Then the great white winter of 1886—7 wiped out threequarters of the stock. Greed combined with natural catastrophe to breed a new type, the cowboy-outlaw, men driven by unemployment and blacklisting into criminal hideouts and the rustling game. At Brown’s Hole or Hole-in-the-Wall they joined up with professional desperadoes; men like Black Jack Ketchum, or the psychopath Harry Tracy, or Flat-Nose George Curry, or Harvey Logan, the diarist of his own murders.
Butch Cassidy, in those years, was drover, horse-wrangler, mavericker, part-time bank-robber, and leader of men; the sheriffs feared him most for the last of these accomplishments. In 1894 they gave him two years in the Wyoming State Penitentiary for stealing a horse he hadn’t stolen, valued at five dollars. The sentence soured him to any further dealing with the law. And, from 1896 to 1901, his Train Robbers’ Syndicate, better known as The Wild Bunch, performed the string of perfect hold-ups that kept lawmen, Pinkerton detectives and the railroad in perpetual jitters. The stories of his antics are endless; breathless rides along the Outlaw Trail; shooting glass conductors from telegraph poles; or paying a poor widow’s rent by robbing the rent man. The homesteaders loved him. Many were Mormons, outlawed themselves for polygamy. They gave him food, shelter, alibis, and occasionally their daughters. Today, he would be classed as a revolutionary. But he had no sense of political organization.
Butch Cassidy never killed a man. Yet his friends were seasoned killers; their murders drove him to fits of remorse. He hated having to rely on the deadly aim of Harry Longabaugh, the Pennsylvania German with evil blue eyes and a foul temper. He tried to go straight, but there was too much on his Pinkerton card and his pleas for amnesty went unheard. Each new robbery spawned another and added years to his sentence. The costs of operating became unbearable. The story goes that the Wild Bunch frittered their hauls on women and the gaming table, but this is only half true. They had another, far greater expense: horseflesh.
The art of the hold-up depends on a quick getaway and Butch Cassidy’s hold-ups depended on relays of fine thoroughbreds. His horse dealer was a man called Cleophas Dowd, the son of Irish immigrants to San Francisco, dedicated to the Jesuit priesthood, and forced as a boy to grovel to altar and confessional. Immediately after his ordination, Dowd startled his parents and the Fathers by riding past on his new racehorse, a brace of six-shooters strapped over his cassock. That night, in Sausalito, he had the pleasure—a pleasure he had long savoured—of giving last rites to the first man he shot. Dowd fled from California and settled at Sheep Creek Canyon, Utah, where he raised horses for outlaws. A Dowd horse was ready for sale when its rider could balance a gun between its ears and fire. The necessary speed he purchased from the Cavendish Stud at Nashville, Tennessee, and relayed the cost to his clients.
Around 1900 law and order settled in on the last American frontier. The lawmen bought their own fine bloodstock, solved the problem of outpacing the outlaws, and organized crime hid in the cities. Posses flushed out Brown’s Hole; the Pinkertons put mounted rangers in box cars, and Butch saw his friends die in saloon brawls, picked off by hired gunmen, or disappear behind bars. Some of the gang signed on in the U.S. Armed Forces and exported their talents to Cuba and the Philippines. But for him the choices were a stiff sentence—or Argentina.
Word was out among the cowboys that the land of the gaucho offered the lawless freedom of Wyoming in the 1870s. The artist-cowboy Will Rogers wrote: ‘They wanted North American riders for foremen over the natives. The natives was too slow.’ Butch believed he was safe from extradition there, and his last two hold-ups were to raise funds for the journey. After the Winnemucca raid, the five ringleaders, in a mood of high spirits, had their group portrait taken in Fort Worth and sent a copy to the manager. (The photo is still in the office.)
In the fall of 1901 Butch met the Sundance Kid and his girl, Etta Place, in New York. She was young, beautiful and intelligent, and she kept her men to heel. Her Pinkerton card says she was a school teacher in Denver; one rumour has it she was the daughter of an English remittance man called George Capel, hence Place. Under the names of James Ryan and Mr and Mrs Harry A. Place, the ‘family of 3’ went to operas and theatres. (The Sundance Kid was a keen Wagnerian.) They bought Etta a gold watch at Tiffany’s and sailed for Buenos Aires on S.S. Soldier Prince. On landing they stayed at the Hotel Europa, called on the Director of the Land Department, and secured 12,000 acres of rough camp in Chubut.
