Hold the Enlightenment (14 page)

El Señor Raúl Cea, seventy-seven, is generally considered the
historiador
, the keeper of the legend. He owns a small cattle ranch set
on a hillside above the Río Blanco, and I drove to visit him with an Argentine fishing buddy of mine named Eduardo, who directed me through fenced fields of fine, fat cows. Beyond the valley was the Cerro Tres Picos, an Andean wall rising stark against a cloudless sky, and the three pinnacles that gave it its name. Glaciers on the saddles between the peaks glittered in the sun.

“Raúl will talk about Boots for hours,” Eduardo told me. “His wife doesn’t like it. She believes he is obsessed. We should only stay for one hour, no more.”

We arrived at the modest old ranch house to find Raúl Cea wrestling with a used freezer that was sitting on the tailgate of a battered Ford pickup. He was a big man, but it was my opinion that anyone who has attained seventy-seven years shouldn’t be carrying around freezers single-handedly.

Eduardo and I shouldered the resolute Mr. Cea out of the way and lugged the bulky appliance into the house. We gathered around the kitchen table, and la Señora Cea graciously offered the thick green tea called mate and sat with us for a moment until it became clear that we were going to talk about the dreaded Boots. She excused herself and left the room, closing the door perhaps a bit more firmly than was absolutely necessary.

Mr. Cea told us that he was not a historian by trade, but a retired civil servant. He had been a builder, Eduardo said, and it was he who erected the stately municipal office building in Cholila. He’d also been a small-time rancher all his life—“a gaucho, a cowboy like Butch Cassidy”—and his father had known the North American outlaws well.

Butch and Sundance arrived in Cholila in the summer of 1901, Mr. Cea said. Butch called himself Santiago Ryan. Harry Longabaugh—the Sundance Kid—brought along his girlfriend, Etta Place. They claimed to be man and wife, and Sundance went by the name Enrique Place. The newcomers were granted land to develop under an Argentine law, similar to the U.S. Homestead Act, that had been enacted on October 16, 1884. (Mr. Cea, like any historian, amateur or professional, was a font of such dates.) According to the law, each head of a household was granted 2,500 hectares, or about 6,250 acres. The Ryan ranch covered 15,000 acres
in all—12,500 belonging to Butch and Sundance, and 2,500 to Etta, the first woman in Argentina to be granted land under the act. This might have had something to do with the fact that Etta wore paired six-guns and was able to shoot bottles off fence posts while riding on horseback at full gallop.

In Cholila, the North Americans quickly earned the respect of the local people. They rode well, knew cattle, and Ryan and Mrs. Place spoke some Spanish. In the United States, Mr. Cea informed me, there is much controversy about Ryan. Some say he was a good man. Some say he was bad.

“When he came here,” Mr. Cea said, “he was a good man.”

More than ten years ago, I found myself driving through southern Argentina and stopped for a time in Río Gallegos, the last sizable outpost on the mainland before you reach the car ferry to Tierra del Fuego. It was a dreary day in late September, and the snow that lay around the small town plaza was covered with a wind-driven shroud of soot and dirt, all of it dissolving under gray, freezing rain.

My tourist map was full of interesting facts. Along this wave-battered coast of the southern Atlantic, penguins frolic on the rocks. And on February 16, 1905, the local bank was robbed by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

A guy came from Utah to the end of the Earth to rob the bank, here? Not so very far from Antarctica? I had a hard time assimilating the idea of Wild West bank robbers in close proximity to penguins.

It took me more than a decade to get back to Argentina. I brought along a 1994 book titled
Digging Up Butch and Sundance
, by Anne Meadows. With her husband, Dan Buck, Meadows traveled to South America half a dozen times to research the life and times of Boots. “Our obsession has nearly bankrupted us,” she wrote. The book is a fascinating labyrinth of conflicting stories that ends in a high mountain bowl in Bolivia where Sundance is almost certainly buried. Butch is probably there as well, but then again, there’s a slight possibility that he survived and returned to the United States. The speculative historical record reads like a catalog of Elvis sightings.

By the time I turned off the paved highway and onto the gravel road to Cholila, thirty-five miles away, I was in the labyrinth myself. There were forests and rivers and lakes. The Andes looked a lot like the mountains outside my hometown in Montana, and I had a sudden apprehension of psychic danger. It was possible I too could become lost in a maze of stories; I could bankrupt myself searching for an unattainable veracity. Two days, I thought, no more—much in the way the future crack addict believes he will take a single hit on the pipe and quit.

