The Tragic Days of Billy the Kid

Facsimile of the 1956 edition

Frazier Hunt

• Editorial: Sunstone Press
• Año: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781611392357
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Biographies de sciences sociales

Since a July night in 1881 when he was shot down at the age of 21, Billy the Kid has been a victim of the myths that surrounded and captured him. This vivid interpretation of the Kid's life and character will come as an exciting revelation to readers who may have been familiar only with the earlier fictionalized versions. For here is real, moving tragedy painted in broad brush strokes with the vivid hues of the stark American Southwestern landscape. Never before has there been brought into true focus the Lincoln County War, which broke out in 1878 in the then Territory of New Mexico, and which furnished the background and the period for the adventures of this extraordinary boy. The literature concerning both the desperate cattle war and the singular young outlaw have necessarily been constructed around a thin framework of fact with its papier maché façade of myth and legend. So persistent have been these legends that the true character of the Kid seemed almost beyond reach. Indeed, the Western poet, Arthur Chapman, once wrote that "Billy the Kid must remain wholly the most unaccountable figure in frontier history."Frazier Hunt (1885 - 1968) had the good fortune to have access to a great mass of fresh and unpublished source material which fully documents this thrilling history of the Kid and his times. It is a new and rather appealing boy who now comes to light-an alert, likeable yet tough youngster, adored by the native Mexicans no less for his fluency in Spanish than for his kindness and consideration, but no wanton killer. In place of the former distorted figure of legend, a young man of flesh and blood and heart emerges into clear perspective. So at last we have the real Billy the Kid-authentic, true-and completely accountable.

PART ONE

The Little Grub-Line Rider

1

A number of years ago Arthur Chapman, the Western poet who wrote Out Where the West Begins, explained, “Billy the Kid must remain wholly the most unaccountable figure in all frontier history.”

For three-quarters of a century he remained exactly that —the victim of the myths which had surrounded and captured him.

Hundreds of articles, radio and TV shows, stories, books and motion pictures have been written around this unique young man. Unfortunately none of the writers had access to more than a small part of the hidden source material which would have cleared away the fabulous tales and obscure half-truths and brought into clear focus the real Billy the Kid and the great days he lived.

For the first time the fully documented facts have now been brought together. They comprise a great mass of letters, newspaper accounts, official reports and word-of-mouth recollections.

And so it is that with the death of the legend of Billy the Kid there comes to life a warm and friendly human being, authentic and accountable. . . .

It was time the Kid pulled out to another part of the country and lay low for a while.

The “law” was after him. There might even be a reward posted at this very moment for his capture.

Somewhere in the Burro Mountains of southwestern New Mexico near the Arizona line where he was hiding out, he had come across the newspaper that carried the verdict of the coroner’s jury. He’d killed a man, all right.

There it was in cold type. He must have read the item several times when he found it in a stray copy of the Arizona Citizen, dated August 22, 1877.

In the first sentence his name was given as Austin Antrim, but a little way down it was changed to “Henry Antrim, alias Kid.” As a matter of fact, he had been known around Silver City and the neighboring area as both Henry and Billy Antrim, as well as the Kid and Henry McCarty, which was his real name. The item read:

Austin Antrim shot E. P. Cahill near Fort Grant on the 17th inst. and the latter died on the 18th. Cahill made a statement before death to the effect that he had some trouble with Antrim during which the shooting was done. Deceased had a sister, Margaret Flanegan, in Cambridge, Mass., and another, Kate Conlon, in San Francisco. He was born in Galway, Ireland, and was aged 32. The coroner’s jury found that the shooting “was criminal and unjustifiable, and that Henry Antrim, alias Kid is guilty thereof.” The inquest was held by M. L. Wood, J.P. and the jurors were M. McDowell, George Teague, T. McCleary, D. M. Norton, Jas. L. Hunt and D. H. Smith.

It was certainly a hand-picked jury. The Kid knew most of the six men and they were friends of Cahill’s. It was logical for him to assume he would receive the same harsh treatment from a regular jury if he were caught and tried for murder.

Long after the event an old army scout and well-known frontier character, Gus Gildea, gave an account of what occurred and it appeared in the Tucson Citizen of January 31, 1931. Gildea’s statement can be accepted as substantially accurate:

It was in the Fall of ’77 when I first met Billy the Kid. He was an easy going, likeable youth, still in his teens. I was scouting at Fort Grant then, when Billy came to town, dressed like a “country jake,” with “store pants” on and shoes instead of boots. He wore a six-shooter stuck in his trousers.

The blacksmith frequented George Adkin’s saloon. He was called “Windy” because he was always blow-in’ about first one thing and then another. I don’t recall the rest of his name. Shortly after the Kid came to Fort Grant, Windy started abusing him.

