← Back to the front page

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s Escapades, and Other Lesser Known Historic Events

Khalid Elhassan January 21, 2020 33 min

William Carver - Butch Cassidy — Butch Cassidy, far right, The Sundance Kid, far left, and other members of the Wild Bunch gang. Wikimedia

39. The Flight of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

A posse assembled to chase the Wild Bunch in 1900. Pintrest

Under mounting pressure from the authorities, and doggedly pursued by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the Wild Bunch broke up. Butch Cassidy fled with the Sundance Kid, real name Harry Longabaugh (1867 – 1908) to NYC. There, they were joined by Sundance’s girlfriend, Ethel Place, and in February of 1901, the trio sailed to Rio de Janeiro. They spent several months in Brazil, before moving on to Argentina.

America’s most notorious outlaws had made a seemingly clean break. In Argentina, they bought a 15,000-acre ranch in the tiny settlement of Cholila, on the Rio Blanco near the Andes, and settled in to a life of prosperous ranchers. They escaped their past for the next six years, while managing to elude the world’s most powerful detectives. Eventually, that past – helped by their missteps – finally caught up with them.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.