Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

The case

The mule gave them away. In November 1908 two English-speaking strangers took a room in a boarding house in San Vicente, a mining settlement high in the Bolivian Andes, and the man who owned it noticed that one of their animals carried the brand of the Aramayo mining company, whose payroll had been held up on the road a few days earlier. He passed word to a small cavalry detachment nearby. By the next morning both strangers were dead, and the Bolivian authorities had no idea who they were.

The likeliest answer is the two most famous outlaws of the American West's last years. Robert LeRoy Parker was born in 1866 in Beaver, Utah Territory, the eldest of thirteen children of English-born Mormon parents, and grew up near Circleville. He fell in with a rustler named Mike Cassidy, whose surname he borrowed; the "Butch" is said to come from a spell working for a butcher in Rock Springs, Wyoming. His first known robbery was of the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride, Colorado, on 24 June 1889. Harry Alonzo Longabaugh was born in Pennsylvania in 1867 and drifted west at fifteen. He took his nickname from Sundance, Wyoming, after serving eighteen months in jail for stealing a horse, saddle and gun there.

Cassidy served eighteen months of a two-year sentence in the Wyoming penitentiary for horse theft and was pardoned in January 1896. Soon afterwards he was at the centre of a loose association of outlaws later called the Wild Bunch, among them Elzy Lay, Harvey Logan (Kid Curry), Ben Kilpatrick and Will Carver, who used remote hideouts such as Hole-in-the-Wall in Wyoming and Robbers Roost in Utah. They robbed the bank at Montpelier, Idaho, in August 1896, the Pleasant Valley Coal Company payroll at Castle Gate, Utah, in April 1897, and the Union Pacific's Overland Flyer near Wilcox, Wyoming, on 2 June 1899. Longabaugh joined them in this period. In the pursuit after Wilcox, Sheriff Joe Hazen was shot dead, and Logan, who killed several lawmen, made the gang far more dangerous than its genial leader's reputation suggests.

Cassidy explored an amnesty through Utah's governor, but the gang robbed another Union Pacific train near Tipton, Wyoming, on 29 August 1900, ending any chance of it. A raid on the First National Bank at Winnemucca, Nevada, three weeks later is usually credited to Cassidy and Longabaugh, though not everyone accepts that Cassidy was there. In Fort Worth that winter five of them sat for a group portrait in new suits; the Pinkerton agency obtained a copy and put their faces on wanted posters.

On 20 February 1901 Cassidy, Longabaugh and Longabaugh's companion Etta Place sailed from New York for Buenos Aires. They took up a ranch near Cholila in Argentine Patagonia and seem for a time to have lived quietly. By 1905 the Pinkertons knew where they were, and after an arrest warrant was issued the three sold up and moved on. In December 1905 four bandits, believed to include Cassidy, Longabaugh and Place, robbed the Banco de la Nación at Villa Mercedes in San Luis province and crossed into Chile. Place returned to the United States in 1906. The two men found work guarding payrolls at the Concordia tin mine in Bolivia.

On 3 or 4 November 1908, accounts differ, two masked Americans took the Aramayo, Francke and Company payroll from its courier near Tupiza. On the evening of 6 November soldiers, the local police chief and the mayor's party approached the San Vicente boarding house to arrest the strangers. The men inside opened fire and killed a soldier, and the exchange went on for hours. Around two in the morning those outside heard a man scream, then two shots. At daylight they found both men dead, one with a bullet wound in the forehead and one in the temple. The local report concluded that one had shot his badly wounded companion and then himself.

They were buried in the San Vicente cemetery as unknown foreigners. Bolivian officials connected them to the payroll robbery but did not name them, and the identification as Cassidy and Longabaugh rests on circumstantial evidence assembled later from Pinkerton files, letters and local records. That gap gave room for stories that one or both came home.