20 
FAMILY OF THREE
It was a good life from the start in many ways, settled in among Welsh, Italian, English, Chilean, and even a few American immigrants who, for the most part, remained at a comfortable distance, pursuing their own South American adventures. While those first months in their new land featured some arduous frontier living—June, July, and August are the dead of the Argentine winter, a tough time to sleep in a tent with only a campfire and blankets to keep them from freezing—the three were working toward a common goal of having a more civilized life than Butch and Sundance had known as cowboys up north. By the time they built their houses, they had a well-groomed springer spaniel who slept inside, they dressed up like gentlemen and lady “growers,” took afternoon tea, and often spent their evenings reading by the light of burnished brass oil lamps imported from the United States. A man whose father had known the trio told the historian Anne Meadows in the early 1990s, “The Places and Señor Ryan were people accustomed to living well, very cultured. They had a washstand with a fine pitcher and basin, and she put drops of perfume in the water. They set the table with a certain etiquette—napkins, china plates. Their windows went up and down [in the supposedly more refined North American style].” An Italian immigrant named Primo Capraro, who would spend a night with them in 1904, wrote later:
The house was simply furnished and exhibited a certain painstaking tidiness, a geometric arrangement of things, pictures with cane frames, wallpaper made from clippings from American magazines, and many beautiful weapons and lassos braided from horsehair. The men were tall, slender, laconic, and nervous with intense gazes. The lady, who was reading, was well dressed. I had a friendly dinner with them, and as I couldn’t offer them any gratuity, I made them a detailed sketch of a bungalow [that they might build]. I figured the necessary quantity of bricks, windowpanes, ironwork, nails, bolts, metal sheets, and even the projected number of windows doors and tables, beds, wardrobes, chairs, etc. We agreed that in the event they undertook the project, I would come down to Cholila with workers I would recruit in Bariloche.
One wonders if Capraro noticed while sketching the dream house that they were a family with special needs, including the need to get away quickly. When I visited there in 2017, I noticed that every room in their cabins had a door leading to the outside. Back in the day, no matter what the time or the weather, three horses always stood in or just outside the barn, saddled and ready to go. They even had a primitive walkie-talkie that they used to communicate with a sentry in a brick building two hundred meters down the road toward the town of Cholila. Nervous with intense gazes indeed.
Generally speaking, though, they felt comfortable with their neighbors in Chubut. “The bandits were well liked,” a descendant of one of their friends told Anne Meadows, “amiable, generous, cordial, polite to the ladies, friendly with children.” The impressions they made in Patagonia were consistent with the way they had long been perceived up north. Many commented on their devotion to books, as well as their facility with guns, ropes, and horses. “Those who knew them well,” said Capraro, “said that they were expert shooters capable of hitting a coin in the air.” The local gauchos had at first “chortled at the prospect” of watching the overly refined gringos try to organize the cattle at roundup time, another longtime Cholila resident told Meadows, “but they proved to be very good cowboys, handy with lassos, and the gauchos came away with a new opinion.”
Butch, who inevitably charmed almost everyone he met, was seen as gregarious and dependable, someone who “joined in the festivities of the settlement.” Sundance struck the locals as highly competent, but often terse and aloof: “Not so much a bad character,” a Welsh-born policeman named Milton Roberts wrote later, “as a cold-blooded one—but a genuine cowboy, very capable with animals.” Once when the governor of the province, Julio Lezana, came through Cholila and asked if he could stay a night with them, they welcomed him and uncorked the wine. “Place played the samba on his guitar, and Ryan danced with [the daughter of local rancher] Don Ventura Solis.” Ethel danced with the governor.
Lezana must have been as dazzled by Ethel as everyone else. She was “good-looking, a good rider, and an expert with a rifle,” Roberts wrote. A neighbor named Richard Perkins described her as “very agile and bold… she rode with the skill of an equestrian and hunted birds with a revolver.” An Argentine researcher who spoke to many who knew her called her “a goddess.” Her style of dress, which often tended toward the masculine, was the subject of much local comment. “She wore corduroy bombachas [gaucho pants] that fell over men’s boots, which she wore when doing ranch work.” Another policeman, Julio O. de Antueno, said that “she never wore dresses, just pants and boots” but managed to always project elegance nevertheless. The comisario, or police commissioner, of the district, Eduardo Humphreys, was said to have had a crush on her, as did a local teenage boy named John Gardiner, who’d recently immigrated from Scotland. Gardiner, a sickly, bookish lad, felt that as two “educated people” who had managed to find each other “in the wilderness,” he and Ethel were fated to be together—a notion which, if sadly misguided, supports the idea that she might have been a teacher, and not a dance hall girl, back in the States. “Ethel was his first love and his only love,” said a friend of Gardiner’s, who noted that John nursed a corresponding hatred of the man he knew as Enrique Place, considering him “a mean, low cur” for, in his opinion, not appreciating Ethel sufficiently. Señor Ryan, on the other hand, he liked quite a bit.
