Hunting Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid
Did the infamous outlaws really die in Bolivia?
In Bolivia the legend has it that the Spanish Empire extracted enough silver from Bolivia to build a bridge from Potosi all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to Madrid and back again to Potosi– Bolivia’s main mining state and city. One of the main mines during Bolivia's silver rush was the Pulacayo mine. In Pulacayo they first struck Silver in 1883 and when the two infamous Yankee outlaws Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid escaped the law in the United States to look for greener pastures in Bolivia, guess where they eventually showed up…
Right here in the Pulacayo mine, in the middle of the Bolivian Altiplano desert. A barren landscape, on the surface stripped for life, except for the llamas roaming the area. The air up here is thin, each step comes at cost, it will cost you valuable oxygen, but dig into the ground and you will be rewarded. No one describes it better than Butch telling The Sundance Kid about Bolivia, in the movie carrying their names, Butch says: “You wouldn't believe what they're finding in the ground down there. They're just fallin' into it. Silver mines, gold mines, tin mines, payrolls so heavy we'd strain ourselves stealin' 'em”.
In its heyday Pulacayo was a bustling town with around 30,000 inhabitants, today around 50-60 families are left rummaging through the scraps, trying to make a living off of what little zinc, copper & tin the mine still provides. As I recently visited the mostly abandoned mining town an old local man told me “we are hoping for an investor to come and buy the mine, to bring it back to life”, what is it the English say?– It’s the hope that kills you…
The old man seemed to be somewhat of a warden of Pulacayo, he had been born here and he was still living here. I imagine he was old enough to have seen the mine in the latter years of its heyday– the mine was ramped down in the 1950’s. Apart from the covid face diaper he was wearing, it was as if he was stuck living in the past, desperately waiting for it to come back, hoping to one day wake up back in 1951. The old man was kind, very talkative. I imagine he doesn’t get many visitors these days. He asked if I wanted to play a game of bowling on Bolivia’s oldest bowling lane, a bowling lane dating back to 1891, brought to the town from England by the owners of the mine back in the day. I couldn’t believe my luck, of course I wanted to have a go!
As I took aim at the pins lined up at the end of this historic bowling lane I couldn’t quite believe myself. I imagined all the people who had lined up here before me– presidents, rich businessmen and outlaws, squeeze your eyes together real hard and you’ll struggle to spot the difference between these folk. I can imagine Butch and Sundance playing a game here against the owners of the mine, drinking beers, smoking cigarettes, charming the owner, luring him to let out all the details they needed to pull off their next heist– The route of the payroll transport, the dates upon which payroll comes in and out of town and most importantly how much money the payroll is?
The official story of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid claims that the two outlaws ended their days in a shootout with the Bolivian Army in San Vicente, a small mining village hidden deep in the Bolivian Andes, after having stolen the payroll of the Pulacayo mine. The pair had escaped on horses marked with the logo of the Pulacayo mine, after days riding through the rough Bolivian Andes, under the sun with no food and hardly any oxygen, the pair made it to San Vicente. Hungry, sun-burned and thirsty they headed straight to a small guesthouse and restaurant. They ordered two beers and plenty more– You can’t trust the water quality up here in the Bolivian mountains. The fatal moment came when a young San Vicente local noticed the two horses marked with the Pulacayo mine logo. The young local went straight to the San Vicente sheriff– later that night the Bolivian Army arrived in San Vicente and the fatal shootout took place over the course of the following night.
When the Bolivian army officials entered the room where Butch and Sundance had been barricaded all night during the shootout they found two dead bodies, Sundance had a gunshot to the forehead, Butch had a gunshot to the bottom of his head. The conclusion: Butch had first put Sundance out of his misery before turning the gun on himself… The pair was buried in the San Vicente cemetery where they lay resting to this day–- Sounds legit, right?
Since that fatal shootout in 1908 the speculations about what really happened that night has been many. Were the two dead bodies actually the bodies of Butch and Sundance, or had they managed to escape the law one final time by staging their own death?
When a team of investigators lead by Dr. Clyde Snow, a celebrated forensic anthropologist went to Bolivia in 1993 to excavate the supposed grave of Butch and Sundance; they found that the bones in the grave couldn't be matched with the identities of Butch and Sundance. So what really happened that night? Did Butch and Sundance die in Bolivia or did they live out their lives in peace after one last heist?