Here's Butch and Sundance in their city duds, Sundance is on the left, unfortunately we don't have any good, clear photos of them in their Western attire:
Howdy folks and greetings from the Great Plains of North Texas!
I promised some of my readers that I'd give an update on the Butch and Sundance story if I found more information regarding their demise.
Well, as I was finishing my series of posts on these guys I found out that the main researcher I'd been using, the amazing Anne Meadows, had written an addition to the latest printing of her book, Digging Up Butch and Sundance.
In my last post on the subject I talked about additional information which adds to the evidence that we already have about what happened to them. This post is the rest of that information.
Can't we prove this thing once and for all?
Uh...no. But using DNA IS the way to do it. The legend at the San Vicente cemetery where the outlaws were buried gave a location of an unmarked grave.
That grave was supposed to be between a German prospector who blew himself up thawing a frozen stick of dynamite on his woodstove and a Swede who accidently shot himself while dismounting his mule.
So in 1996 an exhumation was done on the supposed grave site but only one body was there and it turned out to be the German prospector. DNA was run just to be safe and no match to either Butch or Sundance.
In the Afterword Anne Meadows explained that they learned of a mistake in the translation of the location of the two outlaws. It didn't say between the German and Swede. It simply said they were buried in the same cemetery as the other foreigners, the German and the Swede.
That ain't gonna happen
The researchers ran into tremendous resistance in exhuming that one body. The locals don't believe the dead should be bothered. The only way to find out for sure if Butch and Sundance are buried there would be to exhume almost every grave in the cemetery and they would never permit that.
The circumstantial evidence that the two perished in that little windswept town is overwhelming though. If that gold watch hadn't disappeared then it could have been identified as the one Sundance bought at Tiffanys in New York City in 1900.
The skeptics have a good question
Skeptics ask why did they stop in a town when they had always camped away from towns when they were on the run?
Well, the weather for one. San Vicente is over 14,000 feet up in the mountains and it was bitter cold. The inventory list showed they had no winter clothing.
This is a great photo showing the barren landscape of San Vicente:
In addition to that, they had no food for their mules so they had to stop and buy food for them. The terrain was barren with no grass. This was basically a high desert.
In the interviews that the investigators did with the locals one of the locals stated that he heard the two debating about staying at the village.
One wanted to get supplies and push on, the other wanted to spend the night. Turned out to be a fateful decision. They were in a remote village two mountain ranges from the crime so I think they felt safe.
The skeptics have another good question
Critics also argue that this couldn't have been Butch and Sundance because Butch always stationed fast horses spaced out every ten miles or so along his escape routes.
That is true. But the area of Bolivia which they were in is mountainous terrain with narrow trails and mules were used to traverse those trails.
I believe this photo is a very accurate image of what the trails looked like, there were no "roads" per se, at least not modern type roads:
So there was no "fast" escaping in this terrain. I don't know if they could have done the same thing with mules as he did with horses but he didn't.
They DID have a route mapped out on a map which we discussed in the last post but they took a hostage the first day to be their guide and on the second day they stopped at a village to ask for directions.
One more correction
The initial reports which were examined claimed that they had left their rifles on the front porch of that little house but the inventory list of the items in the back room where the bodies were found included a new Winchester rifle with 120 rounds of ammunition.
And they also had lots of ammunition for their pistols so they had plenty to keep firing. But they knew they were surrounded and pinned in, they were both wounded, and there was no escape. So instead of trying to take more lives they decided to take their own.
This final act confirms what I have learned about them. They were men of courage and had a core morality against killing.
The painful truth
The fact is, they drastically underestimated the Bolivians.
But when you steal a mine payroll in a section of the country composed of nothing but miners then the whole country is on the lookout and even in little San Vicente they had been alerted to watch for two Americans with a mine-owned mule.
That gold dredging operation manager who they took hostage for the first day of travel said that he warned them and told them he thought their plan was "unwise" and he said that Sundance replied to him with confidence.."They won't get us."
Thanks for going on this journey with me folks, I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have. God bless you all!
-jonboy Texas
