Visiting the Mystery of Etta Place

Visiting the Mystery of Etta Place

I had the honor of portraying Etta Place in a PBS Movie of the week called Gunfighters of the Southwest/Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid. 

I was working in California at the time when I got a call from a cast director in New Mexico, Teresa Neptune with Rainbow Casting Service. Teresa is very well known for casting many of the major films/TV series which were filmed in New Mexico at this time, such as; The Cowboy Way, Buffalo Girls, Lazarus Man, The Hi-Lo Country, All the Pretty Horses and many more. She asked if I was interested in working on this project and if so please be here on this date. She had casted me for several other projects in the past and knew that I was dependable, knowledgeable, always willing to help out and I could handle horses and ride very well. So in a few days I was working on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid!

                                                                                      

Etta Place (born c. 1878, date of death unknown) was a companion of the American outlaws Butch Cassidy (real name Robert LeRoy Parker) and the Sundance Kid (Harry Alonzo Longabaugh), both members of the outlaw gang known as the Wild Bunch. Principally the companion of Longabaugh, little is known about her; both her origins and her fate remain mysterious. Despite Longabaugh and Parker's fame, by the mid-20th century it was the mysterious vanishing of Place that sparked the most interest, which cont

Etta Place of the left and myself (Bobbi Jeen Olson) portraying Etta Place (right) in the PBS Gunfighters of the West, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid. Do you think there's any resemblance!? — in Santa Fe, NM. 

Click the link to see parts of the film http://vimeo.com/6002810 

The Mysterious Case of Etta Place Pt. I

Posted by Tony Hays

The story of Etta Place is rather more mysterious because it would appear that she chose to disappear, not long after the reported deaths of her lover, Harry Longabaugh and his friend, Robert Leroy Parker, better known to posterity as the Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy. What makes it doubly mysterious is that we don't even know her real name or from whence she came. Katherine Ross did a wonderful job fixing her image in the public consciousness in the 1969 movie "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," elevating her to near iconic status. But all that did was birth a generation of Etta Place fans.

I would never claim to be a true Etta Place aficionado; I happened on the conundrum she poses quite by accident. In fact, I was a little surprised that the world had simply swallowed Etta up. But I quickly learned that except for about 12 years at the most, Etta Place didn't exist.

The majority of the experts agree that Butch and Sundance probably met Etta at a bordello around 1900. The Pinkerton Agency, which had a strong interest in Etta, described her as attractive, speaking with an educated tone. Estimates of her birth year range from 1878 to 1882 or 1883. Rumors suggest that she was a cousin of Longabaugh's since Longabaugh's mother was a Place. General consensus holds that Sundance met Etta at Fannie Porter's bordello in San Antonio about 1900. By 1909, Etta had ridden off into the sunset, while Sundance and Butch were said to be dead in South America. Indeed there are those researchers who say that Etta died in South America as well. Acquaintances, what few there were, called Etta beautiful and said that she spoke with a refined accent. Without ever saying anything explicit, she indicated that she hailed from the East Coast. Pinkerton Detective Agency reports supported this as well. Only a handful of people knew her well enough as Etta Place to offer descriptions – Annie Bassett, Josie Bassett, and Laura Bullion among these. This trio of young ladies were the girlfriends of various members of the Wild Bunch, the outlaw gang of which Butch and Sundance were a big part.

Etta (or Ethel) Place might not have been her real name, which could add to the mystery...Who was Etta Place and where did she go?

I truly appreciate you taking the time out to visit my blog. I  LOVE "Keepin' the West Alive" by promoting the Western Lifestyle in a positive, family oriented manner. Please let me know what you think by stopping by my website at

www.BobbiJeen.com

or on Facebook at

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bobbi-Jeen-Olson/181996078556253

Dream so BIG if only half of it comes true, it's still amazing,

Bobbi Jeen Olson

www.BobbiJeen.com

Max Evans shares his stories about the Western Feature Film Hi-Lo Country

The Rounder, The Hi-Lo Country, Madam Millie, just a few books by one of the greatest Western Authors Max Evans. I worked on the Feature Film, “The Hi-Lo Country” and I had the honor of hanging out & visiting with Max about how we can keep the west alive...It's gonna take ALL of us workin' together!

Bobbi Jeen Olson

www.BobbiJeen.com

Follow me on facebook at

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000835980042

Wardrobe for Bobbi Jeen by www.MeredithLockhartCollections.com

Jewelry by Foutz Trading Post-Casa Grande AZ 

About Max Evans (great interview and article)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FixQwse20hM

Yet the real, unmythic, contemporary West of big skies and ranches, and of cowboys who these days ride pickups more often than horses, that West is still in business. And its principal chronicler is a former cowboy, hard-rock miner and painter named Max Evans.

Evans looks like a man you might have seen in a western, fleeing a posse or joining one, although his only role was in fact riding shotgun beside Slim Pickens as the stagecoach driver in Sam Peckinpah's "The Ballad of Cable Hogue."

A critic once called Evans "a range-land Mark Twain." His novels and stories are often wildly funny but frequently carry an undertone of tragedy and a suggestion that the antics themselves are compensations for pains of a grueling life in unyielding country.

