Billy the Kid Read online

  Billy’s testimony before the Dudley Court is disappointing. Doubtless at the urging of Sue McSween and her attorney, he was more intent on supporting her thesis that soldiers participated in the fighting than in describing what actually happened. The testimony yields many important clues valuable in reconstructing the sequence, but the historian wishes it had been fuller and less partisan. Soldiers did not participate in the fighting.

  24. George Coe, March 20, 1927, HHC.

  25. Ibid.

  10. THE DRIFTER

  1. George Coe, interview with J. Evetts Haley, Glencoe, N. Mex., March 20, 1927, HHC. The Casey brothers, though not Ellen and Lily, seem to have returned from Texas by this time. Coe identified his victims as Caseys.

  2. Dudley to AAAG DNM, Fort Stanton, August 3 and 22, 1878, with enclosures, File 1405 AGO 1878, NARA.

  3. Godfroy to Post Adjutant Fort Stanton, August 3, 1878, encl. to Dudley to AAAG DNM, Fort Stanton, August 3, 1878, File 1405 AGO 1878, NARA. For the past friction, see McSween to Schurz, February 13, 1878, and McSween to Lowrie, February 25, 1878, RG 75, Office of Indian Affairs, LR, NARA (M234, roll 576). The investigation revealed that Godfroy had been “lending” flour and other supplies to The House to meet temporary shortages. Apparently the loans were repaid in kind, but such casual handling of government stores led to Godfroy’s dismissal. See Watkins Report, NARA.

  4. A party of “wild” Indians—that is, unattached to the agency—had been seen in the vicinity, and at first some thought the firing meant these Indians were fighting with agency Indians. These roamers, apt to be more trigger-happy than the agency people, may have been the Indians the Hispanics encountered.

  5. George Coe, March 20, 1927, HHC. Frank Coe was also present and told much the same story. See his interview with J. Evetts Haley, San Patrico, N. Mex., August 14, 1927, HHC. Other sources bearing on this incident are Dudley to AAAG DNM, Fort Stanton, August 6, 7, 8, and 10, 1878, with enclosures, File 1405 AGO 1878, NARA. A rich source, enclosure to Dudley’s of August 10, is a lengthy report of an investigation by Capt. Thomas Blair, which includes the accounts of Godfroy, Dr. Blazer, and Interpreter José Carillo. See also Mesilla Valley Independent, August 15, 1878; and Cimarron News and Press, September 19, 1878.

  6. Frank Coe, August 14, 1927, HHC.

  7. These notes are from Sallie’s diary in the Chaves County Historical Society, Roswell, N. Mex., excerpts provided by Harwood P. Hinton. These take the form of a document assembled by Maurice G. Fulton, who added pertinent entries from other sources as well. Sallie recorded that she received a letter from Billy on July 20 and that her father received one from Charley Bowdre on July 21 telling of the burning of the McSween house. Available from another source is a letter Joe Smith wrote from the Tunstall store on July 19, Fulton Collection, Box 11, Folder 7, UAL. The Five-Day Battle does not seem to have interfered with the U.S. mail. See also Marilyn Watson, “Was Sallie Billy’s Girl?” New Mexico Magazine (January 1988): 57–60.

  8. Frank Coe, interview with J. Evetts Haley, San Patricio, N. Mex., February 20, 1928, HHC. See also George Coe, March 20, 1927. As usual, the Coes’ chronology is confused, and they differ somewhat on the sequence of the Regulator wanderings. Frank even has them riding as far west as Los Lunas, on the Rio Grande, but within the known time constraints this seems doubtful. I have adjusted their chronology and sequence to fit what is known from other sources.

  9. This quotation and those that follow are from the Frank Coe interview, February 20, 1928, HHC. George Coe tells much the same story, although more briefly.

  10. Dudley to AAAG DNM, Fort Stanton, 3 P.M., September 7, 1878, File 1405 AGO 1878, NARA. Fritz recognized only Sam Smith and Joe Bowers, but Tom O’Folliard later came under indictment for this theft. At the least, I think the thieves were Kid, O’Folliard, Smith, and Bowers, and there were probably others.

  11. Dudley to AAAG DNM, Fort Stanton, September 7, 1878, File 1405 AGO 1878, NARA. This dispatch was prepared before the one cited in ibid.

  12. Garrett, Authentic Life, 78. Other sources tend to confirm the version given by Upson-Garrett.

  13. The opening of the Staked Plains to cattlemen is well told by J. Evetts Haley in two books: Charles Goodnight, Cowman and Plainsman (Boston, 1936; reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1949); and George W. Littlefield, Texan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1943). See also John L. McCarty, Maverick Town: The Story of Old Tascosa (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1946).

