Accompanied by Bellot, they went to Casasola’s home and entered the patio. As they approached the bandits’ room in the dark, Butch appeared in the doorway and fired his Colt, wounding the leading soldier, Victor Torres, in the neck. Torres responded with a rifle shot and retreated to a nearby house, where he died within moments. The other soldier and Rios also fired at Butch, then scurried out with Bellot.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Wild West magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

After a quick trip to Barran’s house for more ammunition, the soldier and Rios positioned themselves at the entrance to the patio and began firing at the bandits. Captain Concha then appeared and asked Bellot to round up some men to watch the roof and the back of the adobe house, so that the bandits couldn’t make a hole and escape. As Bellot rushed to comply, he heard ‘three screams of desperation’ issue from the bandits’ room. By the time the San Vicenteños were posted, the firing had ceased and all was quiet.

The guards remained at their stations throughout the bitterly cold, windy night. Finally, at dawn on November 7, Captain Concha ordered Bonifacio Casasola to enter the room. When he reported that both Yankees were dead, the captain and the surviving soldier went inside. They found Butch stretched out on the floor, one bullet wound in his temple and another in his arm, and Sundance sitting on a bench behind the door, hugging a large ceramic jar, shot once in the forehead and several times in the arm. According to one report, the bullet removed from Sundance’s forehead had come from Butch’s Colt. From the positions of the bodies and the locations of the fatal wounds, the witnesses apparently concluded that Butch had put his partner out of his misery, then turned the gun on himself.

The outlaws were buried in the local cemetery that afternoon. The Aramayo payroll was found intact in their saddlebags. Once their possessions had been inventoried and placed in a leather trunk, Captain Concha absconded to Uyuni with the lot, leaving the Aramayo company to battle for months in court to recover its money and its mule.

Two weeks after the shootout, the bandits’ bodies were disinterred, and Peró identified them as the pair who had held him up. Tupiza officials conducted an inquest of the robbery and shootout, interviewing Peró, Bellot and several other area residents, but were unable to ascertain the dead outlaws’ names.

In July 1909, Frank D. Aller, Sundance’s benefactor in Antofagasta, wrote the American Legation in La Paz for ‘confirmation and a certificate of death’ for two Americans–one known as Frank Boyd or H.A. Brown and the other as Maxwell–who were reportedly ‘killed at San Vicente near Tupiza by natives and police and buried as ‘desconocidos’ [unknowns].’ Aller said that he needed a death certificate to settle Boyd’s estate in Chile. The legation forwarded the request to the Bolivian foreign ministry, stating that the Americans had ‘held up several of the Bolivian Railway Company’s pay trains, as also the stage coaches of several mines, and…were killed in a fight with soldiers that were detached to capture them as outlaws.’

In late 1910, after considerable procrastination, the Bolivian government finally responded with a summary of the Tupiza inquest report and ‘death certificates for the two men, whose names [were] unknown.’

In May 1913, a Missouri carpenter named Francis M. Lowe was arrested in La Paz on suspicion of being George Parker (Butch’s real name, according to the Pinkertons’ wanted posters). With the aid of the American Legation, Lowe established that his was a case of mistaken identity. In filing a report on the matter, an official at the legation advised U.S. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan that ‘certain Englishmen and others here assert that a man known as George Parker [whom the La Paz police were seeking] had been killed in one of the provinces two or three years ago while resisting’ arrest.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to