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Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid

Harry Longabaugh ("Sundance Kid")

Little is known of his early life, a Pennsylvania native, born in 1867 or 70, who, at the age of 15, had traveled with his cousins out west to escape the monotony of his childhood life. Like Butch, Longabaugh (Longbough or Longenbough) worked as a ranch hand during his teenage years and, like Butch, he became attracted to the easy money to be gained by dealing with stolen livestock. By age twenty, he was working as a cowboy for the N Bar N owned by the Neidringhaus Brothers in Culbertson, Montana. For a period of time, he was also reputed to have worked for the Two Bar. In 1887, out of work and drifting, Longbough stole a horse, gun, and saddle from Western Ranches, Ltd., owner of the Three V's, near Sundance, Wyoming. He was ultimately arrested, plead guilty, and was sentenced to 18 months in the Sundance Jail. He was pardoned by Gov. Thomas Moonlight in Feb. 1889.

Longbough drifted then to Belle Fourche, S.D. There, as a result of his bravado about the time spent in the Sundance Jail, he earned the appellation of Sundance or "Sundance Kid," the nickname was well in place by the time he joined up with Butch and the Wild Bunch. From there he moved north of the border and worked for a period of time at the Bar U in Alberta and engaged for a short period of time in the saloon business at Grand Central Hotel in Calgary. He then returned to Montana again signing on with the N Bar N at its Rock Creek unit.

In 1892, Sundance was implicated with Tom McCarty (whom Sundance had known in Colorado), Matt Warner, and George Cassidy (Butch), in the robbery of the Great Northern westbound # 23 near Malta, Montana. By 1896, Sundance was reported to be in the Baggs and Dixon, Wyoming area.

A few years later, while working on the Bar FS ranch in Wyoming, Longabaugh encountered Butch Cassidy, whom he had met years earlier at Hole-in-the-Wall. When Cassidy organized his notorious Wild Bunch of bank and train robbers, Longabaugh eagerly enlisted.

On June 28, 1897, Sundance along with George Currie, Kid Curry, Walt Punteney and Tom O'Day participated in the robbery of the Butte County Bank in Belle Fourche, S.D. The bank must have been a tempting target. After the railroad arrived, the town had become prosperous as being a loading point for cattle. Thus, Fifth Avenue was lined with saloons to quench the thirst of cowboys. Indeed, there were so many saloons that the street was commonly referred to as "Saloon Street." Above the saloons were other establishments to tempt lonely cowboys. The most famous of the other establishments was one commonly called "Diddlin' Dora's" operated by Madame Dora DuFran. Madame DuFran was so successful that she had branches elsewhere including Lead and Deadwood. The robbery of the bank and the follow-up by the law was a comedy of errors. O'Day was arrested after O'Day's horse decided to leave town without O'Day. Longabaugh was arrested along with three other men, but Longabaugh and two others escaped from jail in Deadwood.

On September 24, 1897, Carbon County, Mont., Sheriff John Dunn and a small posse cought up with the remaining three near the Musselshell River. In the ensuing shootout, Kid Curry's horse was shot through the neck and Curry was shot through the wrist. Curry leaped upon the horse and galloped away, only to have the horse drop dead. All three were arrested and transported to the Deadwood Jail. There, they promptly escaped and stole horses and gear. Another posse caught up with them. They eluded capture by escaping on foot, but lost the horses and swag that they had stolen. They ultimately made it back to the Hole in the Wall, where as a result of their adventures, they were accepted as full members of the Hole in the Wall gang.

Longabaugh was active in all of the Wild Bunch robberies around the turn of the century, and he happily participated in vacation trips to such retreats as Denver, Fort Worth, and New Orleans. In 1902 Longabaugh and his consort - a former schoolteacher and/or prostitute named Etta Place - met Butch in South America, where they used a government grant of land to set up a cattle ranch in Argentina. Etta developed appendicitis in 1907, and Longabaugh took her to Denver for medical care, but he soon returned to South America, where he and Butch alternated between robbing banks and working for a mining company in Bolivia. Following a payroll robbery which the two outlaws pulled in 1908, Longabaugh was killed in a fight with Bolivian soldiers, while Cassidy escaped and returned to the United States.

Etta Place

Etta Place is the most mysterious female character in the American west. Ethel Place, as the Pinkerton National Detective Agency sometimes listed her, first appeared at the Wild Bunch's hideout, the Robber's Roost, in the winter of 1896-1897. There is a dispute as to whether she was at first Butch Cassidy's girl and then switched to the Sundance Kid, or if she was always only Sundance's woman.