  14. A. B. McDonald, “Tascosa’s Lone Settler [Mrs. Mickie McCormick] Recalls Wild Days,” Frontier Times 8 (February 1931): 235. Reprint from Kansas City Star.

  15. Henry Hoyt, A Frontier Doctor (New York: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1929). I have used the Lakeside Classics edition, ed. Doyce B. Nunis, Jr. (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons, 1979), 148. Hoyt exaggerated Billy’s notoriety in October 1878, forgetting that he did not become a celebrity until later, but his recollections are otherwise authoritative.

  16. Ibid., 153.

  17. Ibid., 149, 154.

  18. Hoyt later presented the document to J. Evetts Haley, and it is now in the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas.

  19. Garrett, Authentic Life, 81. Fred Waite ended up back home in the Indian Territory, where he served as a tax collector and died naturally in 1895. Henry Brown, after returning for a stint as Tascosa’s first marshal, became a respected Kansas lawman, but he also developed a covert sideline as a bank robber, and in 1884 a lynch mob ended both careers. John Middleton punched cows in Kansas, married an heiress, wrote complaining letters to the elder Tunstall in London, and died in 1885 from the effects of his wound at Blazer’s Mills.

  20. Dudley to AAAG DNM, Fort Stanton, December 9, 1878, File 1405 AGO 1878, NARA; General Order 62, Fort Stanton, December 20, 1878, Exhibit 45, Dudley Court Record, NARA.

  21. Garrett, Authentic Life, 82, 85, says that Billy was arrested in Lincoln, confined in the jail, and escaped. He adds that Billy penciled an inscription on the oak door of his cell stating that he had been imprisoned here on December 22, 1878. This is corroborated nowhere else, and the inscription, which Garrett says he copied in 1881, could not have been on an oak door to a cell. Lincoln still made do with the old cellar jail, reached through a trapdoor. I think this is more Upson apocrypha.

  11. THE BARGAIN

  1. S. R. Corbet to John Middleton, Lincoln, February 3, 1880, Fulton Collection, Box II, Folder 8, UAL.

  2. New Mexico Biographical Notes, Mullin Collection, HHC. I have dealt with this background in greater detail in High Noon in Lincoln: Violence on the Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 125–31.

  3. Dudley to AAAG DNM, Fort Stanton, February 19, 1879, File 1405 AGO 1878, NARA. Dudley was shown the letter and told of the reply.

  4. Dudley to AAAG DNM, Fort Stanton, February 21, 1879, Exhibit 79–43, Dudley Court Record, NARA. Three parties to the agreement told Dudley its terms.

  5. The most detailed and authoritative evidence for reconstructing the events of this night is a newspaper account summarizing the testimony of participants and witnesses in Judge Bristol’s court in Mesilla in July 1879: Mesilla Valley Independent, July 5, 1879. See also ibid., March 9 and 22, 1879; Mesilla News, March 1, 1879; Las Vegas Gazette, March 1, 1879; Las Cruces Thirty-Four, March 6 and 19 and April 9, 1879; and Dudley to AAAG DNM, Fort Stanton, February 19, 1879, with enclosures, File 1405 AGO 1878, NARA. Edgar Walz, Tom Catron’s brother-in-law and agent in Lincoln, who was present, wrote a graphic reminiscent account: “Retrospection,” MS, October 1931, in Museum of New Mexico Historical Library, Santa Fe. For a synthesis of the evidence, see Philip J. Rasch, “The Murder of Huston I. Chapman,” Los Angeles Westerners Brand Book 8 (1959): 69–82.

  6. Kimball to CO Fort Stanton, February 18, 1879, and Lt. Byron Dawson to Post Adjutant, February 19, 1879, both encl. to Dudley to AAAG DNM, Fort Stanton, February 19, 1879, File 1405 AGO 1878, NARA.

  7. Walz, “Restrospection.”


  8. Wallace to Hatch, Lincoln, March 7, 1879; Special Field Order No. 2, Hq. DNM, March 8, 1879; Wallace to Hatch, Lincoln, March 9, 1879; all in Lew Wallace Papers, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis (hereafter IHS).

  9. Wallace to Carroll, Lincoln, March 11 and 12, 1879, Wallace Papers, IHS.

  10. Wallace to Hatch, Lincoln, March 5, 1879; Wallace to Carroll, Lincoln, March 10, 1879; Carroll to Wallace, March 11, 1879; Wallace to Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, Lincoln, March 21, 1879; all in Wallace Papers, IHS. Special Order 34, Fort Stanton, March 6, 1879, Exhibit 79–58, Dudley Court Record, NARA.

