Butch Cassidy's Cabin

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had sailed from New York early in 1901 with Ethel Place, better known to history as Etta. By October they had registered cattle brands in Cholila under the names James "Santiago" Ryan and Harry A. Place, the latter presenting Ethel as his wife. They never held title to the land (it was untitled public land, and their petitions to buy it were never granted), but they built a working ranch on it all the same.

In a letter home to Utah in August 1902, Butch counted 300 cattle, 1,500 sheep, 28 saddle horses, two hired men, and "a good 4 room house," and wrote that he liked the place better every day. The cabin they built of horizontal logs, with a shingle roof and sash windows, was a distinctive sight in the valley; one visitor in 1904 remembered its walls papered with clippings from American magazines. Their nearest neighbor was a former Texas sheriff, and their closest friend in the valley a Welsh settler, Daniel Gibbon.

Chubut's new territorial governor, Julio Lezana, stayed with them in March 1904; local legend has him dancing with Ethel while Sundance played guitar, though historians disagree on whether it happened. The quiet ended in 1905. Suspected, probably wrongly, of a February bank robbery in Río Gallegos, and reportedly warned of an order for their arrest by a local policeman, they sold their buildings and livestock and in May slipped across Lake Nahuel Huapi into Chile.

The main cabin still stands at El Blanco, just off Ruta 71 about ten kilometers north of Cholila, partly restored in the mid-2000s and protected as provincial heritage since 1994. It sits on private land, behind a gate kept closed so the neighbors' livestock stay out. A short way down the road, La Legal, a general store from 1930 reopened as a small museum and bar, displays photographs and memorabilia from the outlaws' Patagonian years.

The visit takes under four hours, so it pairs easily with a drive through the rest of the Cholila valley.

The same valley holds two of the waters our lodges fish: Cholila Lake and Carrileufu River.