Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Who is that woman?

Etta Place walked into a New York City photo studio in 1901 -- and unknowingly walked into history. There she stands, wearing her fine clothes and gold watch, her dark hair piled elegantly atop her head and her arm brushing the arm of a dapper gent known as the Sundance Kid. The portrait of Etta with her outlaw boyfriend is one of the few scraps of physical evidence that this woman existed. Before and after she turned up in the DeYoung Photo Studio on Broadway, Etta Place -- if that is even her real name -- lived a life now shrouded in mystery. "As much as (historians) have looked for Etta, nobody has ever really pinned her down," says Leo Lyman, a retired historian in Leeds, Utah, who has researched the story of the woman who hung out with Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch in Utah, the West and South America. Exactly where this woman was born, what she did before she rode with the Wild Bunch, and what happened to her after Butch and Sundance reportedly died in a 1908 shootout in Bolivia are all unknown...read more

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