New documents detail deadly chapter in Butch and Sundance's escape to Chile

The two outlaws spent their nights carousing in the bordellos of a far-west mining town where they were holed up, on the run from the law. One night, one of the fugitives got into a brawl at an after-hours restaurant.

- Uki Goñi

 

Lawmen arrived and ordered everyone into the street, but the drunken bandit drew his gun. He fired a single shot; an officer died.

The 1905 scene did not play out in the US, but in the Chilean port of Antofagasta – a boom town that at the time was as wild as any in the American west – and it was detailed in a judicial report recently rediscovered in the country’s national archives.

The protagonists were the notorious US outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the dog-eared file has revealed a previously unreported incident during their flight to South America, later immortalised in the eponymous 1969 film.

“It’s an unknown chapter in their life,” said Anne Meadows, who discovered the file with her husband, Dan Buck. The couple have spent decades trailing the pair’s escape to South America, a search that has continued even after the 1994 publication of their book, Digging Up Butch and Sundance. The couple have returned to South America 15 times, visiting the outlaws’ every known hiding place in Argentina, Chile and Bolivia in search of clues.

But the file – which Meadows and Buck found this June – proves not only that Sundance, real name Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, killed a police officer in Chile but also that he was helped to escape by a US diplomat.

“It happened in this period between Argentina and Bolivia when no one really knows what they were up to,” said Meadows, speaking by telephone from their home in Washington. “Sundance had been in the bordellos of Antofagasta that evening, and several other evenings, with Butch Cassidy,” added Buck.