Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
THE LAST DAYS OF BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID
The wilds of Bolivia have always attracted their fair share of renegades and desperadoes,
but few have received as much posthumous attention as
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid
. Made famous by the 1969 movie starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, they be-
longed to a band of outlaws who robbed banks, trains and mines in the Rocky Mountains
in the United States. In 1901, with the golden age of Wild West gunslingers coming to an
end, a price on their heads and the ruthless Pinkerton Detective Agency (the predecessor of
the FBI) hot on their trail, Butch and Sundance fled by ship to South America.
They settled in
Argentina
under assumed names, living on a ranch in the Cholilla Valley
in Patagonia. But the Pinkerton Agency had not given up the hunt, and in 1905 the two
outlaws went on the run after their names were linked with a bank robbery in Río Gallegos,
in the far south of Argentina. They fled to
Chile
, apparently returning to Argentina to rob
another bank, before showing up in
Bolivia
in 1906, where they found work at the Con-
cordia Tin Mine - their duties, ironically, included guarding the payroll. A year later they
made a trip to Santa Cruz, and Butch returned determined to start life again as a rancher in
the Eastern Lowlands. Perhaps in need of capital to finance their retirement, in 1908 they
quit their jobs and returned to their old ways, heading to
Tupiza
, where the wealth of the
Aramayo mining company offered a tempting prize. Put off from robbing the town bank by
the presence of Bolivian troops, on November 3 Butch and Sundance intercepted a convoy
of mules carrying a mine payroll at
Huaca Huañusca
,
a mountain pass north of Tupiza.
Finding only $90,000 rather than the half million they had expected, the outlaws fled south
withtheloot.Withmilitary patrolsandpossesofangryminers(whosepayhadbeenstolen)
scouring the countryside, and the Argentine and Chilean border guards alerted, the bandits
stopped at the home of an English friend, mining engineer A. G. Francis.
Warned the authorities were on their trail, Butch and Sundance turned north, heading to-
wards Uyuni. On November 6 they stopped for the night in
San Vicente
,
a remote mining
village about 100km northwest of Tupiza. Unknown to them, however, a four-man milit-
ary patrol was also spending the night in the village. Informed of the outlaws' presence,
they attacked the room where Butch and Sundance were staying. After a brief shoot-out,
all went quiet. In the morning, the two bandits were found dead, Butch having apparently
shot his wounded partner before turning his gun on himself. The bodies were buried in an
unmarked grave
in the cemetery.
Or were they? In subsequent decades rumours suggested the two dead men were not
Butch and Sundance. The two outlaws were reported to have returned to the US or Argen-
tina having assumed new identities; one report even had them finally gunned down in Par-
is. In 1991 forensic anthropologists exhumed a body from the San Vicente cemetery, but
were unable to settle the mystery surrounding the outlaws' fate.