“Ryan was born Robert Leroy Parker, in Beaver, Utah, on April 13, 1866,” Mr. Cea continued. Despite my protests, he thought it was important that I revisit certain aspects of American history. The Civil War, he said, the war of brother against brother, had just ended. Some 816,000 men were dead, the most to die in any American war. In the West, banks and large cattle companies were buying up land from the widows of veterans. Justice was slow. Gangs of men, hardened fighters like Jesse James, robbed the hated banks and became folk heroes. All this, Mr. Cea said, happened in the first decade of Bob Parker’s life, a time when the soul is formed. The boy saw family ranchers bilked of their land by banks, railroads, and multinational cattle companies. If Butch rustled cattle, in Mr. Cea’s rendition of history, it was a form of social protest.

Butch—who worked for a time as a butcher, hence the nickname—became a ranch foreman, a natural leader who knew how to command tough men. He watched his employers, the cattle barons, stealing stock and land from poor ranchers, who had no recourse. He burned, in Mr. Cea’s opinion, with a hatred of injustice, which he identified with the big and bullying corporate interests of the time.

The bad winter of 1888–1889 broke the system. Hundreds of thousands of cattle died on the range. Bosses abandoned the land and returned to their homes in Great Britain or the East. Unemployed cowboys roamed the lawless land. Butch continued robbing banks and railroads, and became famous. In 1899 he hooked up with the Sundance Kid.

Pursued by the Pinkerton Detective Agency—“actually the forerunner of your FBI,” Mr. Cea said—the partners decided to flee to
South America. Modern technology, especially the telegraph, had effectively put them out of the train-robbing business.

“Why South America?” I asked.

“Europe was too socially stratified,” Mr. Cea replied. “But many people in the American West knew of Patagonia.” The Welsh, fleeing dead-end lives in the coal mines, had already settled in Chubut Province. Representatives of these Welsh immigrants recruited English-speaking colonists all across North America. Central Patagonia was attractive because the land looked a great deal like the American West. But there were few banks, the frontier was still open, and the cattle business was still a matter of family ranches. It was a place where a man could make an honest living raising beef.

We had been talking for an hour. Mrs. Cea came into the kitchen, passed through smiling pleasantly, and closed the door to the next room with a great deal of authority. Mr. Cea smiled after her.

The events that followed had a horrible irony, Mr. Cea continued. “When Ryan”—Butch—“arrived in Argentina, he intended to live peacefully, but instead became a catalyst for the social and political problems of the day in this country.”

Behind the closed door to the living room, Mrs. Cea was rearranging furniture or perhaps using the floor as a trampoline. Raúl Cea began to speak more rapidly.

Ryan was granted land primarily because Argentina needed to develop the Cholila valley and frustrate Chilean claims on the land. After a plebiscite—“held on April 30, 1902,” and presided over by Queen Victoria of England—the land was declared part of Argentina. Chileans, however, owned most of the property in the valley and apparently planned to pursue their claims by buying up all the ranches they could. The Argentine authorities gave the Ryan party homesteads—the one sizable chunk of land in the valley not yet under Chilean control—primarily because they weren’t Chileans.

There are documents, Mr. Cea said, that proved they were good ranchers. As in the United States, a homesteader had to “prove up” the land, and officials were dispatched to monitor his progress.

“Remember this date,” Mr. Cea said. “February fifteenth, 1905.” On that day, an official named Lázaro Molinas visited Ryan’s Cholila
ranch under the provisions of the homestead law. He spoke with Ryan and the Places, and certified that they had nine hundred mother cows and fifty horses. Their books were in order. The report that Molinas filed, Mr. Cea said, could be found in the town records of Rawson, the provincial capital.

A Chilean-backed company called Cocham offered to buy the ranch from Ryan, but he refused. According to Mr. Cea, Chilean agents framed Ryan for the Río Gallegos robbery. “Recall the document of Señor Molinas,” Mr. Cea said.

Mrs. Cea marched through the kitchen, slamming both doors.

“We should leave now,” Eduardo said.

“Yes, of course,” I said, making no effort to move.

