Who was Etta Place

Etta Place, the mistress of both Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, is often described as the most beautiful and wildest of all women in the Old West. More has been written about her and less is known about her than any other of the many female outlaws of her period. She is both the Wild West’s most legendary woman and its most mysterious individual.

Few facts are known about Etta Place and much of what has been written about her is romanticized and probably highly exaggerated and fabricated. Thanks to dime novelists, pulp fiction writers and the motion picture industry, most of the people who lived in the Old West are depicted as larger than life outlaw heroes of the same mold as England’s Robin Hood. Very few, if any, lived up to this image. Interestingly, most admirers of the period – and this includes Europeans and Asians as well as Americans – refuse to believe the men and woman who lived in the West between 1865 and 1910 were normal human beings with the same positive and negative behavioral traits most people possess today. They want their Western heroes bigger than life. They want them romanticized. They love it when the media makes movies and legends out of them.

And, that’s where Etta Place finds her place in American history.

Etta Place became a figure of legendary proportion for three reasons: 1) She was the companion of Butch and Sundance, 2) Hollywood made her famous by making a major motion picture about her and her two companions, 1969’s "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid", in which Katherine Ross played her character, and 3) She was a beautiful woman.

Facts regarding Etta are few. Eyewitnesses maintain she was the second woman to ride into the Butch and Sundance hideaway in southern Utah known as the Robber’s Roost in the winter of 1896-97. She was allegedly 20 years old at the time. She was strikingly beautiful, an excellent horsewoman and an outstanding rifle shot. She was became Harry Longbaugh’s (the Sundance Kid’s) primary love interest, and went to South America with Sundance and Butch, returning to the U.S. three times during her tenure in Argentina and Bolivia.

Beyond that, no one seems to know for sure anything else about Etta Place. When and where she was born, where she grew up, what she did for a living, how many times if any, she married, how many children, if any, she might have had, when she left Sundance, where she lived following her return to the U.S. and when she died all remain a mystery.

Compounding the mystique of Etta Place is the fact five women are known to have used the name Etta Place as aliases. Three of the women who used the false Etta Place name journeyed to South America. Unknown to most movie buffs whose only knowledge of Butch, Sundance and Etta is based on Hollywood’s version of the trio, is the fact that several members of the Wild Bunch, as Cassidy’s gang was known, fled to South America during the first decade of the 20th Century. Some historians place the number at more than one dozen. Most took women with them. Many died at the hands of South American authorities.

Etta was reportedly a "refined," highly educated woman of Eastern birth and rearing. She was also alleged to have been a prostitute with roots in Texas. Others maintain she was born and reared in Denver, Colorado. Some maintain she was a married schoolteacher with music as her primary discipline.

Many believe Etta was married with two children when she deserted her family to seek a life of adventure with Longbough. Others state she was the Sundance Kid’s cousin (his mother’s maiden name was Place) an that she knew him as a child and teenager. Another theory has Etta and Butch as cousins.

Some think Etta was initially Butch Cassidy’s mistress before falling in love with Sundance. Some think the many references to "the family of three" in letters written by Butch and Etta refer to the trio as a ménage a’trois, with Etta sharing herself equally with the two men.

Was her name really Etta Place? She signed it Ethel on several occasions. Some maintain her real last name was Thayne, while others believe it was Ingerfield.

Did she have two children from a marriage prior to meeting Butch and Sundance? Maybe yes and maybe no. Some historians believe she and Butch had a daughter in 1903. Most think not.

Did she die along side Butch and Sundance in the Bolivian shootout in 1908? Soldiers killed two males and one female in a village saloon that year, but "experts" differ as to what happened and to whom:

There is still considerable debate over the end of her relationship with Sundance. Etta appears to have disappeared after Sundance took her back to Denver on her third trip back to the U.S. in 1908. Did she remain in the Mile High City or did she finish her business there and return to South America? No one knows for sure. Some think she returned to New York, while others believe she began a new life in Texas.

