The Sundance Kid: Harry Longabaugh's Real Road from Wyoming to Bolivia

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Harry Alonzo Longabaugh was born in Pennsylvania in 1867, the youngest of five children, and went west at 15 by covered wagon to help settle a cousin's homestead in Cortez, Colorado. He learned to wrangle and breed horses and seemed headed for a ranching career. Then came the winter of 1886 to 1887, the freeze that killed millions of cattle and wrecked the open range industry. Laid off by the N Bar N Ranch in Montana, he stole a horse, a saddle, and a gun near Sundance, Wyoming in 1887, was caught in Miles City, and served 18 months. The town gave him his name.

This episode rebuilds his life in order and without the movie gloss. He tried honest work in Canada before turning to rustling, then to trains and banks with Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch. With bounties reaching $30,000 and the Pinkertons closing in, he sailed for Buenos Aires in February 1901 with Cassidy and Etta Place and bought a 15,000 acre ranch near Cholila. The quiet did not last. The trail ends at a boarding house in San Vicente, Bolivia in November 1908, and in a grave nobody has been able to confirm.

• After jail he worked at the Bar U Ranch in 1891 and became joint owner of a Calgary saloon, until a dispute with his partner neared a gunfight and he fled back to Montana.
• The gang's real killer was Harvey Logan, known as Kid Curry, who murdered at least five lawmen. Longabaugh is documented only as wounding two men in a shootout.
• A Welsh Argentine sheriff, Edward Humphreys, warned the group that Pinkerton agent Frank Dimaio had found them, and by May 1, 1905 they had sold the ranch and fled to Chile.
• A Chilean newspaper digitized in 2022 showed that Longabaugh, using the alias Frank Boyd, killed a police officer in Antofagasta and got out on bond.
• The pair were betrayed by a mule carrying the mining company's brand. DNA tests after a 1991 dig in San Vicente and a 2008 exhumation in Utah matched neither man's relatives.