There is a possibility that she is a cousin of Sundance, as his mother's maiden name was "Annie Place." For that matter, the entire name "Etta Place" could be an alias. The common theory is that Etta was a prostitute from Fanny Porter's bordello in Fort Worth, Texas where the Wild Bunch frequently went to relax and celebrate their latest robbery.

While in New York City, Sundance and Etta had their picture taken together. This is the sole documented photo of Etta Place. The photograph was taken in DeYoung's Studio on lower Broadway. Sundance and Etta stand as though for a formal wedding portrait. Looking refined and ladylike, she wears a black dress with a white fichu and a small watch-pin.

Robert A. Pinkerton wrote to Buenos Aires police chief Francisco J. Beazley on July 1, 1903, enclosing "four photographs and descriptions of Mrs. Harry Longabaugh, known in South America as Mrs. Harry A. Place." Pinkerton detective Frank Dimaio had visited Argentina and traced the outlaws to their Cholila ranch. "I know nothing of Etta Place's background, but have the impression that he [the Sundance Kid] may have met her in a house of ill-fame, and that she afterwards became his common-law wife ... I do not know whether she is a mystery woman or not, but she evidently has parents in Texas."

- Frank Dimaio letter to James D. Horan, Wild Bunch historian

Parker, Robert LeRoy ("Butch Cassidy," "George Cassidy," "William T. Phillips")

In 1866, the same year Jesse James led his gang's first raid against a Missouri bank, a child who was to be the last of the Western gang leaders was born in Beaver, Utah on April 13, 1866, Cassidy was the first of 13 children. His name was Robert LeRoy Parker, later changed to Butch Cassidy in token of admiration for a friend, Mike Cassidy, who had taught him the fine arts of rustling and horse theft. Like the James boys, he came from a family with a devout religious tradition, but grew up observing few strictures of his faith.

His Mormon parents had come to Utah from England in 1856. His parents moved over the mountains to Circleville in 1879 and young Roy, as he was known about the house, worked in ranches across western Utah, including at Hay Springs, near Milford. On one of these early jobs Roy had his first run-in with the law - he let himself into a closed shop, took a pair of jeans, and left a note promising to return later to pay his debt. But things did not go well in Circleville for the Parker family - Roy's dad, Maximillian, lost land to another homesteader in a property rights dispute.

This area around Circleville had long been a hangout for outlaws, and in his mid-teens Robert LeRoy developed a hero worship for a ruffian named Mike Cassidy, who gave his young friend a saddle and a gun. At the age of sixteen Parker left home and began to run with Cassidy, ultimately becoming second-in-command of the rustling outfit. By 1884, Roy was rustling cattle from Parowan (just over the Markagunt Plateau) and his life on the lam had begun.

Parker's activities brought him from time to time to Wyoming's isolated Hole-in-the-Wall country, where he met some of the men who later became members of his Wild Bunch. As a youth, Butch joined a gang whose members included Bill McCarty, rumored to have been a James gang veteran. After participating in train and bank holdups, the neophyte drifted off on his own. In 1887 he participated in an aborted train robbery in Colorado, and in 1889 he helped loot banks in Denver and in Telluride, Colorado. Following these jobs, Parker, using the alias "George Cassidy," returned to Wyoming and lay low, working in a Rock Springs butcher shop, which, of course, is where he gained the sobriquet "Butch." During those years he sometimes tried to go straight, working as a cowboy on various ranches, including a stint in the mid-1880's on the huge Swan Land and Cattle Company Ranch. But he soon returned to rustling, and in 1892 he was taken into custody. In 1894, following a delayed trial, Butch was sentenced to a two-year stretch in the Rawlins, Wyoming State Penitentiary - without chastening effect. The man who swore out the warrants leading to Butch's arrest, rancher Otto Franc of the Big Horn Basin, was mysteriously shot to death in 1903.

Released at the age of 30, in 1896, Cassidy promptly formed his own gang. After Cassidy's men had robbed a bank, lifted a mining camp payroll and pulled off a series of rustling successes, local newspapers honored their prowess by calling them the Wild Bunch. After his release in 1896, Butch returned to crime, forming the notorious Wild Bunch to assist him. Surrounded by such men as Harvey Logan, Harry Longabaugh ("the Sundance Kid"), Ben Kilpatrick, Elzy Lay, Harry Tracy, and Big Nose George Curry, Cassidy engineered a number of train and bank robberies in the ensuing years.

In one sense, the label was misleading, for Cassidy himself made it a lifelong point to avoid needless violence. When pursued by posses, he shot at the horses, never at the riders. He said, apparently truthfully, "I have never killed a man." He ran his gang democratically, asking members' advice on projects. Even the wanted posters described him as "cheery and affable."

