Etta Place - Life With The Sundance Kid

Life With The Sundance Kid

According to a Pinkerton Detective Agency memorandum dated July 29, 1902, she was "said.....to be from Texas", and in another Pinkerton document dated 1906, she is described as being "27 to 28 years old", placing her birth around 1878. This is confirmed by a hospital staff record from Denver, where she received treatment in May 1902, which reports her age as "23 or 24," (therefore again, circa 1878), although both records may transpire to be from the same original source, the hospital staff.

Even her real name is a mystery; Place was the maiden surname of Longabaugh's mother (Annie Place) and she is recorded in various sources as Mrs. Harry Longabaugh or Mrs. Harry A. Place. The one instance where she is known to have signed her name, she recorded it as "Mrs. Ethel Place". The Pinkertons called her "Ethel", "Ethal", "Eva" and "Rita" before finally settling on "Etta" for their wanted posters. Her name may have become "Etta" after she moved to South America, where Spanish speakers could not pronounce "Ethel".

In February 1901, Etta Place accompanied Longabaugh, whom she may or may not have married, to New York City, where at Tiffany's jewelers they purchased a lapel watch and stickpin and where, at a studio in Union Square on Broadway, she posed with him for the now famous DeYoung portrait, one of only two known images of her. She then, on February 20, sailed with him and Parker (who was now posing as one James Ryan, her fictional brother), aboard the British ship Herminius for Buenos Aires in Argentina.

There she settled with the two outlaws on a ranch which they purchased near Cholila in Chubut Province of west-central Argentina. It comprised a four-room log cabin on the east bank of the Blanco River. Under a new law of 1884, they were granted 15,000 acres (61 km²) of adjacent land to develop, 2,500 of which belonged to Place herself, who has the distinction of being the first woman in Argentina to acquire land under the new act, as land ownership had hitherto been almost the exclusive preserve of men.

However, on March 3, 1902, she and Longabaugh sailed on the SS Soldier Prince from Buenos Aires to New York City, probably to visit family and friends in the USA. On April 2, they registered at a Mrs. Thompson's rooming house in New York City. They toured Coney Island and visited his family (originally from Mont Clare, Pennsylvania, but by then living in Atlantic City, New Jersey). They also possibly traveled to a Dr. Pierce's Invalid Hotel in Buffalo, New York, for (unspecified) treatment. They then traveled west, where again they sought medical treatment, this time in Denver, Colorado. They returned to Buenos Aires from New York on July 10, 1902, aboard the steamer Honorius, posing as stewards. On August 9, she was with Longabaugh at the Hotel Europa in Buenos Aires, and on the 15th she sailed with him aboard the steamer SS Chubut to return to their ranch.

In the summer of 1904, she made another visit with Longabaugh to the USA, where the Pinkerton Detective Agency traced them to Fort Worth, Texas, and to the St. Louis World Fair, but failed to arrest them before they again returned to Argentina. In early 1905, the trio sold the Cholila ranch, as once again the law was beginning to catch up with them. The Pinkerton Agency had known their precise address for some months, but the rainy season prevented their assigned agent, Frank Dimaio, from traveling there and making an arrest. Governor Julio Lezana issued an arrest warrant, but before it could be executed, Sheriff Edward Humphreys, a Welsh Argentine who was friendly with Parker and enamored of Place, tipped them off. The trio fled north to San Carlos de Bariloche, where they embarked on the steamer Condor across Lake Nahuel Huapi and into Chile.

By the end of that year, however, they were again back in Argentina; on December 19, Place took part, along with Longabaugh, Parker and an unknown male, in the robbery of the Banco de la Nacion in Villa Mercedes, 400 miles west of Buenos Aires. Pursued by armed lawmen, they crossed the Pampas and the Andes and again into the safety of Chile.

Place had long been tired of life on the run and deeply lamented the loss of their ranch. At her request, therefore, on June 30, 1906, Longabaugh accompanied her from Valparaiso, Chile, to San Francisco, California, USA, where she apparently remained while he once again returned to South America. No evidence reports Longabaugh and Place saw one another at all between 1906 and his alleged death in 1908.