When Butch Cassidy and his gang robbed the Castle Gate, Carbon County, mine office in 1897, they made off with $7,700.
This week, a paper photo of Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and the rest of the "Wild Bunch" sold for $85,000, while a disputed tintype of Butch went for $14,100.The outlaws must have been rolling in their graves, wherever they are. Like everything else about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, even the location of their final resting place is in dispute.
The latest chapter in the saga unfolded this week in New York City. On Monday, the Swann Galleries auction house offered a famous view of Butch, Sundance and other members of their gang, posing as a gag with new bowler hats.
The view was taken as a joke, but it led to the bandits' downfall. When sleuths of the Pinkerton Detective Agency got hold of the photo, they copied it and sent pictures of them to law officers throughout the West.
Too well-known in the United States, Butch (born in Utah as Robert LeRoy Parker) and Sundance (actually named Harry Lonabaugh) left the country. For a time they tried ranching in Argentina and worked for a mine, but eventually their bandit leanings reasserted themselves, and they went back to robbing.
After lifting a mine payroll in southern Bolivia in 1908, Butch and Sundance got into a gun battle with a few soldiers. They found themselves pinned down in a hotel room.
According to researcher Daniel Buck and his wife, Anne Meadows, Butch shot the badly wounded Sundance and then turned his pistol on himself. Others claim they escaped and returned to the United States with new aliases.
On Monday, the Swann print sold for $85,000, including the buyer's premium. Before the auction, the photo's estimated value was $25,000 to $45,000.
"It was a lot higher (than the estimate), but we had a lot of interest," said Daile Kaplan, vice president and director for photographs at Swann Galleries. "Many different bidders . . . were going after the lot, so it made for a very exciting auction."
Other photos relating to the Wild Bunch also sold nicely, she said. A small Wyoming State Penitentiary mug shot of Cassidy went for $2,530. A group of photographs of women associated with the gang went for $4,830.
A photograph of an outlaw who wasn't from Utah, the infamous Jesse James, fetched $10,350.
"The fact is, the Western pictures not only appeal to collectors of Western Americana, but we saw quite a number of fine-art photograph collectors going after those lots as well," Kaplan said.
Nobody doubted the authenticity of the Swann photos, which were collected by writer James D. Horan. The Cassidy photos had been known since the bandit's lifetime.
Another New York auction house, Christie's East, offered a tintype it said was of Butch Cassidy. The tintype, which turned up recently, shows a man in cowboy garb.
However, the tintype's authenticity was disputed. Both Buck and Meadows, probably the most eminent Cassidy researchers, doubted it really does show Butch.
Buck relayed their doubts to Christie's before the sale, but the auction house insisted that the tintype was authenticated by an expert.
On Tuesday, the tintype view sold for $14,100, including buyer's premium.
"I'm sure there's a lot of chucklehead Internet millionaires out there that would buy something like this . . . with little substantiation," Buck said after the sale.