can go no further.
Needless to say, the author of The Bandit Invincible tells a quite different story. Immediately after they had ambushed a mule-train, Cassidy, Sundance and two others, referred to only as Billings and Haines (where had they come from?), were surprised by a detachment of mounted gendarmerie that was patrolling along the same rough track. In the shoot-out that follows, Sundance and the other two are fatally wounded, but Cassidy manages to escape. “After everything became silent in the darkness... for an hour he crawled on his hands & knees so he could not be seen or heard so easily.” The narrative goes on to detail how he caught his horse and made his way out of the mountains. “He alone survived the terrible battle.” Eventually, and without going into any detail, he reached the coast and found a ship to England. From there he went to Paris where “he entered a private hospital where he submitted to several minor operations. Three weeks [later] left the hospital he could see Verry little trace of his old self in the mirror, so clever had the transformation worked out.” The narrative ends by saying that “the various governments of North & South America accepted their [the gendarmerie’s] story as authentic and the name of Butch Cassidy became only a memory”.