Over the years, the domestic life of Butch, Sundance, and Ethel, has raised many an Argentinian eyebrow. When I introduced the topic to the testy old proprietor of the El Globo Hotel in Trelew (where legend has it the trio once shared a single room), he said “Una mujer, dos hombres”—then shrugged theatrically. The arrangement does not appear to have been an active ménage à trois: Sundance and Ethel slept in one cabin, Butch in another. They also maintained separate relationships with their native land which may have reflected their contrasting views of the future: Butch was becoming rooted in South America while Sundance was clearly not. A little less than a year after arriving, in February 1902, the three traveled back to Buenos Aires, where Sundance and Ethel boarded the British steamship Soldier Prince, bound for New York City with its hold full of fruits and vegetables. We know from later Pinkerton reports that their trip to the United States, like previous ones, combined pleasure (they went to Coney Island and Atlantic City, where Sundance’s brother Harvey lived, as well as to Mont Clare) with at least one doctor’s appointment (possibly at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, where they may have both received treatment for an unspecified illness). They returned in August on another clanking British steamer called the Honorious, traveling this time as crew—Sundance was the chief purser; Ethel, the stewardess—in exchange for free fare.
Butch spent the first part of his alone time in the Office of Land Management in Buenos Aires, filing more forms aimed at increasing their real estate holdings and trying to secure the title on what they already had. Argentinian land laws were complicated and the procedures unclear, even to some government officials. After a few such dull days, he made the three-week journey by steamship and horseback to Cholila, where, for a stretch of time, he had not much to do except oversee others, play poker with the hired hands, and attend cockfights. “I have a good 4-room house, wearhouse [sic], stable, chicken house, and some chickens,” he said in a letter to Mathilda Davis. “The only thing I lack is a cook, for I am still living in Single Cussedness and I sometimes feel very lonely.” His poor Spanish, he said, was part of his problem: “I don’t speak it well enough to converse on the latest scandals so dear to the hearts of all nations, and without which conversations are very stale.” But it wasn’t just a lack of language that left him isolated. Something else, something more essential, kept a man who craved society and whom everyone fell in love with from ever having a lover—at least one he could show to the world. But then that, too, was really no different from the way things had been back in the States.
The watershed moment of their South American venture came in mid-March 1903, when a Pinkerton detective showed up in George Newbery’s dental office with photographs and questions. The agency was not at that point officially involved in the pursuit of Butch and Sundance, but its president, Robert Pinkerton, the son of the founder, thought he could convince a client or two to support a mission to track down the pair (and their mysterious lady friend, whom the agency mistakenly called Etta). One of his more experienced operatives, Frank Dimaio, out of the Philadelphia office, had just completed an assignment in Brazil, and so Robert Pinkerton directed him to go to Buenos Aires to see what he could learn about the fugitives. He already knew one big thing, thanks to the illegal monitoring of Samanna Longabaugh’s mail: that the three were living in cabins in the remote area of Cholila. After Dimaio produced photographs of the suspects, including the group portrait taken in Fort Worth, Newbery confirmed their location but said he thought they were fine, honest folks who since their arrival two years earlier had worked hard and doubled their livestock. If the agent did have a mind to arrest them, Newbery said, the oncoming rainy season was a poor time to make the long journey on his own by steamer and saddle. Dimaio agreed the timing wasn’t right and headed back to the United States—where he created a Spanish-language circular describing the outlaws that he would soon begin sending to police chiefs throughout Argentina.
It was standard business practice for the Pinkertons to exaggerate the threat posed to companies and associations by people they wanted to be paid to pursue. From his office in New York, Robert Pinkerton mailed out memoranda linking Butch and Sundance to all sorts of crimes throughout South America that they couldn’t possibly have committed. He also wrote and publicly released a letter to the Buenos Aires police chief about the Wild Bunch “hold-up robbers,” saying, “It is a firm belief that it is only a question of time until these men commit some desperate robbery in the Argentine Republic. They are all thorough plainsmen and horsemen riding from 600 to 1,000 miles after committing a robbery. If there are reported to you any bank or train hold up robberies or any other similar crimes, you will find that they were undoubtedly committed by these men.” The cost of “running down and apprehending Harry Longbaugh, [sic] alias Harry Alonzo, and George Parker, alias Butch Cassidy,” he told the Union Pacific Railroad, the American Bankers Association, and a few other entities for which the agency had worked, would be $5,000—and, as an added bonus, Charlie Siringo, the cowboy detective himself, would take part. His pitch seems to have elicited no response, though. Mounted train bandits and bank robbers like Butch and Sundance already seemed quaint to twentieth-century business executives—but beyond that, hadn’t the outlaws already solved the problem they posed to corporate America by running away? As far as E. H. Harriman and other leading American capitalists were concerned, as long as those troublemakers stayed in the exotic locales to which Pinkerton claimed he had tracked them, they could do whatever the hell they pleased. At this point, the Pinkertons backed off.