‘Are there any bandits?’ they asked. They were glad to hear there were none.
A few weeks later, Milton Roberts, the Welsh police commissioner from Esquel, found them under canvas at Cholila; their fine light thoroughbreds, all ready saddled up, struck him as rather odd. Butch, as we know from the letter, was alone the first winter. He stocked the farm with sheep bought from an English neighbour. The cabin, modelled on Circleville but bigger, was up by June.
In the following year, a Pinkerton detective, Frank Dimaio, tracked them to Cholila with the Winnemucca photograph, but was put off going to Patagonia by stories of snakes and jungles, perhaps invented for his benefit. The ‘family of 3’ used Cholila as a base for five years without interference. They built a brick house and a country store (now owned by an Arab trader) and put ‘another North American’ in charge.
The locals thought they were peaceable citizens. At Cholila I met the grandchildren of their neighbour, Señora Blanca de Gérez, who left this note when she died three years ago:They were not good mixers, but whatever they did was correct. They often slept in our house. Ryan was more sociable than Place and joined in the festivities of the settlement. On the first visit of Governor Lezana, Place played the samba on his guitar and Ryan danced with the daughter of Don Ventura Solís. No one suspected they were criminals.
The Pinkerton Agency wrote to the Chief of Police in Buenos Aires: ‘It is only a question of time until these men commit some desperate robbery in the Argentine Republic.’ They were right. Apart from running low in funds, ‘the family of 3’ were addicted to the art of the hold-up, without which life itself became a bore. Perhaps they were spurred on by the arrival of their friend Harvey Logan. In 1903 he had wormed his way out of jail in Knoxville, Tennessee, after all but throttling his warder with the coil of wire he kept hidden in his boot. He turned up in Patagonia under the name of Andrew Duffy, an alias he had already used in Montana.
In 1905 the reconstituted Wild Bunch broke out and robbed a bank in Southern Santa Cruz. They repeated the performance on the Banco de la Nación at Villa Mercedes in San Luis in the summer of 1907. It seems that Harvey Logan shot the manager through the head. Etta was there, dressed as a man—a fact obliquely confirmed by Blanca de Gérez: ‘The Señora cropped her hair short and wore a wig.’
In December 1907 they sold Cholila, in a hurry, to a beef syndicate, and scattered into the Cordillera. None of their neighbours ever heard of them again. I have heard a number of reasons for their departure. But the most usual explanation is that Etta was bored, had a grumbling appendix and insisted on going to Denver for the operation. There is another possibility: that appendix was a euphemism for baby and that the father was a young Englishman, John Gardner, who was ranching in Patagonia for his health. The story goes that Harvey Logan had to get him out of the Kid’s way, back to his family estate in Ireland.
Etta was apparently living in Denver in 1924. (Her daughter may have been a competitive girl called Betty Weaver, who pulled fifteen spectacular bank robberies before her arrest and jail-sentence at Belleplaine, Kansas, in 1932.) In the Ashley Valley in Utah, I met an old man, rocking on his porch, who remembered Butch Cassidy in 1908. But if they did come back that summer, the pace was too hot; for by December both outlaws were in Bolivia working for a man called Siebert at the Concordia tin mine.
The classic account of their death, at San Vicente, Bolivia, in December 1909, following their theft of a mine payroll, was first set down in Elk’s Magazine for 1930 by the Western poet, Arthur Chapman. It was an ideal scenario for the movie-makers; the b
rave cavalry captain shot while trying to arrest the gringos; the mud-walled courtyard full of dead mules; the impossible odds; the Kid first wounded, then shot through the head by Butch, who, having now killed a man, reserves the last bullet for himself. The episode ends with the Bolivian soldiers finding Etta’s Tiffany watch on one of the bodies.
