The brief but spectacular crime spree of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
in the American West — barely spanning two years — ended in 1901,
with a quick trip to New York City to elude Pinkerton Detective agents
followed by a voyage to Argentina.
Seven years later, Butch and Sundance found themselves
in a small rental house in San Vicente, Bolivia,
surrounded by soldiers intent on capturing or killing them
after the armed robbery of a courier
carrying payroll for a Bolivian mining company.
They were the prime suspects in the robbery,
based on the courier’s description of his assailants.
The armed standoff in San Vicente did not go well.
It began with a lone soldier approaching the house.
He was shot, sparking a brief exchange of gunfire.
The mayor of San Vicente, who was with the soldiers,
said he then heard “three screams of desperation,”
followed by two more gunshots coming from inside the house.
And then there was silence.
Hours later, the soldiers entered the house.
And they found the man thought to be Sundance slumped against a wall
with bullet wounds to his body and a gunshot to his forehead.
And the man believed to be Cassidy was on the floor next to him
with a single gunshot wound in his temple.
They concluded that Cassidy had killed his wounded partner
before turning his gun on himself.
At the coroner’s inquest, the courier said the two bodies were the foreigners,
probably Americans, who had robbed him,
but there was no formal identification of the men
as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Unnamed, the bodies were buried in unmarked graves
in the San Vicente cemetery; and no official record of the deaths
of Sundance and Cassidy exists anywhere in the world.
And, with no official proof of their deaths, the speculation
that Cassidy and Sundance had somehow survived, began.
‘They bribed the Bolivian soldiers and escaped!’
‘Cassidy was stabbed in Paris!’
‘No, he was killed in a botched bank robbery in Uruguay!’
‘Sundance made it to Venezuela, where he was killed!’
Cassidy’s sister wrote a book in 1975 which claimed
he returned to the family ranch in Utah in 1925,
then settled in Washington state,
where he lived under an assumed name until 1937.
She said he is buried in a secret grave.
Amateur historians have combed through official records in South America,
even exhuming bodies from the San Vicente cemetery for DNA analysis,
but have found no trace of Cassidy or Sundance.
[But they’d love to have you buy their book.]
These men have become a cottage industry,
and we haven’t even mentioned the wild speculation [and books]
written about Sundance’s beautiful companion, Etta Place,
who disappeared in San Francisco in 1907 without a trace.
Hollywood and these booksellers know that
to live outside the rules and even thrive there for a while
is the stuff of secret dreams.
So, give us wild conspiracies and speculation.
We mundane rule followers never seem to outgrow the need for fairy tales.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
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