What really happened to Butch & Sundance in Patagonia

September 2, 2019 10:57 AM

Everything comes to an end, even a tango party in Argentina. Fifty years after the Oscar-winning movie, Patrick Symmes, author of Chasing Che and The Day Fidel Died, tells the true story of the six years the infamous outlaws spent trying to start a new life in South America.
posted by gottabefunky (9 comments total)

Very interesting article. However, I want to ask the author (on edit: thanks to the link I was able to send him an email and ask) if Gardner was a Scotsman or a Welshman because he uses both. And that sort of mistake ruins articles for me because if they aren't well edited I have a hard time believing them. But I loved the film as a child as I watched it with my mother -- who loved both Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

The other signed witness on that document was John Gardner, a Scotsman who had been in Patagonia for more than a decade.

In June 1905, Sundance wrote to Gardner, the Welshman who had traded books with Ethel, describing the deal as satisfactory.

And now I have Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head stuck in my head.
posted by terrapin at 1:26 PM on September 2, 2019

For a couple of guys intending to escape their past and create new lives, they sure did a lot to draw attention to themselves. Living large, sending mail back home to friends, etc.
posted by Thorzdad at 2:20 PM on September 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

Ethel is more interesting than either Butch or Sundance.
posted by maxwelton at 2:44 PM on September 2, 2019 [6 favorites]

if Gardner was a Scotsman or a Welshman because he uses both.

I don't know, but as mentioned on MeFi before (previously, even more previously), the whole Chubut valley was a Welsh colony, almost entirely Welsh in language for a while. By the time Butch, Sundance, and Ethel got to Cholila, it had been increasingly dominated by the central Argentinian government and Spanish was on the rise. But the reason they could find so many people to speak English with, down at the extreme edge of South America, is that they were talking to Welshmen in their second language.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:59 PM on September 2, 2019 [5 favorites]

For a couple of guys intending to escape their past and create new lives, they sure did a lot to draw attention to themselves. Living large, sending mail back home to friends, etc.

It’s very hard not to draw attention to oneself as a fugitive without effectively method-acting being dead. Any human connection one had will draw attention (for example: the Mossad caught Eichmann after he went out to a restaurant with his wife on their actual wedding anniversary), and one would be constantly looking over one’s shoulder. It’s plausible that, after a few years of this, many fugitives would (consciously or otherwise) self-sabotage and try to get caught, just to end the ordeal.
posted by acb at 4:03 PM on September 2, 2019

On a related note: ‘Faking your own death is a full-time job, and I can guarantee you that if you slip up with even the slightest sign of life, we will find you’
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:27 PM on September 2, 2019 [5 favorites]

For a couple of guys intending to escape their past and create new lives, they sure did a lot to draw attention to themselves. Living large, sending mail back home to friends, etc.

One of the things that I got out of this previous FPP about Henry Hill (the Goodfellas guy) is that, for some guys, they really can't give it up, either the thrill of pulling off a big job or blowing it all afterwards, even if they have the threat of the Mafia hanging over their heads (or the Pinkertons, whose nineteenth-century reputation was genuinely formidable).
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:58 PM on September 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

Yes, it really should be billed as what Butch, Sundance, and Ethel did in Patagonia, and Ethel seems to have been the one to successfully go to ground, post Patagonia.
posted by gudrun at 8:46 AM on September 3, 2019

Great read, thanks for posting.
posted by soundguy99 at 3:30 PM on September 3, 2019