In Patagonia

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

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Authors: Bruce Chatwin
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Butch met the Sundance Kid and his girl, Etta Place, in New York. She was young, beautiful and intelligent, and she kept her men to heel. Her Pinkerton card says she was a school teacher in Denver; one rumour has it she was the daughter of an English remittance man called George Capel, hence Place. Under the names of James Ryan and Mr and Mrs Harry A. Place, the ‘family of 3’ went to operas and theatres. (The Sundance Kid was a keen Wagnerian.) They bought Etta a gold watch at Tiffany’s and sailed for Buenos Aires on S.S. Soldier Prince. On landing they stayed at the Hotel Europa, called on the Director of the Land Department, and secured 12,000 acres of rough camp in Chubut.
    â€˜Are there any bandits?’ they asked. They were glad to hear there were none.
    A few weeks later, Milton Roberts, the Welsh police commissioner from Esquel, found them under canvas at Cholila; their fine light thoroughbreds, all ready saddled up, struck him as rather odd. Butch, as we know from the letter, was alone the first winter. He stocked the farm with sheep bought from an English neighbour. The cabin, modelled on Circleville but bigger, was up by June.
    In the following year, a Pinkerton detective, Frank Dimaio, tracked them to Cholila with the Winnemucca photograph, but was put off going to Patagonia by stories of snakes and jungles, perhaps invented for his benefit. The ‘family of 3’ used Cholila as a base for five years without interference. They built a brick house and a country store (now owned by an Arab trader) and put ‘another North American’ in charge.
    The locals thought they were peaceable citizens. At Cholila I met the grandchildren of their neighbour, Señora Blanca de Gérez, who left this note when she died three years ago:
    They were not good mixers, but whatever they did was correct. They often slept in our house. Ryan was more sociable than Place and joined in the festivities of the settlement. On the first visit of Governor Lezana, Place played the samba on his guitar and Ryan danced with the daughter of Don Ventura Solís. No one suspected they were criminals.
    The Pinkerton Agency wrote to the Chief of Police in Buenos Aires: ‘It is only a question of time until these men commit some desperate robbery in the Argentine Republic.’ They were right. Apart from running low in funds, ‘the family of 3’ were addicted to the art of the hold-up, without which life itself became a bore. Perhaps they were spurred on by the arrival of their friend Harvey Logan. In 1903 he had wormed his way out of jail in Knoxville, Tennessee, after all but throttling his warder with the coil of wire he kept hidden in his boot. He turned up in Patagonia under the name of Andrew Duffy, an alias he had already used in Montana.
    In 1905 the reconstituted Wild Bunch broke out and robbed a bank in Southern Santa Cruz. They repeated the performance on the Banco de la Nación at Villa Mercedes in San Luis in the summer of 1907. It seems that Harvey Logan shot the manager through the head. Etta was there, dressed as a man—a fact obliquely confirmed by Blanca de Gérez: ‘The Señora cropped her hair short and wore a wig.’
    In December 1907 they sold Cholila, in a hurry, to a beef syndicate, and scattered into the Cordillera. None of their neighbours ever heard of them again. I have heard a number of reasons for their departure. But the most usual explanation is that Etta was bored, had a grumbling appendix and insisted on going to Denver for the operation. There is another possibility: that appendix was a euphemism for baby and that the father was a young Englishman, John Gardner, who was ranching in Patagonia for his health. The story goes that Harvey Logan had to get him out of the Kid’s way, back to his family estate in Ireland.
    Etta was apparently living in Denver in 1924. (Her daughter may have been a competitive girl called Betty Weaver, who pulled fifteen

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