From Publishers Weekly
After Meadows and her husband learned that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had ranched for several years in their beloved vacation stomping grounds of northern Patagonia, the couple became obsessed with pinning down the last days and deaths of the legendary 19th-century outlaws. For seven years they chased rumors in Bolivia, Argentina and Chile, twice mortgaging their house in order to hunt down facts that had eluded police, Pinkerton detectives and historians. Starting in Patagonia, the two amateur detectives ferreted out thousands of letters, documents and newspapers; located South American neighbors and U.S. relatives of the bandits; visited supposed hideouts; exhumed coffins said to contain their remains; and had bones analyzed for DNA clues. Nothing satisfied Meadows until she and her husband chose to believe an account, once dismissed by Pinkertons as false, that had been told by a hostage taken by the outlaws the night before they were killed by Bolivian soldiers. The account established the year (1908), place (San Vincente) and manner of Cassidy and the Kid's deaths. Unfortunately, the drama of this obsessive pursuit is buried under Meadows's overwhelming detail, which supplants the colorful bandits themselves, the exotic locales and any insight into the compulsion that drove her and her husband. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Legend has it that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were killed in a gunfight with Bolivian soldiers in 1908. Author Meadows and her husband, Dan, spent good parts of the years 1986-93 researching the outlaws and searching for their graves. Both a history of the famous pair and a South American travelog, this book is packed with painstaking detail of tedious research conducted in various archives, courthouses, newspaper morgues, and the Library of Congress. It's sprinkled with stories of adventurous backroad travel through Argentine pampas, Chilean deserts, and Bolivian mountains in rental cars, buses, trains, and trucks. Meadows spins a decent mystery story, but the detail of the research overwhelms the excitement she creates, so much so that finally the reader doesn't care much how the mystery is resolved. Recommended for comprehensive Western Americana collections.
Thomas K. Fry, Univ. of Denver Lib.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
