52 ChaPter^1
With the law on their trail and capture likely, Etta vanished. The other
two were ultimately trailed to Bolivia, where they were discovered hiding in
an adobe house. When the captain of the local military approached the home
with his gun drawn, Butch shot him dead. This was the first and only person
Cassidy ever killed. Local military and armed civilians surrounded the house
and sprayed it with bullets. No one went inside the home until the following
day. When they did, they found Cassidy and the Sundance Kid dead. The
Kid’s body sat against a wall, with a bullet in the head. Butch was on the
floor in front of Sundance, a bullet in his head. The duo had died from a
murder-suicide, where Butch killed his partner and then put a bullet in his
own temple.
In a rather lackluster ending, the famous bandits were buried in unmarked
Bolivian graves. However, their deaths represented something larger, the end
of the Wild West and the triumph of Capitalism; a Washington Post article
simply said that the Wild Bunch had “disappeared with the march of civiliza-
tion.” Even if the Wild Bunch ended in failure and death and Capitalism
triumphed, the legacy of these famous outlaws and the ideas they represented
remained long after their deaths. In 1969, Paul Newman and Robert Redford
starred in an Oscar-winning movie about Butch and Sundance. More recent-
ly, over a century after they rode, the popular band My Morning Jacket sang,
"Butch Cassidy, I could've been your friend/And rode with you and the
Sundance Kid/We'd laugh awhile and we'd smile a bit/'Cause crimes like
ours aren't counterfeit."Fury on the Farms
At the same time that workers held strikes and western bandits stole from the
rich, farmers continued to lose their land and independence and had to go to
work for others as part of a rural proletariat. As L.L. Polk from Kansas
described this division in 1890, “you will see arrayed on one side the great
magnates of the country, the Wall Street brokers, and plutocratic power,” said
Polk, “and on the other you will see the people.” The traditional system of
agriculture, the family farm–where family members grew crops and raised ani-
mals for themselves for subsistence–gave way to commercial farming–where
larger, often corporate, farmers grew crops to sell to the market. This led to
the specialization of crops since some crops such as cotton, wheat, and tobac-