  11. Wallace to Schurz, Lincoln, March 31, 1879, Wallace Papers, IHS; “Rio Bonito” to Ed., Fort Stanton, April 8, 1879, Mesilla Valley Independent, April 12, 1879.

  12. Wallace to Hatch, Lincoln, March 6, 1879, Wallace Papers, IHS.

  13. The exchange of letters is in the Wallace Papers, IHS. This first letter from Billy, however, is not there, nor is another that is critical to the events of chapter 15. The two are available because Maurice G. Fulton obtained copies from Lew Wallace’s son. The one here cited appears in Fulton’s History of the Lincoln County War, ed. Robert N. Mullin (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1968), 336.

  14. Wallace did not describe this meeting in his memoirs but told the story to a reporter. Between Wallace’s tendency to romanticize and the reporter’s inclination to embellish, it may not have come out exactly faithful to factual detail. The spirit and the substance, however, appear reliable, and my account is drawn from this report. See Indianapolis World, June 8, 1902.

  15. For the escape of Evans and Campbell, see Mesilla Valley Independent, April 5, 1879; and Carroll to COS Forts Bayard, Craig, and Bliss, Fort Stanton, March 19, 1879, RG 393, Post Records, Fort Stanton, N. Mex., LS, Vol. 20: 241, NARA.

  16. Wallace to Schurz, Lincoln, March 31, 1879, Wallace Papers, IHS.

  17. “Statement by Kid, made Sunday night March 29, 1879,” Wallace Papers, IHS.

  18. Capt. Juan Patrón to Wallace, Fort Sumner, April 12, 1879, Wallace Papers, IHS. For the Rifles, see Campaign Records, Lincoln County Rifles, 1879, TANM, Roll 87, Frames 185–202, NMSRCA.

  19. Leonard to Wallace, Lincoln, May 20, 1879, Wallace Papers, IHS.

  20. Lincoln County, District Court Journal, 1875–79, April 1879 term: 333–35 (April 28, 1879), NMSRCA. The indictment of Evans, Criminal Case File 229, is also in NMSRCA. A photostat of the indictment of Dolan and Campbell, Criminal Case 280, is in the Fulton Collection, Box 12, Folder 2, UAL.

  21. Mesilla Valley Independent, May 10, 1879.

  22. Leonard to Wallace, April 20, 1879, Wallace Papers, IHS; Lincoln County, District Court Journal: 316–18 (April 21, 1879), NMSRCA.

  23. Mesilla Valley Independent, May 10, 1879; Mesilla News, May 1, 1879, in New Mexican (Santa Fe), May 17, 1879.

  24. The voluminous transcript and appended exhibits are in RG 153, Judge Advocate General’s Office, Records Relating to the Dudley Inquiry (QQ 1284), NARA.

  In his memoirs, published in 1906, Lew Wallace reproduced a number of letters written by his wife, Susan Wallace, from New Mexico during his governorship. One that she penned at Fort Stanton during the Dudley inquiry mentioned Billy Bonney and has been cited frequently by Kid students. In one passage, she wrote, “The Lincoln County reign of terror is not over, and we hold our lives at the mercy of desperadoes and outlaws, chief among them ‘Billy the Kid,’ whose boast is that he has killed a man for every year of his life. Once he was captured, and escaped after overpowering his guard, and now he swears when he has killed the sheriff and the judge who passed sentence upon him, and Governor Wallace, he will surrender and be hanged.”

  This letter is not in the Wallace Papers, and I am led to believe that Wallace or his wife manufactured the quoted passage many years later, after Billy the Kid had become a celebrity. Everything in it, including the appellation “Billy the Kid,” dates from after May 11, 1879. Certainly at this time he had yet to develop such intense animosity toward the governor.

  See Susan E. Wallace to Henry L. Wallace, Fort Stanton, May 11, 1879, in Lew Wallace, Lew Wallace: An Autobiography, 2 vols. (New York and London: Harper and Bros., 1906), 2: 920–21.

