Honesty is the best disguise, the ultimate trick for such famous criminals. During the 1890s, Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Longabaugh, a.k.a. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, carried out a streak of bank robberies across five U.S. states with the help of a revolving host of associates known as the Hole in the Wall Gang. Often planned by the meticulous Butch and executed by the quick-thinking Sundance, their crimes made the most of preparation and timing and were justifiably famous for their panache and profit.
Butch was a lapsed Mormon who nursed a grievance against the high and mighty. He deliberately targeted the most powerful banks and financial interests, and while his crimes were usually nonviolent, his plans grew increasingly ambitious and elaborate with practice. In 1898, he escalated his war dramatically by boarding an express train of the Union Pacific railroad in Wyoming. After politely releasing the passenger carriage, the gang swiped $30,000 from the train’s safe, along with diamonds and negotiable bank notes. They blew a bridge to prevent pursuit, and when Sundance was later cornered by a sheriff’s posse, he managed to shoot his way out and escape.
E.H. Harriman, owner of the Union Pacific, hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to track the men down and eventually raised the price on their heads from $1,000 to $10,000 each. The gang responded by pulling off a string of rapid-fire robberies over the next two years, hitting trains and banks and escaping with impunity. Sympathetic and charismatic, able to vanish overnight into raw wilderness, they executed their heists with such audacity, it was as if they were toying with the banks and powerful corporations they robbed.
But they were smart enough to know the streak couldn’t last forever. Sometime in 1899, they started making plans to get out. In a letter to a friend, Butch explained what made their flight to South America possible: $30,000 they had “inherited” from an uncle.
The “uncle’s” name was the National Bank of Winnemucca, Nevada, and the inheritance was withdrawn at gunpoint in September 1900. This was the last of the Wild Bunch robberies—in the U.S., anyway. But instead of fleeing into the deepest badlands of Idaho or Wyoming as before, the trio of Butch, Sundance, and Ethel hid in a another kind of wilderness, the teeming streets of New York City.
By this point, they were not a duo but a trio. Ethel—not Etta, as history misrecalls her—began to associate with the Wild Bunch in the 1890s. Pinkerton reports, one source for their South American idyll, described her as 5’5” and quite thin, with pale skin, green eyes, and brown hair. In photos, she has the calm self-possession of many a beautiful woman.
There are more absences than known facts in her record: no last name, no evidence of a legal marriage, no letters, no clue as to her final fate. But she and Sundance were already a common-law couple of many years by the time they left for South America, and he introduced her as his wife, even to his family in Pennsylvania. Decades later his grandnieces would identify her, perhaps fancifully, as a West Virginia-born music teacher. But the only solid data tells a less charming story: As Anne Meadows relates in her book Digging Up Butch and Sundance, Ethel had resided for a time in Fort Worth, Texas, at an address near the cattle yards that was listed as a “Class A” house of prostitution. The frontier drew many young women into brothels, and virtually all of them would be looking for a way out. By 1900, Sundance and Butch were on the way out of the hemisphere with her.