He would throw Billy to the floor, ruffle his hair, slap his face and humiliate him before the men in the saloon.

Yes, the Kid was rather slender, with blue eyes and fair hair. The blacksmith was a large man, with a gruff voice and blustering manner.

One day he threw the youth to the floor. Pinned his arms down with his knees and started slapping his face.

“You are hurting me. Let me up!” cried the Kid.

“I want to hurt you. That’s why I got you down,” was the reply.

People in the saloon watched the two on the floor. Billy’s right arm was free from the elbow down. He started working his hand around and finally managed to grasp his .45.

Suddenly silence reigned in the room. The blacksmith evidently felt the pistol against his side, for he straightened slightly. Then there was a deafening roar. Windy slumped to the side as the Kid squirmed free and ran to the door, vaulted into the saddle on John Murphy’s racing pony and left Fort Grant.

When I came to town the next day from Hooker’s ranch, where I was working, Murphy was storming and cursing the Kid, calling him a horse thief, murderer and similar names. I told him he would get his horse back, for the Kid was no thief.

In about a week one of Murphy’s friends rode into town on Cashaw, Murphy’s horse, saying the Kid had asked him to return the animal to the owner.

It is fairly well established that the Kid rode that night of the killing to the Knight ranch and stage station near the Arizona-New Mexico line, where he had stopped once before when he was in trouble. The Knights were family friends. Knight for a time had run a butcher shop in Silver City where the Kid’s stepfather, William H. Antrim, had worked off and on.

There are several accounts as to just what the boy did during the next three or four weeks after the killing of the blacksmith. It is probable that he kept away from the main trails, stopping for a night or two at various isolated little ranches and mining camps where a stranger was always welcome and no questions asked. Within a few days he sent back the horse he had borrowed.

There is a stubborn tradition that he fell in with Jesse Evans and one or two of his thieving gang from the Rio Pecos country of Lincoln County, two or three hundred miles to the east. He may even have joined up with Evans in a little horse-lifting lark here around the Burro Mountains, not far from Silver City. The Evans gang had ridden back to Lincoln County by the time the boy started for Mesilla, the sleepy Mexican county seat of Dona Ana County on the Rio Grande, forty miles north of El Paso.

The Kid certainly didn’t look the part of a killer. He wouldn’t be eighteen for another two or three months, and he had to stretch a little to bring himself up to five feet, eight inches tall. He weighed only a trifle more than 130 pounds, but he was fairly heavy-boned and wiry, although his hands and feet were unusually small. There was a resilience about his slender figure that made him almost immune to ordinary hardships.

His two upper teeth were prominent but this did not disfigure him. Rather it seemed to add to the peculiar charm that gave him an unusually attractive personality. His light-brown hair was a little on the wavy side, and his blue-gray eyes at times could turn cold and deadly. And he was experienced in frontier ways and fully qualified to take care of himself.

Fundamentally he was good-natured and of a happy, carefree disposition, and there are proofs galore of his genuine kindness of heart to old people and to children, and to the lowly pobres (the poor ones) whose language he could speak so beautifully. There is no single authentic case of his ever having abused a native New Mexican. Instead, there is ample evidence that he was as one with them, a fact which was to have a great influence on his short and tragic life.

2

It is strange that the early years and family background of this unusual boy are wrapped in mystery so absolute that no amount of research has ever been able to penetrate it. Within a year and a half after Billy’s death, a singular Massachusetts-born tramp-printer and inebriate newspaperman by the name of Ash Upson, living at the time in Roswell in the Pecos Valley, undertook to write, under Sheriff Pat Garrett’s signature, a small biography called “The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid.” The roving Ash apparently had boarded for a time with the boy’s mother in both Santa Fe and Silver City and obtained from her certain facts regarding the lad’s early years. Later they were to be fattened by the printer’s own fertile imagination.

The various youthful adventures concocted and elaborately described by Ash Upson in the Garrett book have long been accepted as gospel facts. Yet the first valid date and incident in the early days of the Kid’s life was unearthed as a result of the research of Robert N. Mullin and Philip J. Rasch almost eighty years after the event took place. Their findings blew to bits many of the accepted “facts” which clearly were the creations of Upson’s romantic imagination.

In both the “Book of Marriages” of Santa Fe County, New Mexico, and the records of the First Presbyterian Church in the capital, there was found a notation of the marriage on March 1, 1873, of William H. Antrim and Mrs. Catherine McCarty, performed by the Rev. D. F. McFarland. Among the witnesses were the bride’s two sons, Henry McCarty and his older brother Joe McCarty. It is the boy Henry McCarty, later known to the world as Billy the Kid and William H. Bonney, with whom this study is concerned.