No one knows where Chapman got the story: Butch Cassidy could have invented it himself. His aim, after all, was to ‘die’ in South America and re-emerge under a new name. The shooting at San Vicente was investigated by the late President René Barrientos, Ché Guevara’s killer, himself an ardent Western history buff. He put a team on to solving the mystery, grilled the villagers personally, exhumed corpses in the cemetery, checked the army and police files, and concluded that the whole thing was a fabrication. Nor did Pinkertons believe it. They have their own version, based on the skimpiest evidence, that the ‘family of 3’ died together in a shoot-out with the Uruguayan police in 1911. Three years later they assumed Butch Cassidy dead—which, if he were alive, was exactly what he wanted.
‘Bunkum!’ his friends said when they heard the stories coming out of South America. Butch didn’t go in for shoot-outs. And from 1915 on, hundreds of people saw—or thought they saw— him; running guns for Pancho Villa in Mexico; prospecting with Wyatt Earp in Alaska; touring the West in a Model T Ford; calling on old girlfriends (who remember him as gotten rather fat); or turning up at a Wild West Show in San Francisco.
I went to see the star witness to his return; his sister, Mrs Lula Parker Betenson, a forthright and energetic woman in her nineties, with a lifetime of service to the Democratic Party. She has no doubts: her brother came back and ate blueberry pie with the family at Circleville in the fall of 1925. She believes he died of pneumonia in Washington State in the late 1930s. Another version puts his death in an Eastern city, a retired railroad engineer with two married daughters.
23
NOT FAR from Cholila there was a narrow gauge railway back to Esquel. The station was a toy station. The ticket salesman had the face of a private drinker. In his office was the photo of a soft middle-class boy with slicked-down hair, wanted for murdering the Fiat executive. The railway officials wore uniforms of pale grey with gold braid. On the platform was a shrine to the Virgin of Luján, the protector of travellers.
The engine was about eighty years old, made in Germany, with a tall funnel and red wheels. In the First Class, food had worked into the upholstery and filled the carriage with the smell of yesterday’s picnic. The Second Class was clean and bright, with slat seats, painted pea-green, and a wood stove in the middle.
A man was boiling his blue enamel maté kettle. An old lady talked to her favourite geranium, and two mountaineers from Buenos Aires sat among a heap of equipment. They were intelligent, intolerant, earned pitiful salaries and thought the absolute worst of the U.S.A. The other passengers were Araucanian Indians.
The train started with two whistles and a jerk. Ostriches bounded off the track as we passed, their feathers billowing like smoke. The mountains were grey, flickering in the heat haze. Sometimes a truck smeared a dust-cloud along the horizon.
An Indian eyed the mountaineers and came over to pick a quarrel. He was very drunk. I sat back and watched the history of South America in miniature. The boy from Buenos Aires took his insults for half an hour, then he stood up, exploded and pointed the Indian back to his seat.
The Indian bowed his head and said: ‘Si, Señor. Si, Señor.’
The Indian settlements were strung out along the railway line on the principle that a drunk could always get home. The Indian came to his station and stumbled off the train clutching the last of his gin. Round the shacks broken bottles glinted in the watery sun. A boy in a yellow wind-cheater got off as well and helped the drunk walk. A dog, which had been lying in a doorway, ran up and licked him all over the face.
24
ALL ALONG the Southern Andes you hear stories of the bandoleros norteamericanos. I have taken this one from the second volume of Memorias de un Carrero Patagónico (Memoirs of a Patagonian Carter) by Asencio Abeijón:
In January 1908 [that is, a month after Butch Cassidy sold Cholila], a man riding over the Pampa de Castillo passed four horsemen with a string of hot-blooded horses. They were three gringos and a Chilean peon. They carried Winchesters with wooden handles. One of them was a woman dressed as a man. The traveller thought nothing of it. All gringos dressed in a strange fashion.
The same evening three horsemen stopped at the hotel of Cruz Abeijón at La Mata. There was no woman with them. They were two norteamericanos and a Chilean. They said they were looking for land. The shorter one was cheerful and talkative, by the name of Bob Evans. He spoke good Spanish and played with Abeijón’s children. The other was tall and fair and silent and sinister. His name was Willie Wilson.