  25. Mesilla Valley Independent, June 21, 1879.

  26. Mesilla News, June 21, 1879.

  27. San Miguel County, District Court Records, Criminal Case 1005, Territory v. The Kid: Keeping a Gaming Table, NMSRCA.

  28. Henry Hoyt, A Frontier Doctor, Lakeside Classics edition, ed. Doyce B. Nunis, Jr., (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons, 1979), 183–87. This incident displays all the implausibilities of the typical Ash Upson tale, but Hoyt’s credibility in other respects makes one hesitate to toss it in the bin of Upsonian fantasies. In an appendix Editor Nunis discusses the issue, showing that James’s presence in Las Vegas in July 1879 is not precluded by other evidence of his whereabouts. Under the name Thomas Howard, he and his family lived in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1875 to 1881, but he traveled extensively. The railroad had just reached Las Vegas, and he may well have been exploring possibilities. Also, according to the Las Vegas Optic, December 6, 1879, “Jessie James was a guest at Las Vegas Hot Springs, July 26th to 29th. Of course it was not generally known.”

  29. Purington to AAAG DNM, Fort Stanton, August 17, 1879, RG 93, LR, Hq. DNM, NARA (M1088, Roll 38).

  30. Frank Coe, interview with J. Evetts Haley, San Patricio, N. Mex., February 20, 1928, HHC.

  31. Las Vegas Gazette, December 28, 1880.

  12. THE RUSTLER

  1. William Wier, interview with J. Evetts Haley, Monument, N. Mex., June 22, 1937, Vandale Collection 2H482, Barker History Center, University of Texas.

  2. Quoted in Walter Noble Burns, The Saga of Billy the Kid (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1926), 185–86.

  3. The quotations of Paulita Maxwell Jaramillo are from Burns, Saga of Billy the Kid, 180–90. Burns interviewed Mrs. Jaramillo in Fort Sumner. In its first version, his account identified Mrs. Jaramillo as an object of Billy’s affections, but his publisher’s lawyers, fearing libel, forced him to rewrite it. The true story, as developed by his research, is set forth in Burns to Judge William H. Burges (El Paso), Chicago, June 3, 1926, Research Files, Mullin Collection, HHC. Burns’s findings are enlarged by the researches of Maurice G. Fulton as set forth in the Billy the Kid Binder, Mullin Collection, HHC. Fulton’s information came principally from Charles Foor, a Fort Sumner old-timer in the 1920s who had been on the scene in 1880. This documentation states that Burns’s Abrana García was really Serina Segura, who was given a false name to protect her identity. Since the 1880 census lists Abrana García, twenty-two, and her husband, Martín García, thirty-three, this seems to be in error. Nasaria Yerby is listed in the 1880 census as unmarried and the mother of a son, three, and a daughter, Florintina, aged one; see New Mexico Biographical Notes, Mullin Collection, HHC. For another, confirming source citing Foor, see Leslie Traylor, “Facts Regarding the Escape of Billy the Kid,” Frontier Times 13 (July 1936): 512. Celsa Gutierrez also presents a problem, which I can resolve only by assuming that her maiden and married names were both Gutierrez, a common Hispanic surname. The 1880 census lists her as twenty-four and the wife of Sabal Gutierrez, with a son, aged three. This census also lists Dolores and Feliciana Gutierrez, ages fifty-two and thirty-six, living with their six-year-old grandson, Candido. In later years, according to the Fulton-Mullin documentation, Candido stated that he was the son of Sabal and Celsa Gutierrez, although there is also some indication that he was born to Celsa out of wedlock. Pat Garrett’s marriage record reveals that his bride, Apolinaria Gutierrez, was also the daughter to Dolores Gutierrez and thus was Celsa’s sister. See William A. Keleher, The Fabulous Frontier: Twelve New Mexico Items, 2d ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992), 68.

  4. The pattern is well described in John L. McCarty, Maverick Town: The Story of Old Tascosa (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1946), 81ff.

  5. John Meadows, interview with J. Evetts Haley, Alam
ogordo, N. Mex., June 13, 1936, HHC. Coghlan’s story is graphically told in C. L. Sonnichsen, Tularosa: Last of the Frontier West, 2d ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1980), 245–59. See also New Mexico Biographical Notes, Mullin Collection, HHC.

  6. Las Vegas Gazette, December 28, 1880.

  7. F. Stanley, Dave Rudabaugh: Border Ruffian (Denver: World Press, 1961); Bill O’Neal, Encyclopedia of Western Gun-Fighters (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), 269–71; William A. Keleher, Violence in Lincoln County, 1869–1881: A New Mexico Item (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957), 281–82. For the escape, see Weekly New Mexican (Santa Fe), April 5 and 12, 1880.

  8. Philip J. Rasch, “He Rode with the Kid: The Life of Tom Pickett,” English Westerners Tenth Anniversary Publication (London, 1964), 11–15; O’Neal, Encyclopedia, 154–55; Las Vegas Morning Gazette, January 10, 1884; New Mexico Biographical Notes, Mullin Collection, HHC.