Who was Etta Place?
She was the mistress and possibly partner of Pennsylvania native Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, additionally known as the “Sundance Baby,” and a fringe decide throughout the Wild Bunch, the outlaw gang led by Robert LeRoy Parker, additionally known as “Butch Cassidy.” However, little is thought of her origins and even a lot much less about what occurred to her after Sundance and Butch had been killed in South America.
Larry Pointer, creator of the 1977 information Seeking Butch Cassidywrote that Etta's id was “one of many important fascinating mysteries in Western historic previous.”
Place was perhaps born in 1878, and as an grownup she was described as “classically good-looking,” with a kind smile and a cultured demeanor, an overview confirmed by a full-length portrait of her and Longabaugh – some say that Bridal ceremony {photograph} of the couple – Taken in February 1901 at Joseph B. De Youthful's pictures studio at 815 Broadway in New York Metropolis. She spoke educatedly and knew strategies to cope with a rifle.
She had met Longabaugh a yr or two earlier and can have been involved in among the many Wild Bunch's robberies, scouting out a monetary establishment prematurely or holding the group's horses all through a theft. Nevertheless the image of New York Metropolis, historian Thom Hatch wrote in his 2013 information The ultimate outlaws“Paying homage to precise afternoon tea, carriage rides in Central Park and evenings on the theater.”
Even her establish could be fallacious. “Place” was the maiden establish of Longabaugh's mother, Annie, and Sundance typically used the pseudonym “Harry Place.” It has been instructed that she used the first establish “Etta” in South America after Spanish audio system mispronounced “Ethel”, which might or couldn’t have been her exact first establish. The Pinkertons alternately referred to as them Ethel, Eva, Rita, Etta and Betty Price.
In a letter to his good good friend David Gillespie shortly after the gang's follow theft on June 2, 1899, near Wilcox, Wyoming, Longabaugh included a duplicate of the portrait of himself and Place, whom he described as his partner and “Girl from Texas.” described. The Pinkertons, who spent various time and effort monitoring the Wild Bunch, always believed Etta was from Texas, which inserts alongside along with her recognized experience with horses and firearms. In 1906, after his investigators traced Place to Fort Worth, William Pinkerton requested that metropolis's police chief to “uncover out who this girl is.”
Based on the concept that Etta's precise establish was Ethel and that she was from Texas, researcher Donna Ernst compiled a list of all women named Ethel who had been born in or spherical Fort Worth and San Antonio between 1875 and 1880. Over time, she was eradicated as a candidate for the youthful Etta Place.
Moreover one.
This was Ethel Bishop, who lived with 4 completely different women in a developing that was perhaps a brothel near the notorious Madame Fannie Porter's pleasure palace in San Antonio, a recognized meeting place for the Wild Bunch. One different oft-repeated story is that Butch rescued Etta from a brothel when she was 16 years earlier. Longabaugh biographer Ed Kirby believes that Place was the daughter of 1 Emily Jane Place of Oswego, NY, who was somehow related to Sundance's mother. Nonetheless others have instructed that Etta was actually Colorado rancher Ann Bassett, a Wild Bunch employee who was recognized to have competed with Sister Josie for Cassidy's affections.
Would possibly Bassett have moreover caught Sundance's consideration?
Most probably not. By 1903, Bassett had married Hirum “Good day” Henry Bernard and was arrested (and later acquitted) of cattle theft that exact same yr whereas Place was in South America.
On February 20, 1901, Place and Longabaugh boarded the HMS after posing for her portrait Herminius in New York and landed in Buenos Aires, Argentina on March twenty third. Touring with them was Cassidy, who posed beneath the pseudonym “James Ryan” and claimed to be Etta's brother. In 1902, Place and Longabaugh briefly returned to the USA to go to Etta for remedy for an unknown illness, and as soon as extra in 1904 when Pinkerton employees believed she was visiting her family in Texas. In 1906, most likely as a consequence of her illness, Place returned to the USA for a preserve. Sundance returned to South America, the place most historians contemplate he and Butch died in a shootout with troopers in Bolivia in 1908.
Within the meantime, Etta has disappeared.
Numerous researchers have instructed that she turned a brothel operator in Fort Worth beneath the establish Eunice Gray. Nevertheless in an article in October 2010 Wild West Donna Humphrey-Donnell well-known that she had seen a purported portrait of youthful Gray and that the woman in that {photograph} was positively “not the similar girl seen throughout the well-known New York portrait of Etta Place and the Sundance Baby.”
In 1909, an unknown girl matching Etta's description requested a U.S. diplomat in South America for help in buying Longabaugh's dying certificates. Nevertheless she not at all returned to his office. However, the incident solely proves that Place was nonetheless alive in 1909.
Since then, completely different theories have emerged: that Etta was the partner of legendary boxing promoter Tex Rickard; that she moved to Paraguay and remarried; that Longabaugh had survived the 1908 shootout in Bolivia and lived thankfully ever after with Place in Alaska; that Etta died throughout the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; or that she was each killed all through a house dispute or took her private life in Argentina throughout the Nineteen Twenties. In 1970, Cassidy's sister, Lula Parker, suggested Betensen Los Angeles Cases In step with reporters, her brother had not been killed in Bolivia as believed and Etta had spent her time as a coach in Denver.
Finally, speculation, conjecture, and coincidence aside, all everyone knows for sure is that she was a very good trying girl who as quickly as romanced the Sundance Baby after which disappeared from the pages of historic previous.
No extra.
To in the present day, associated unimaginable tales move into about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Baby, tales about their escape from the capturing in Bolivia and their subsequent lives in anonymity in quite a few areas throughout the West or South America.
However, identical to the theories surrounding Etta Place, they’re unfounded and probably false.
Nevertheless tempting.
This textual content initially appeared throughout the Spring 2024 topic of Wild West Journal.