But in the flair they displayed in action, the Wild Bunch lived up to their name - particularly after they turned their attention to trains. At 2:30 a.m. on June 2, 1899, near Wilcox, Wyoming, they used a warning lantern to halt the Union Pacific's Overland Limited. The gang detached the express car and set a stick of dynamite underneath - enough to open it like an egg crate but not enough to maim the stubborn guard inside. More dynamite blew the safe apart, sending currency wafting through the night air. The outlaws scooped up $30,000 and rode off.

After a job the gang sometimes vacationed together in such cities as Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Denver. Between holdups Butch often rendezvoused with Mary Boyd and other sweethearts. He also sought refuge in various locales, once working as a sailor on the Great Lakes and on another occasion serving on a steamer from Seattle to Los Angeles.

The Wild Bunch followed up its first thunderous train job with three more. Although Pinkerton men were on the gang's trail, the Union Pacific considered a business-like approach to the problem - offering to buy out Cassidy with a pardon and a position as an express guard "at a good salary."

After the deal fell through and Cassidy robbed another train, the railroad organized its own gang of gunfighters, outfitted them with high-powered rifles, and sent them out in a high-speed train to bring in the Wild Bunch. Cassidy, realizing that such determined pursuers would eventually catch up with him, decided to transfer his operations to South America. He journeyed to New York sometime in late 1901, accompanied by a trusted confederate, Harry "Sundance Kid" Longbaugh of Sundance, Wyoming, and by Longbaugh's lady love, Etta Place. After taking in the city sights, they sailed to Buenos Aires and new opportunities.

In 1902, Cassidy, Longabaugh, and Longabaugh's mistress, Etta Place, fled to South America, following an extended vacation in New York. Cassidy sailed alone via Liverpool and the Canary Islands, and was joined by Longabaugh and Etta in Montevideo, Uruguay. The trio moved to Argentina, where they operated a cattle and sheep ranch, trailing their herds into Chile, finding a profitable market at the mines there.

During the next decade, Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and Etta robbed banks and trains all across South America. Pinkerton men continued to keep track of them; one dossier entry noted: "As soon as Cassidy entered an Indian village he would be playing with the children. When hard pressed by local authorities, he would always find a hideout among the native population."

After a few years Etta began suffering attacks of appendicitis, and in 1907 Longabaugh took her to Denver for an operation. After he returned, the two bandidos yanquis shifted their activities to Bolivia, where they began robbing payroll shipments and banks. working in the tin mines between holdups. Early in 1908 they were caught by Bolivian soldiers, and Longabaugh was killed after a violent battle. Butch apparently escaped, however, returning to the United States and establishing his identity as William Thadeus Phillips. He claimed to be a mechanical engineer from Des Moines, Iowa, and on May 14, 1908, he married Gertrude Livesay in Adrian, Michigan.

Because Mrs. Phillips was an asthmatic, the couple soon moved to Globe. Arizona, and Phillips spent some time across the border as a mercenary in the Mexican Revolution. In 1910 thev settled in Spokane, Washington, and within five years William had established the Phillips Manufacturing Company, producing adding machines and other business equipment. The company prospered, and Phillips became an Elk and a Mason and indulged his love of fine cars - just as Butch had always enjoyed fine horses. In 1919 the childless coupleadopted an infant son. In 1910, 1925, and 1934, Phillips visited some of his old haunts, searching fruitlessly for buried loot from his Wild Bunch days. He also saw members of his family and former acquaintances - including his widowed sweetheart, Mary Boyd Rhodes.

Phillips was forced to sell his company during the Great Depression, and in 1934 he unsuccessfully tried to market a manuscript, "The Bandit Invincible," based on his career as Butch Cassidy. In desperation he concocted a scheme to kidnap for ransom a wealthy Spokane citizen, but the plan was never executed. By that time Phillips had contracted cancer, and he died in 1937 at Broadacres, the county poor farm at Spangle, near Spokane.

In 1909 the men were back in Bolivia. One account claims that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were killed in a shoot-out at San Vicente. However, the police were not able to positively identify the two dead men. According to another source the men were killed while trying to rob a bank in Mercedes, Uruguay in December, 1911. Another source claims that Robert Longbaugh escaped from these incidents and returned to the United States and died in Casper, Wyoming in 1957.

The ultimate fate of the trio remains a mystery. Stories circulated that they were killed in a battle with troops in Bolivia or Uruguay, but more reliable reports indicated that they returned to the U.S. and lived to a ripe old age. Whatever the outcome, Longbaugh had foreseen the future accurately when he said, during the glory days of the Wild Bunch: "I'll never be taken alive."

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