Down in Cholila, meanwhile, the outlaws had no idea they were being featured in a marketing campaign—or even that the Pinkertons knew where they were. Their lives went on as usual. Sundance and Ethel made what was becoming their semiregular trip to North America in March 1904, this time visiting the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis, where they had the opportunity to attend the Airship Contest, marvel at the wireless telephone demonstration, and experience the breakout hit of the midway: ice cream cones. Butch stayed in Cholila and opened a country store on their property, to both amuse himself and make a little side income. He also shopped for himself at similar places. An undated receipt shows that he bought socks, slippers, a sweater, two handkerchiefs, and a dozen bombillas—metal tubes for drinking maté tea, like a true Argentinian rancher. In a February 1904 letter to his good friend Daniel Gibbon, a Welsh immigrant who lived nearby, he noted that his pal “Place” was off buying bulls, and that he himself wanted to purchase some rams but was temporarily unable to sit in the saddle due to “a bad dose of the Town Disease.” Outlaw scholars have always assumed he was talking, if not almost boasting (since the mention seemed so gratuitous), about gonorrhea. Besides maintaining a few widely scattered whorehouses, Chubut Province also featured horse-drawn, pimp-driven whore wagons, which found no shortage of patrons. Perhaps because of rumors about his sexuality, Butch seemed eager for Gibbon to understand that he partook of such earthy pleasures.
A sharp knock on Butch’s cabin door in April 1904 shattered whatever peace the three were finding in the wilds of Patagonia. His visitors were a contingent of provincial policemen who wanted to talk to him and probably Sundance, too, about a robbery that had taken place several days earlier some six hundred miles to the east. Two ranch hands involved in a sheep-shearing operation were suspected of stealing five thousand pesos that their employer, the giant Southern Land Company, had been transporting to a bank in Trelew. The pair, one of whom may have been an American named Robert Evans, had promptly escaped from custody, but the police had reason to believe they were friends of Señors Ryan y Place and had made their way to Cholila to hide out. Butch, they also thought, was likely the owner of the big, shiny Colt revolver that officers took from Evans at the time of his arrest. Was the gun, in fact, his, the stern-faced callers wanted to know? Had they seen Evans and the other fellow recently?
If Butch had one fatal flaw, it was that he couldn’t stay away from bad company—and the trouble it ultimately brought him. He judged no one, it seemed; or if he did, he found everyone to his liking somehow, even the amoral sorts like Harvey Logan, the odd ducks like Al Hainer—and the often surly men like Sundance. Thus it had always been. As far as the Chubut police were concerned, the answer to both their questions was yes—it was Butch’s gun and the two suspects had stayed in his cabin before and since the robbery—though Butch wasn’t about to say any of that. Evans was an ordinary career criminal whom he and Sundance had known to some small degree back in the States as a member of the Ketchum gang, which had hung out in Brown’s Park, a gang that at times included their colleagues Ben Kilpatrick and Will Carver. How they connected in South America we don’t know, but once they did, their bond grew stronger, and before long, Evans was sleeping for weeks or months at a time in Butch’s cabin.
This was not at all a good idea because his presence could draw the police and their absence usually meant they were somewhere over the mountains once again getting themselves into the kind of trouble that would cause the police to follow them back to Cholila. The officers who came to Butch’s door in April 1904 took him to Rawson, 460 miles to the east, to make a statement before a judge. He denied knowing anything about the gringos or the gun and was quickly released. But the world he came back to was different from the one he’d left just a few days earlier. He was a Likely Suspect now, a permanent Person of Interest whose real identity would in time become known.
Butch and Sundance should have hightailed it out of Cholila right then, but instead they hesitated. Winter was setting in, making travel and the business of selling off their livestock more difficult. It is always hard to make a living as a small-time rancher, and there were signs that they were running low on funds, such as Butch’s opening a store and Sundance and Ethel’s working for their steamer passage. They were still living in their cabins ten months later when Evans and a newly arrived fellow American named William Wilson held up the Banco de Tarapaca y Argentino in Rio Gallegos, the capital of Santa Cruz Province, seven hundred miles south of Cholila, and got away with the equivalent of about $100,000. No arrests were made, but the Santa Cruz police issued a warrant for Santiago Ryan and Enrique Place, whom they thought might lead them to Evans and Wilson—that is, if they weren’t the robbers themselves.
It is pretty certain that they weren’t. A good number of people saw them in Cholila on the day of the Rio Gallegos robbery. Many weeks went by, and the Chubut police didn’t come to even question them, never mind put them in custody. The warrant, in fact, still lay on the desk of their friendly local police commissioner, Eduardo Humphreys, who was fond of the three (especially Ethel) and wasn’t inclined to undertake what he saw as an unpleasant task of arresting them. Instead, Humphreys let them know they were being sought in connection with the robbery, then dithered for several months while they sold off whatever property they could (they never did get title to the land), settled their debts, and prepared to leave. When his behavior came to light, Humphreys was fired, but by the time his replacement arrived in Cholila in early April 1905, the outlaws’ cabins were empty, and they were hiding in the nearby hills. On the day they finally left the valley—May 1—Butch posted a brief letter to a neighbor, a former Texas sheriff named John Commodore Perry. He asked Perry to pay his friend Daniel Gibbon the sum of $285.44 to settle a debt, then closed with these words:
“We are starting today.”