A Pinkerton Detective Agency report has Etta being killed in a shootout with a man named Mateo Gebhart in Chubut, Argentina, in March 1922. Another report has her committing suicide in 1924, while yet another states she died a natural death in 1966.

Many historians believe Etta had a daughter named Bettie after her return to the United States. In late 1971, while laying on her deathbed, Bettie allegedly whispered to her husband, "Mother may still be living. She remarried and may have had other children." Other historians believe the stories told by the man tagged as the Cimmeron Kid, that he was the son of Etta and Sundance.

The following chronology of dates, occurrences, and details, are held by most historians to be fact:

1899 - 1900: Ethel is living in Texas and being courted by Harry A. Longabaugh, alias the Sundance Kid, aka Harry A. Place. Some stories claim Etta was a housekeeper or possibly a prostitute in Fannie Porter's sporting house during this time.

December 1900: Soon after Sundance parties in Fort Worth, Texas, and poses for the famous "Fort Worth Five Photograph". He reunites with Ethel. According to his family, they marry, possibly in Texas. Because he is using the alias Harry A. Place, she becomes Mrs. Ethel Place. Later, in South America, the pronunciation of her name becomes Etta because of the inflections of the Spanish language. Thus she becomes known as ‘Etta Place’.

January 1901: Ethel and Sundance visit his family in Mont Clare, Pennsylvania.

February 1, 1901: With Sundance, Ethel signs Mrs. Taylor’s New York City boarding house register as Mr. And Mrs. Harry A. Place. While visiting Union Square in New York City, they visit Tiffany’s Jewelers and have their photograph taken together at De Young’s Photography Studio.

February 20, 1901: With Sundance, Ethel boards the British Ship Herminius as Mr. And Mrs. Harry A. Place, and they sail for Buenos Aires, Argentina. From there they travel to Cholila and begin a lawful, peaceful existence on their new ranch along with Butch Cassidy, Sundance’s partner in crime.

March 3, 1902: Ethel and Sundance sail on the ship S. S. Soldier Prince from Buenos Aires to New York City for a visit to the States. The Pinkertons later find evidence of their visit and declare that she is homesick and visiting her family.

April 2, 1902: Ethel and Sundance register at Mrs. Thompson’s rooming house in New York City. Together they tour Coney Island, visit his family in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and possibly travel to Dr. Pierce’s Invalid’s Hotel in Buffalo, New York, for unspecified treatment.

July 10, 1902: Ethel and Sundance sail aboard the Steamer Honorius from New York to Buenos Aires, posing as stewards.

August 9, 1902: Ethel registers with Sundance at the Hotel Europa in Buenos Aires. On August 15, 1902, they travel aboard the steamer S. S. Chubut and return to their ranch in Cholila, Argentina.

Summer 1904: Together with Sundance, Ethel again returns to the States for a visit to her family. The Pinkertons track them in Fort Worth, Texas, and at the St. Louis World’s Fair, but do not discover them before they return to Argentina.

May 1, 1905: According to files recently discovered in South America, Ethel, Sundance, and Butch decide to sell the Cholila Ranch and leave to avoid the law. On June 30, 1905, Sundance writes a letter to a friend stating that they are leaving from Valparaiso, Chile, for San Francisco.

1907: According to files recently discovered in South America, Ethel is living in San Francisco, where Sundance took her two years previously.

July 31, 1909: Ethel possibly tries to obtain Sundance’s death certificate after the San Vicente shootout in order to settle his estate. There is no further evidence or activity that can be traced to the existence of Ethel Place; she disappears from all records.

After word of their deaths reached the United States, a lovely woman of means who called herself Eunice Gray appeared in Fort Worth, Texas and began operating the Waco Hotel at 110 E. 15th St. No one ever said anything to her on the subject, but many Fort Worthians suspected Eunice Gray of being Etta Place.

Gray operated the hotel for 40 years and died in 1962 in a fire that destroyed her hotel. Documents salvaged from the fire indicated her age as 77. Her estate was valued at $90,000.