Digging Up Butch and Sundance

History and adventure combine as a years-long search for the final resting place of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid turns up a lonely grave in the Bolivian Andes.

After Meadows and her husband learned that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had ranched for several years in their beloved vacation stomping grounds of northern Patagonia, the couple became obsessed with pinning down the last days and deaths of the legendary 19th-century outlaws. For seven years they chased rumors in Bolivia, Argentina and Chile, twice mortgaging their house in order to hunt down facts that had eluded police, Pinkerton detectives and historians. Starting in Patagonia, the two amateur detectives ferreted out thousands of letters, documents and newspapers; located South American neighbors and U.S. relatives of the bandits; visited supposed hideouts; exhumed coffins said to contain their remains; and had bones analyzed for DNA clues. Nothing satisfied Meadows until she and her husband chose to believe an account, once dismissed by Pinkertons as false, that had been told by a hostage taken by the outlaws the night before they were killed by Bolivian soldiers. The account established the year (1908), place (San Vincente) and manner of Cassidy and the Kid's deaths. Unfortunately, the drama of this obsessive pursuit is buried under Meadows's overwhelming detail, which supplants the colorful bandits themselves, the exotic locales and any insight into the compulsion that drove her and her husband. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A delightful dip into popular historical research as the author, a Washington, DC, lawyer and journalist, sets out to determine the real fate of legendary outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Did Butch and Sundance die in a shootout with the Bolivian army in a lonely Andean village in 1909? And if so, what happened to their bodies? As Meadows's husband and research companion, Dan Buck, puts it: ``We started out looking for the truth, but collecting the folk tales (was) just as much fun.'' They soon learned that sorting fact from fiction would require repeated trips to South America, including a few harrowing excursions into remote areas of Argentina, Chile, and the Bolivian Andes. Their research took them from the US National Archives to the library of the Pinkerton Detective Agency in New York City, and to newspaper offices, libraries, mining camps, and government agencies in several South American nations. While the paper trail yielded unexpected results, considering the number of popular researchers and hobbyists before them, it was more than matched by the oral history gleaned from descendants of the outlaws, soldiers, and local citizenry, some of whose parents knew Butch and Sundance during their ten years in the region. As if tracking down all of the aliases used by Butch and Sundance--and the occasional imposter--wasn't enough, Meadows and her husband also found evidence that one or both may have survived the famous shootout and used the incident to fake their own deaths. The trail finally leads to the site of the shootout, a cemetery near San Vicente, Bolivia, where they accompany forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow during his exhumation of a grave reputed to be the outlaws' final resting place. Fun and wonderfully suspenseful, both as a historical mystery and as a travelogue. (16 pages of photos and 16 maps, not seen) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Legend has it that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were killed in a gunfight with Bolivian soldiers in 1908. Author Meadows and her husband, Dan, spent good parts of the years 1986-93 researching the outlaws and searching for their graves. Both a history of the famous pair and a South American travelog, this book is packed with painstaking detail of tedious research conducted in various archives, courthouses, newspaper morgues, and the Library of Congress. It's sprinkled with stories of adventurous backroad travel through Argentine pampas, Chilean deserts, and Bolivian mountains in rental cars, buses, trains, and trucks. Meadows spins a decent mystery story, but the detail of the research overwhelms the excitement she creates, so much so that finally the reader doesn't care much how the mystery is resolved. Recommended for comprehensive Western Americana collections.
Thomas K. Fry, Univ. of Denver Lib.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Like all good legendary figures, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid left behind mysteries concerning their lives and deaths. Did they really commit all the crimes attributed to them? Did they fake their deaths in South America so they could return to the U.S. without worrying about warrants and bounty hunters? And who the heck was Etta Place, anyway? During an Argentine vacation in the mid-l980s, Meadows and her husband set out to run down the definitive Butch and Sundance story or something as close to it as possible. What they found and how it compares with the rumors and legends that have constituted the story over the years is what this highly entertaining book is about. Letters from the outlaws are reprinted, leads run down, and snippets of history recounted in an engaging jumble that becomes more confusing with each new bit of information. Meadows hits several "blank walls" but perseveres in trying to reconcile all the accrued information and misinformation with the few verifiable historical facts of the Butch and Sundance saga. In the end, she and we realize what it's like to chase ghosts and make sense out of myth. Mike Tribby