The Cholila Valley and Butch Cassidy

After leaving the Los Alerces National Park, The Wandelgek entered the beautiful Cholila valley. It nowadays looks like a friendly green valley full of flowers, surrounded by white capped mountains.

It was in this valley that Robert LeRoy Parker (April 13, 1866 – November 7, 1908), better known as Butch Cassidy, an American train and bank robber and the leader of a gang of criminal outlaws known as the “Wild Bunch” in the Old West and Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, better known as The Sundance kid, another “Wild Bunch” gang member, fled to via New York City, after feeling continuous pressure from the numerous law enforcement agencies pursuing them and seeing their gang falling apart. They departed from there to Buenos Aires, Argentina aboard the British steamer Herminius on February 20, 1901, along with Longabaugh’s companion Etta Place. Cassidy posed as James Ryan, Place’s fictitious brother.

 

They settled in a four-room log cabin on a 15,000-acre (61 km²) ranch that they purchased on the east bank of the Rio Blanco near Cholila, just east of the Andes in the Chubut. The scènes below from the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid, are representing their stay at the Cholila valley farm house.

Two English-speaking bandits held up the Banco de Tarapacá y Argentino in Río Gallegos on February 14, 1905, 700 miles (1,100 km) south of Cholila near the Strait of Magellan, and the pair vanished north across the Patagonian grasslands. Cassidy and Longabaugh sold the Cholila ranch on May 1, fearing that law enforcement had located them. The Pinkerton Agency had known their location for some time, but the snow and the hard winter of Patagonia had prevented their agent Frank Dimaio from making an arrest. Governor Julio Lezana issued an arrest warrant, but Sheriff Edward Humphreys, a Welsh-Argentine who was friendly with Cassidy and enamored of Place, tipped them off. The trio then fled north to San Carlos de Bariloche, where they embarked on the steamer Condor across Nahuel Huapí Lake and into Chile; they returned to Argentina by the end of the year.

Cassidy, Longabaugh, Place, and an unknown male associate robbed the Banco de la Nación Argentina  branch in Villa Mercedes on December 19, 400 miles (640 km) west of Buenos Aires, taking 12,000 pesos. They fled across the Andes to reach the safety of Chile.

From there Ethel Place returned to the US, accompanied by Longabaugh. He returned afterwards and joined Cassidy. Both went further north into Bolivia where they were eventually killed.

From Cholilo the Provincial road 12 joined the RN 40 north towards:

El Bolson

El Bolsón is a town in the southwest of Río Negro Province, Argentina, at the foot of the Piltriquitron Mountain. Due to a series of valleys through the mountains of Chile to the Pacific Ocean, El Bolsón has an unusually mild climate for its southern location.

El Bolsón area’s first non-indigenous inhabitants were Chilean farmers Lucas Cárdenas and Elcira Estrada, a couple who came in 1885 from San Pablo, near Osorno, and established themselves in the then known as “Valle Nuevo” (New Valley); in 2018 El Bolsón inaugurated the new Public Clock Square after the couple’s names. In the 1970s hippies from Buenos Aires migrated to El Bolsón; some of them practised horticulture and made handcrafts.

El Bolsón has a tourism economy based on an outdoor artisan market, fly fishing, trekking, rafting, climbing, and other outdoor activities in the surrounding lakes and mountains. The nature tourism offers are complemented with the production of cheeses, smoked trout, special brew beer, regional chocolates and ice cream, as well as organic and wild-crafted jams and preserves, particularly elderberries.

In El Bolson The Wandelgek visited an icecream parlour which had many kinds of Italian gelato style icecream. One of the many flavors was Calafate icecream, made from Calefate berries.

The gelato ice cream was delicious:

After eating the Calafate berry ice, The Wandelgek was destined to return to Argentina. You can probably imagine he was enjoying the ice cream twice as much as before after learning about that ?.

The legend of the Calafate berries

The extremely beautiful daughter of a local tribe chief, met and fel in love with a young Selk’nam tribe member.

The Selk’nam, also known as the Onawo or Ona people, are an indigenous people in the Patagonian region of southern Argentina and Chile, including the Tierra del Fuego islands. They were one of the last native groups in South America to be encountered by migrant Europeans in the late 19th century.

The young man also fel in love with the beautiful girl of another tribe than his own, who had gold colored eyes. Both knew that their love would not be accepted by their parents and tribe members. Thus they made a plan to escape and travel far away. But the father of the girl discovered they were in love and their plan to run away. Angry, he asked the tribes shaman to find a way to block their plans. The shaman magically turned the girl into a thorny bush which carried loads of golden flowers, representing her eyes

The Selk’nam man ready to flee away with his lover, searched long for her and finally found and recognized her in the golden color of the flowers of the thorn bush. But because of the sharp thorns, he could only look at her instead of holding her and he eventually died of grief.

The shaman however was grieved too and ashamed and he regretted his deed. He tried to mend some of it by making the thorny bush carry blue berries, representing the heart of the Selk’nam tribe boy, so that they could, in the end, be together again.

It is told that people eating from those berries, feel the longing of the heart of the boy for the girl with the golden eyes and thus always return to the land of the golden flowered bushes.

Hence the legend of people eating calafate berries, always returning to Argentina, began…

Then The wandelgek left El Bolson and drove further north towards the boundaries of the Nahuel Huapi National Park.