Evans' first novel, "The Rounders," was filmed in 1965 with Henry Fonda and Glenn Ford playing two tramp cowboys working for a tough ranch owner. Like nearly all of Evans' fiction, the novel was born in the facts of his own life. Evans had started cowboying before he was a teenager, hiring out to a rancher who was very tough but significantly more scrupulous than Tom Ed, the boss in the book (played by Chill Wills in the movie).

Now his 1961 novel, "The Hi-Lo Country," has at last been filmed. It opened in Los Angeles and New York on Wednesday for Academy Award qualification. Martin Scorsese, as urban a filmmaker as can be found, produced it; the director was Stephen Frears, the elegant Englishman whose credits include "My Beautiful Laundrette," "Dangerous Liaisons," "The Snapper" and "The Grifters," his only previous exploration of contemporary Americana.

Woody Harrelson and Billy Crudup ("Without Limits") are the cowboy pals, spiritual descendants of Fonda and Ford. Patricia Arquette plays the married woman they both love. The script was by Walon Green, who wrote Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch."

The Hi-Lo Country can't be found on gas station maps or in atlases. It was defined and named by Evans himself. It embraces, in his own words, "the north-eastern half of New Mexico, the far panhandle of Oklahoma, a lot of southeastern Colorado, and extends over into the far northwest of Texas." (A souvenir map, locating the sites of various Evans stories, has been published by literary historian James R. Gober.)

It is a difficult, dry, testing land, a mix of mountains and wide plains, all wind-swept. The place names resonate with history: the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the Purgatoire, Rio Grande, and Canadian rivers, Taos and Las Vegas (New Mexico), where Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders gathered for reunions until the last of them was gone.

The town of Hi-Lo, where the movie's action takes place, isn't on maps, either. It is an amalgam of Des Moines, Springer and Cimarron, all small, wind-scoured hamlets in New Mexico that prosper or suffer with the price of beef or copper and other ores. The life breeds or demands men and women who work hard and (the menfolk most particularly) play hard. Evans himself still has the scarred fists and the often-struck nose to prove it. He wears city suits these days, but with Western boots and Stetsons as legacies of his earlier times.

Lots of Interest Over a Long Time

For the 74-year-old Evans, the idea of making a film from "The Hi-Lo Country" has had a long history going back more than three decades. Among the actors who wanted to be part of the film, Evans noted not long ago, were Brian Keith, Lee Marvin, Charlton Heston, Robert Culp and Slim Pickens.

The list of producers and directors similarly inclined included Saul David, David Dortort, Tom Gries, Buzz Kulick, Marvin Schwartz, William Wellman, Burt Kennedy and Peckinpah, who was the most persistent suitor.

"The trouble was that Sam wanted to make it a 'Gone With the Wind' of the West," Evans says from his home in Albuquerque. "He extended it to Mexico so he could work in the Federales. His script was 160 pages long and would have run close to four hours and cost I can't imagine how much. And with Sam, the executives never lacked for excuses for him not to direct it."

Scorsese and his team saw, as Evans himself had come to realize, that his slim, 155-page novella, need not be an epic. The heart of the story was the intimate relationships of two best friends and the woman they both loved, which ends with one of the friends gunned down.

The identity of the shooter is the movie's surprising twist, but it is true to historical fact. The basic story stemmed from an episode in Evans' life. The victim was Wylie "Big Boy" Hittson, Evans' oldest, closest friend, who is called Big Boy Matson in the novel and the film.)

Article by

Los Angeles Times

Chattin' about Slim Pickens with his daughter Daryle Ann Pickens

Keepin’ the West Alive with Bobbi Jeen Olson

I had the honor of meeting and visiting with Daryle Ann Pickens (daughter of Slim Pickens...the western movie actor) at the Western Writers of America Convention in Albuquerque NM. I loved hearing the stories about her childhood and how much of an inspiration her father was to her (as well as many others). Daryle Ann is a huge promoter of the western lifestyle and does so in a positive, informative, exciting manner. She sharers stories of Hollywood, some of the greatest actors of our time and of the old western films we have all come to love.

Thank YOU Ms Daryle Ann Pickens for Keepin’ the West Alive!

Bobbi Jeen Olson

www.BobbiJeen.com

About Slim Pickens:

Slim Pickens spent the early part of his career as a real cowboy and the latter part playing cowboys, and he is best remembered for a single "cowboy" image: that of bomber pilot Maj. "King" Kong waving his cowboy hat rodeo-style as he rides a nuclear bomb onto its target in the great black comedy Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Born in Kingsburg, near Fresno in California's Central Valley, he spent much of his boyhood in nearby Hanford, where he began rodeoing at the age of 12. Over the next two decades he toured the country on the rodeo circuit, becoming a highly-paid and well-respected rodeo clown, a job that entailed enormous danger. At the age of 31 he was given a role in a western, Rocky Mountain (1950), and quickly found a niche in both comic and villainous roles in that genre. With his hoarse voice and pronounced western twang, he was not always easy to cast outside the genre, but when he was, as in "Dr. Strangelove", the results were often memorable. He died in 1983 after a long and courageous battle against a brain tumor. He was survived by his wife Margaret and three children, Daryle Ann, Thom, and Margaret Lou. His brother has acted under the name Easy Pickens.