Patagonia, refuge of Butch Cassidy

During your trip to Patagonia, you’ll have the opportunity to pass through some of the places where these looters passed through. I mention for example “La Leona” between El Calafate and El Chalten, a great place to have a coffee, the Touring hotel/bar in Trelew, ideally located at the time, near a bank and of course, some places not far from Cholila.

Butch Cassidy was born on April 13, 1866 in Beaver, Utah, to the real name Robert LeRoy Parker. He left home as a teenager and while working on a dairy farm, he became friends with Mike Cassidy, a horse and cattle thief. He later worked on several ranches and briefly in a butcher shop. It was from this experience that he got his nickname “Butch” (from butcher), to which he soon added the name Cassidy in homage to his friend and mentor.

Between 1901 and 1905, in order to escape from the United States authorities, the men of Butch’s gang, who were among the most wanted in the United States, acquired five thousand hectares of virgin land in Cholila, about 80 km north of Trevelin, in the province of Chubut. Ironically, Butch Cassidy‘s first question before buying his land was: “Are there any bandits in the area?”. It’s true that he knew what they were capable of. Far from the North American police and Pinkerton agents, the fugitives lived like honorable ranchers on their farm. Wasn’t Patagonia, immense and poorly controlled, the ideal hiding place for these North American outlaws?

On February 14, 1905, two English-speaking bandits, possibly Parker and Longabaugh (one of the gang), robbed the Tarapacá y Argentino bank in Río Gallegos, 700 miles south of Cholila. Stealing the equivalent of $100,000, the two men fled north to the Patagonian steppes. With law enforcement on their trail, the gang sold Cholila’s house.

Butch Cassidy and two accomplices went further north, to San Carlos de Bariloche, where they boarded the Condor, a boat that sailed on Lake Nahuel Huapi on its way to Chile. They reappeared in Argentina before the end of the year, however: on December 19, Parker, Longabaugh, Place and a fourth man took part in the looting of the National Bank, in Villa Mercedes, 650 km west of Buenos Aires, and seized 12,000 pesos. Pursued by armed lawmen, they then crossed the Pampas and the Andes mountain range, and returned to the safety of Chile.

The most plausible theory is that Butch Cassidy was hunted down, fled to Bolivia, and it was in the mines, under a false name, that the greatest bandit of the Belle Époque ended his life…

Come and experience a real Western in Argentine Patagonia!