Historical treasure found hiding in plain sight has a captivating origin story
As they say, the plot thickens.
For years, visitors to a small county museum in Thermopolis, Wyoming, had the opportunity to see an old photograph of Harry Alonzo Longabaugh alongside his ladylove, Ethel “Etta” Place. From an article published by the Wyoming outlet, Cowboy State Daily:
The photo was taken in 1901 in New York by the DeYoung Photography Studio. Some historians have suggested it’s a wedding photo, as the two are rather handsomely dressed. Harry is holding onto a top hat, while Etta has a gold pocket watch pinned to the lapel of her dress, which Harry had just purchased for her at the Tiffany & Co. jewelry store.
Public domain image.
You may or may not recognize the photo, and his given name may or may not ring a bell, but you’ve certainly heard of him—he’s the Sundance Kid, a notorious outlaw of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch gang. As it turns out, the photo on display in Thermopolis was an original, just one of five “cabinet cards” purchased by Sundance and Etta, to send to family and friends as a farewell; only days or weeks after this photo was taken, Sundance and Etta, along with Butch, boarded a ship for Argentina to escape the high-profile pursuing Pinkertons.
If you know the story, you know that what really happened to Sundance is still up for debate; some claim he died in a shootout in Bolivia, some think he eventually made his way back to the United States and lived out his life under an alias.
It truly is a fascinating tale, adding to the charm and mystique of the legends of the Old West, but the mystery of Sundance’s last known whereabouts isn’t a new one. However, now that the photograph has been determined to be an original, sights turned to the chain of custody and how it came to be in the possession of the museum; but digging into this history begat an entirely new mystery, leaving us with more questions than before.
Minnie Brown died a “pauper” in 1940, and upon her death, her estate gifted several photographs to the museum, one of which was the Sundance original. Jackie Dorothy, a director of tourism in Thermopolis, has been studying the life of Brown, who is herself, at the heart of an unsolved mystery. Per the article:
Brown had married the town butcher, Mike Brown, in 1907, but in December 1908 she told authorities that she had shot and killed him.
According to the account she gave law enforcement, he’d been abusive and was choking her, so she shot him with one of his own guns.
Because that would have been self-defense, she was never charged with a crime. But investigators noted at the time that none of the details of her account matched the forensic evidence. The bullet couldn’t have been fired from where Brown said she was standing nor was the gun she claimed to have used the one that had killed her husband.
Then, it gets weirder. According to Dorothy’s research:
Brown also had in her possession watches from the infamous Wilcox train robbery. That was the crime that had finally forced Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid to flee the country in the first place [emphasis added].
And weirder still:
On the back of the photo in Brown’s handwriting are the words, ‘This gentleman is one of our real gentlemen who knew how to get the money and not cripple or kill … Taken in New York just before he sailed to never return.’
From Legends of America:
[T]he last known whereabouts of Etta Place were in 1907 when she was still living in San Francisco. Afterward, her location is unknown.
(In 1907, Etta would have been about thirty years old.)
Who was Minnie Brown, really?
Image: Public domain.