The two outlaws spent their nights carousing in the bordellos of a far west mining town where they were holed up, on the run from the law. One night, one of the fugitives got into a brawl at an after-hours restaurant. Lawmen arrived and ordered everyone into the street, but the drunken bandit drew his gun. He fired a single shot; an officer died.
The 1905 scene did not play out in the US, but in the Chilean port of Antofagasta – a boom town that at the time was as wild as any in the old American west – and it was detailed in a judicial report recently rediscovered in the country’s national archives.
