Chasing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Butch Cassidy (bottom right) & The Sundance Kid (bottom left)

By John D Farr

Any Westerner knows about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Their daring raids were executed with military precision and skillfully planned. They roamed the west in such a wide ranging region that it was hard to know where they were hanging out.

The “Wild Bunch” was an always changing group of men. If any one thing marked them, it was their fine horses because that was their mode of transportation. In their day, people remembered fine horses.

The railroads and banks got pretty serious about this group of bandits and eventually the outlaws fled to Argentina. Here along the Andes in Chubut province in a little mountain town of Cholila, they settled down. It took a few years for the authorities to find them. Stories of robberies in Argentina tipped off the Pinkerton people that maybe they were down there.

On my first visit here twenty years ago, my Dad (W D Farr) and I fished at Arroyo Pescado, a marvelous spring feed series of ponds on the barren plains east of the town of Esquel. It was owned by an English family that had come to Buenos Aires to work in the  British Hospital there in the late 1800′s. These Brits stayed in Argentina and three generations of them were MD’s. In the course of their lives they found the Andes and this spring, and bought a small ranch as a get away near the largely Italian community of Esquel. Nearby was a Welch settlement. Everyone was involved in agriculture.

There were native Indians in this area and with the natural water, the grass of the valley, and the lakes of the mountains, it was good land for them. The British family built a trading post to trade with the Indians and to gain their trust and to protect their land and livestock.

The last Brit to live on this land was still there 20 years ago when I came on my first visit. He and my Dad were both about 80 and they had a wonderful visit. They talked about pioneers, sheep, cattle, fishing, and Indians. The old man told how his Uncle, the brother of his father, almost killed Butch Cassidy.

Butch had come down to rob the trading post. He would have had to ride in about 50 or 60 miles to reach this unlikely place. The Brit was a big strong man and he got in a fight with Butch and got his gun and was trying to shoot him–except that Butch was a gunman and the Brit was not. The gun had no trigger. Butch and many of his bunch fanned the hammer of their guns faster than they could shoot, plus most people didn’t know how to shoot a gun with no trigger. Tricks of the trade for a gunman.

The gun with no trigger caused the Brit to lose the advantage in the fight and Butch beat him badly and left. The man died a few days later. The trading post is gone, but a monument stands there now in the memory of this man. That is the story I heard and have remembered.

So when my friend Jerry Paxton and I were in Cholila at the southern end of our Andean odyssey, (We spent three weeks traveling from the Bolivian border in Jujuy Province to Chubut Province by car) we saw that Cassidy’s cabin was nearby.

We found it and had to hike in to it. It is a simple log structure on a creek out away from other buildings. Each room has an escape door. Behind the house is the river and the woods (el bosque)–very handy to run and hide. We took pictures and talked about Cassidy on our last full day together in this place.

The next morning in the Bariloche airport before his departure to return home, Jerry was looking at books and one jumped at him. It was “Buscados En La Patagonia,” In English it is the story of Butch Cassidy and his band of bandits from North America. It is written by a professor of history at the University of Buenos Aires who has several books to his credit. It is, of course, all in Spanish. The author is Marcelo Gavirati.

I am contacting him to find out if it has been translated and is available in the U.S.  In the list of the top 50 western films by the Western Writers of America, there are 2 films on Butch and Sundance. There are several books on them including one on “The Women of the Wild Bunch.”

The most interesting thing about Butch and Sundance is that there is no documented ending to the story. I, for one, believe they got back to the USA and lived out quiet lives. But I am most anxious to read this story of their escapades in Argentina from a real historian. It is another chapter in the lore of the wild west–from Patagonia, Argentina.

*J D Farr lives in Encampment, Wyoming and spends December, January and February in Junin de Los Andes and fly fishes in Patagonia. Jerry Paxton is from Encampment, Wyoming and is a Carbon County Commissioner and a retired Agricultural Science teacher. They traveled in November and December of 2009 on mostly the back roads closest to the Andes covering just over 5,000 miles. It was a trip to see the “high” side of Argentina. They drove as high as 16,700 feet.

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