Mr. Cea began speaking much faster. “Molinas talked with Ryan on February fifteenth, 1905. The bank was robbed the very next day. It is over a thousand kilometers from Cholila. Who can ride a horse one thousand kilometers in less than twenty-four hours? It is not possible!”

Sometime later, he said, a picture of Butch, Sundance, and Etta appeared on the front page of a Buenos Aires newspaper. They were identified as the persons responsible for the Río Gallegos robbery. The picture, Mr. Cea believes, was planted by Chileans. When Ryan saw the paper, he sold out to Cocham and required that they pay him in Chile. “He left on the ninth of May, 1905.”

“So Butch and Sundance couldn’t have killed Llwyd Ap Iwan in 1909!” I cried, as Eduardo pulled on my arm.

“No, Argentine police identified the assailants as two other North Americans, Robert Evans and William Wilson. And they were hunted down and killed near the border of Chile after the murder.”

“Do you think Butch and Sundance died in Bolivia?” I asked.

“Good-bye, adios,” Mrs. Cea said, as Eduardo dragged me out the door.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Cea said.

“Thank you for your visit,” Mrs. Cea said. She was quite gracious, considering.

“Santiago Ryan,” Mr. Cea said as he followed us outside, “is not a
man for North America or for Argentina. He is a man for the world. He is a social enigma, a mystery of a soul haunted by injustice.”

“And I saw his house.”

“Oh, no,” Mr. Cea said. “That was the house of Enrique and Etta. Ryan’s house was in front of that. It was torn down in 1943. The logs were used for another building.”

“Which one?” I asked, in the manner of the seriously obsessed.

“Good-bye, now,” Mrs. Cea said, a little less graciously, and at that point we really did have to go.

I
t was like trying to drink a beer on the subway at rush hour. Jostled from all sides, I stood hard against the flimsy railing of a makeshift stall trying to hold my place against various swirling currents of humanity.

Several of the drunks I’d been cultivating peeled out of the crowd to greet me.

“You are my friend,” said Maurice, who, at 9
A.M.
, was already in the condition I aspired to achieve. “Buy me a beer.”

It was his ritual greeting.

“No way in hell,” I said, which was my ritual reply.

It was my tenth excruciating day aboard the
Fleuve Congo
, a conglomeration of eight mostly flatbed barges cabled to a great throbbing riverboat motoring down the Congo River. During my time on deck, I had discovered that only drunkards were intelligent enough to fully comprehend my one-hundred-word French vocabulary.

Maurice, a Congolese Bantu, like most of the other passengers, was a thin, gangly man with a goofy smile. He didn’t really want a beer. He drank palm wine, which he carried with him in a greasy yellow jug that looked like it had once contained motor oil.

The temperature was rising rapidly, the beer was warm, and I was wearing shorts. My skin was a sickly pale white. I felt like a couple of dozen gallons of raw milk. Maurice pointed out all the slowly healing insect bites, the welts, the scabs on my legs.

He wanted to know what had happened to me, and I told him, for the fourth or fifth time, that I had just completed a long walk through a forest that was uninhabited.

“What were the people like?” Maurice asked.

“There weren’t any people. It was uninhabited.”

It was like Eden, this forest in the north of the Republic of the Congo, the former French Congo. The animals there hadn’t been hunted, and they approached our party boldly: elephants and chimps and gorillas and antelope. I had been happy there. But here? On the barge? I was not happy.

“I don’t like crowds, Maurice.”

I told him that my entire life to date had been an exercise in avoiding crowds. I didn’t know how many more days I could bear aboard this Congo River barge, along with three thousand other human beings, all of us compressed into a space about the size of a football field. For me the barge was … it was … what was the word I was looking for?

“Buy me a beer,” said Maurice.

“No way in …”
L’enfer!
That was the word. This was my own personal hell.

I drained the beer and gave the bottle back to the man who’d sold it to me.

“Maurice,” I said, “do you know God?”

“Yes.”

“Have you seen him this morning?”

“No.”

“Damn.” I really needed to talk to God.

I was traveling with Michael Fay, a wildlife biologist, and Cynthia Moses, a filmmaker. The walk through Eden was Michael’s project. His job was to inventory the flora and fauna of the forest and report back to the Congolese government with a recommendation about whether the area should be preserved as a national forest. (He thought it should.)