The stepfather was a good-natured wanderer who was a sort of jack-of-all-trades but was surely a master of none. At times he worked variously as a miner, semi-professional gambler, odd-job man, and helper in the Knight butcher shop. Born on December 1, 1842, at Huntsville, near Anderson, Indiana, he was thirty years old when he married Catherine McCarty. He had enlisted in the 54th Regiment of Indiana Volunteers in Indianapolis in April, 1862, and for some unknown reason was honorably discharged three or four months later.

Shortly after the marriage the family moved from Santa Fe to the new mining community of Silver City, far down in the mountainous country in the southwest section of New Mexico. It was a long journey by stagecoach, for no railroad had as yet penetrated the Territory. Here Catherine developed what was known as “quick consumption.” For the last months of her life she was a pathetic bedridden invalid, her days and nights racked with fits of coughing, and her heart filled with constant worry over what would happen to her two boys when she left this world. There can be no question of the date and circumstances of her passing. In its weekly issue of September 19, 1874, the Silver City Mining Life carried the following item:

Died in Silver City, on Wednesday, the 16th inst., Catherine, wife of William Antrim, aged 34 years.

Mrs. Antrim with her husband and family came to Silver City one year and a half ago, since which time her health has not been good, having suffered from an affection of the lungs, and for the last four months she has been confined to her bed. The funeral occurred from the family residence on Main Street, at 2 o’clock on Thursday.

Authenticated testimony of neighbors and friends furnish ample proof of the gentle care and affection that the smaller boy Henry gave to his dying mother. The memory of her suffering and death marked the few remaining years of his own life with a sense of fatalism and a feeling of the futility of man’s struggle against his fate. This he had learned, as well, from the native New Mexicans who understood and sympathized with the boy.

The great-heartedness of the frontier people saw to it that the two orphan boys were not left entirely to the inadequate efforts of the stepfather. He did his best to hold together his little family, but he had no way of controlling the wilder boy, now turning fifteen. Henry’s education was swiftly completed in the barrooms and gambling halls and tough spots of the mining town.

For a time the Truesdells, who ran a boarding house and hotel in Silver City, gave the boy his room and board for helping in the kitchen and the dining room. More than once in later years the proprietor remarked that Henry was the only boy who ever worked for him who never stole anything. He was not really a bad boy but only a wild one, Mr. Truesdell always insisted.

But the motherless, homeless boy seemed to have a good many things against him. There was the question of his name, an ambiguity which didn’t seem so important at the time yet must have given him a feeling of instability and a complete absence of family roots. It was not the lack of one name that bothered him; it was the fact that he had too many names.

Many people in Silver City learned that his real name was Henry McCarty and they called him that. At times he was also known as Henry Antrim, which was a combination of his own given name and the surname of his stepfather, William H. Antrim. It wasn’t long, however, until he was generally referred to as Billy Antrim and Kid Antrim, then as the Kid—later as Billy Kid, and in the end as Billy the Kid.

It was a full two years after he had left Silver City and when he was in grave trouble over the killing of the blacksmith that he began to use the formal name of William H. Bonney; obviously the William H. was borrowed from the given name of his stepfather. No one knows from whence came the surname Bonney. It was an accepted formula of the frontier for a man on the dodge to use an alias, and when he felt he needed one the boy very probably simply hand-picked and adopted William H. Bonney.

More than a quarter century later, in 1902, Henry H. Whitehall, famous sheriff of Grant County, New Mexico, who had known the Kid intimately, corroborated the facts regarding the boy’s true name in an interview in the Silver City Enterprise:

Early in his career he changed his name to Billie Bonney in order to keep the stigma of disgrace from his family. Billie’s right name, you know, was Henry McCarty.

There is eternal mystery, likewise, surrounding the generally accepted date and place of his birth: New York City, November 23rd, 1859. Both are based largely on the somewhat questionable authority of Ash Upson, who despite his itching foot seemed to find true inner solace and satisfaction in the lonely and dangerous desert mesas and distant mountains of the Rio Pecos land of eastern Lincoln County. In all, the odd, old fellow remained there a full fifteen years. Fact and fancy seemed mixed in equal proportions in the mind of this near-genius, who was as soaked in the poetry of Shakespeare and the romantic novels of Scott as he was in frontier rotgut.

It is reasonable, however, to accept the above birthplace and date, for certainly Billy would now and again have referred to these innocent facts. There is a strong belief that his father died in New York City and that the mother, possibly for health reasons, then moved west and remarried.

Slightly over a year after the death of his mother, when the boy was just under sixteen and living at the home of a Widow Brown, an incident occurred that was to affect the future course of his life. The good lady, worried over the report that the lad was mixed up with a no-good loafer in a small theft, enlisted the help of Sheriff Whitehall. The sheriff, likewise believing that a good scaring might help the motherless boy, took him to Squire Givens who solemnly sent him to the t...