Running down a legend.

• Author: Meadows, Anne
• Position: The legend of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in South America

ON NOVEMBER 7, 1908, two Bolivian policemen shot and killed a pair of North American bandits in San Vicente, a mining town in a barren, windswept bowl 14,000 feet up in the Andes Mountains. Although more than eight decades have elapsed, outlaw historians are still debating whether the men who died that day were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Indeed, some researchers have argued that the gun battle itself was fiction.

Thanks to Hollywood, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (born Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Alonzo Longabaugh) became the most famous members of the Wild Bunch, a loose confederations of outlaws who roamed the U.S. Rocky Mountains a hundred years ago. Between 1889 and 1901, they robbed five trains, three banks, and one mine payroll for a total haul of more than $200,000 (worth roughly $2.5 million today). The group was known variously as the Train Robbers Syndicate, the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, Curry's Gang, and Butch Cassidy's Gang. Perhaps only the Frank and Jesse James Gang, which marauded through the Midwest in the late 1860s and 1870s, was more notorious in frontier history.

By the turn of the century, outlaw gangs were on their last legs in western North America. Telegraphs and telephones enabled posses to head the bandits off at the pass, photography helped lawmen identify them, and the Pinkertons and other professional detectives in the hire of railroads and banks dogged them long after the posses went home.

Most members of the Wild Bunch were dead, in jail, or on the run by March 1901, when the Sundance Kid and his companion Etta, using the aliases Mr. and Mrs. Harry A. Place, boarded the S.S. Herminius in New York and steamed south to Argentina. Butch Cassidy joined them in 1902, and the threesome ranched peaceably for several years in northern Patagonia's Cholila Valley, then a frontier land sparsely populated by Mapuche Indians and Welsh, Chilean, Argentine, and North American settlers.

Similar to the northern Rockies in climate and geography, Cholila might have made an ideal home for the transplanted members of the Wild Bunch. But if the environment seemed familiar, so did the neighbors. Rancher John C. Perry had been the first sheriff of Ozona County, Texas, before immigrating to Argentina and settling in Cholila in the 1890s. Mrs. Perry wrote home to the Ozona Kicker that they had visited some fellow North Americans in the region and found that they were Texas outlaws whom John Perry had known when he was a sheriff.

A couple of days' ride north, near the present-day resort town of San Carlos de Bariloche, Texas cattleman Jarred Jones and New York dentist George Newbery had sizable ranches. Jones and the Wild Bunch trio reportedly socialized on occasion. Newbery was the U.S. vice consul in Argentina and was in Buenos Aires when Pinkerton operative Frank P. Dimaio visited the city in early 1903, looking for members of the Wild Bunch. The Pinkertons had learned, perhaps from Perry or from post-office informants, that Butch Cassidy and his friends were in Argentina, and they dispatched Dimaio, who was on a job in Brazil, to locate them. Newbery recognized photographs of the outlaws as his neighbors on the Cholila ranch.

Dimaio cabled the Pinkertons in New York that the onset of the rainy season precluded his taking a posse to Cholila. Before returning to the United States, Dimaio told the Buenos Aires police to keep him advised of the Wild Bunch's activities, and he arranged for 150 wanted posters to be printed in Spanish with photographs of Butch, Sundance, and Etta on them.

Shortly before Dimaio's visit, the Pinkertons had attempted to raise $5,000 from their bank and railroad clients to send the celebrated cowboy detective Charles A. Siringo and another man to Argentina to capture the Wild Bunch and bring them back to the United States. But the Pinkertons' clients, satisfied that the outlaws were long gone, declined to support the venture.

Other American criminals who had fled the United States in the early 1900s and sought a haven in Argentina were routinely arrested and extradited home, but the local authorities apparently made no attempt to round up Butch Cassidy's gang. During his 1903 visit, Dimaio discussed with Newbery and the Buenos Aires police chief a scheme to lure the outlaws to Buenos Aires on the pretext of signing the title to their ranch, but there is no evidence that the ruse was ever attempted.

By early 1905, the Wild Bunch was riding the outlaw trail again. The exact cause of their departure from Cholila is unknown. Dimaio's posters might have made their way to Patagonia, or someone might have tipped the trio that the...