After breakfast the gringos asked Abeijón the name of the best hotel in Comodoro Rivadavia. They left the Chilean in charge of the horses and rode the remaining three leagues into town. Comodoro, in the days before the oil boom, was a tiny place sandwiched between the cliff and the sea. Along its one street were the Salesian Church, the Hotel Vascongada and the Casa Lahusen, a general store which also served as a bank. The Americans drank with the leading citizens and pursued their enquiries about land. They stayed a week. One morning a policeman found them shooting on the beach. ‘Just practising,’ they joked it off with the commissioner, Don Pedro Barros, who examined their Winchesters and handed them back smiling.
The Americans rode back to La Mata. Bob Evans distributed toffees among Abeijón’s children. They were off again in the morning, this time with the horses and the peon. Abeijón found that his telephone wire had been cut.
At one p.m. on February 3rd it was hot and windy and the people of Comodoro were at lunch. Wilson and Evans tied their spare horses to a hitching post on the edge of town and rode down to the Casa Lahusen. Evans stationed himself by the main door. Wilson and the peon made for the goods entrance. They dismounted and the Chilean held the two horses. A bystander heard the two men arguing, then saw the peon hopping about and dodging behind his horse, and Wilson shoot him through the hand. The bullet went up his arm and through his shoulder and he fell back among a pile of wool-bales.
Commissioner Barros heard the shot and found Wilson doubled up with one hand over his chest. ‘The pig shot me,’ he said. Barros told him to come to the station and explain. Wilson said ‘NO’, and drew a gun, ‘his blue eyes shining diabolically’. Evans shouted ‘Stop, you fooll’ and spurred his horse between the two men, giving Barros a shove that toppled him among the wool-bales as well.
The Americans mounted, unhitched their spare horses, and trotted out of town. The whole business took five minutes. Barros ran to the station and began firing wildly with a submachine gun. Four mounted police followed but gave up. That night a Basque heard them singing to an accordion round their campfire.
Back in Comodoro, the peon was behind bars; at the last minute he had asked Wilson for a bigger cut.
From Esquel I went on south to follow up a second Wilson and Evans story:
25
THE OLD track to Arroyo Pescado cut across the thornscruband headed for the green line where the river came out of the hills and spread into a reedy lagoon. A flock of flamingos took off, flashing orange and black and striping the blue water white as their legs lifted clear. Near the bank a patch of rocky ground was littered with old bottles and tin cans, all that remained of the Welsh Companía Mercantil de Chubut’s store.
On the afternoon of December 29th 1909, the manager, a strong ex-athlete from Bala called Llwyd ApIwan, left the shop and went across to his house for tea. Both his arms were bandaged to the elbows as he had put out an unexplained night fire with his bare hands. Some minutes later his assistant, Bobby Roberts, a soft-headed religious maniac, called over that Wilson and Evans had come to buy tack. They were regular customers and were well known in the Cordillera as carters and crack shots.
ApIwan walked back and found Evans covering Bobby Roberts, who was blubbing. Wilson then led him at gunpoint to the office and ordered him to open the safe.
‘There’s nothing in the safe,’ ApIwan said.
But Wilson knew better. The Company was expecting a consignment of gold sovereigns to pay for the wool-clip. ApIwan opened up and showed a few Argentine banknotes.
‘And they belong to the Indians,’ he said. ‘You’re out of luck. The sovereigns haven’t come.’
Wilson agreed not to take the Indians’ money and shouted through to Evans. But as he backed out of the office, his spur caught in an Indian rug. He tripped and the Welshman jumped him as he fell. Even with his bandaged hands he got hold of the revolver and fired. But there was no trigger. Wilson had taken the trigger off and feathered the mechanism. He reached for a miniature revolver strung round his neck and shot ApIwan through the heart.
The outlaws rode off south to their camp at Rio Pico. Following the scent of a story, I followed and cut back to the main road. The driver of a wool truck stopped and picked me up. He wore a black shirt embroidered with pink roses and played Beethoven’s Fifth on his tape deck. The landscape was empty. The hills went gold and purple in the setting sun. At the foot of a telegraph pole we saw a single standing figure: