Harry Alonzo Longabaugh (The Sundance Kid)
Named for a Wyoming jail, not a dance — eighteen months in the Sundance lockup for horse theft gave him the only name history remembers.
1867–1908 · Born in Mont Clare, Pennsylvania · Also known as The Sundance Kid
The Story
Harry Longabaugh earned his famous alias the hard way: an eighteen-month stretch in the jail at Sundance, Wyoming, for stealing a horse, gun, and saddle as a teenager. He emerged as one of the most capable gunmen of the Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy's outfit, and became Cassidy's closest partner and most trusted lieutenant through a run of train and bank robberies across Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado in the 1890s. His companion Etta Place, whose true identity has never been definitively established by historians, traveled with him through the gang's final years and into South American exile. Like Cassidy, Longabaugh's confirmed history ends in a 1908 shootout with Bolivian authorities in San Vicente, and like Cassidy, the absence of verified remains has left the ending permanently unsettled in popular imagination.
Frontier Timeline
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Killed in Bolivia
The Wild Bunch leaders reportedly die in a shootout with Bolivian cavalry, though the ending remains disputed.
Related Figures
Robert LeRoy Parker (Butch Cassidy)