Billy the Kid Read online

  In personality, Henry combined good humor with a flaming, hair-trigger temper. Boldness verged on recklessness, and when provoked he could explode in deadly rage that carried no warning. Yet his sunny, cheerful nature, his openness and generosity, and his laugh-studded smile made him well liked by almost everyone. He boasted a quick mind and superior intelligence, and he could read and write.

  Because of his slight build and beardless countenance, his young years, and his appealing personality, Henry’s friends called him “the Kid.” The nickname became firmly attached during the Arizona years. “The Kid” meant Henry Antrim, or Henry McCarty, and sometimes he referred to himself as “Kid Antrim.”

  By accident or design, Kid Antrim was about to become the junior member of the most notorious outlaw gang in New Mexico.

  3

  The Outlaw

  As Tony Connor stated, his friend Henry Antrim had left Silver City never to return. His destination: Lincoln County. Thus the boy headed for eastern New Mexico and the country that would provide the scene for his wanderings for the four years remaining to him.

  Lincoln County sprawled across thirty thousand square miles of southeastern New Mexico, a vast jurisdiction the size of South Carolina claiming less than two thousand citizens. Geographically, economically, and socially, it fell into two distinct worlds: a mountain world and a plains world.

  The mountain world consisted of the Capitan, Sacramento, and Guadalupe mountains and the Sierra Blanca. Little pockets of white settlement dotted the northern ranges, leaving the Guadalupes, to the south, as the undisputed domain of Apache Indians.

  The county seat was Lincoln. It lay in the upland valley of the Rio Bonito, with the flat hump of the Capitan Mountains looming to the north and the Sierra Blanca peaks soaring to the southwest. With primitive tools, Hispanics tilled the fertile soils of the Bonito. Most of the Anglos, also farmers owning a few cattle as well, concentrated along the Ruidoso, the next stream south of the Bonito. The Ruidoso and the Bonito united to form the Hondo, which flowed out of the mountains to empty into the Pecos River.

  An adobe village of four hundred people, largely Hispanic, Lincoln extended for a mile on both sides of a single tree-shaded street, crowded on the north by the Bonito and on the south by a steep mountainside dappled with piñon and juniper. At the western edge of town stood the “big store” of L. G. Murphy & Co., the only two-story building in town. In the center of town rose the round tower, or torreon, a bastion of stone and adobe erected in 1862 for defense against Indians. Lincoln boasted no county courthouse, only a roomy adobe owned by “Squire” John B. Wilson that doubled as dance hall and, twice a year, courtroom for the itinerant district court based in Mesilla.1

  Nine miles upstream from Lincoln, Fort Stanton perched on the banks of the Bonito. Like most frontier posts, it consisted of officers’ quarters, barracks, and storehouses fronting on a rectangular parade ground. The mission of the fort’s garrison was to watch over the Mescalero Apache Indians, whose reservation and agency lay across the divide to the southwest at the forks of the Tularosa River. With the agency, the fort provided virtually the only market for the farmers and stockmen of the area.

  Although sparsely populated and remote from the territory’s main cities and travel routes, Lincoln and its environs excelled in habits of violence. The combination of whiskey and guns so prevalent throughout the West seemed particularly volatile in Lincoln County. Adding to the mix were ethnic tensions of Anglos and Hispanics, intensified by a racism that pitted Texans against “Mexicans,” whites against the “nigger soldiers” at Fort Stanton, and everyone against the Indians of the Apache reservation. Casual law enforcement and ineffective courts imposed the weakest of formal restraints on the drunken killings and maimings that had grown routine.2

  Few offenders paid for their crimes, whether murder, assault, or theft of stock. In fact, not until 1877 did Lincoln County even have a jail, and then only a hole in the ground topped by a log guardroom near the east end of town.

  The little cluster of mountain dwellers on the Bonito and the Ruidoso depended on the Mesilla Valley for supply. The road to Mesilla, 140 miles to the southwest, climbed from Fort Stanton to the pass between the Sierra Blanca and the Sacramento Mountains, then descended the Tularosa River by way of the Mescalero Apache Indian agency and Blazer’s Mills. Another little community had taken root here, where an Iowa dentist, Dr. Joseph H. Blazer, had established a sawmill and gristmill at the close of the Civil War. The road descended the Tularosa to the foot of the mountains, site of the Hispanic village of Tularosa. Just beyond, the river sank in the desert sand. Across a flat, barren desert strewn with black lava, along the edge of the glittering White Sands, and up through San Augustín Pass dividing the Organ and San Andres mountains, the traveler made his tortuous way in a journey that from Lincoln usually consumed three days.

  East of Lincoln the dark mountain wall fell away to the shimmering Pecos Plains. This was cattle country, carpeted with grama grass as far as the eye could see—“knee high on every hill and mesa,” marveled a traveler.3

  Here John Simpson Chisum reigned as the “cattle king of New Mexico.” Plain and unpretentious, with an angular, leathery face, Chisum was an affable extrovert and shrewd businessman who, at fifty-four, knew cows as few others did. He had arrived in 1867, trailing a herd of longhorns up the Goodnight-Loving Trail from Texas. By 1876 the Chisum herds had multiplied to eighty thousand head and ranged from old Fort Sumner down the Pecos 150 miles almost to the Texas line. The rich grasslands were public domain, free for the taking, but the swollen Chisum herds discouraged interlopers.

  They came anyway. Along the southern edges of Chisum country, a handful of small cowmen crept up the Pecos from Texas to contest “Uncle John’s” domination. They founded the community of Seven Rivers and began to build their own herds, mostly from Chisum “strays.” Chisum fought back, and in the spring of 1877 the feud escalated into a shooting war.4

  At the heart of the plains world stood Roswell and, nearby, Chisum’s South Spring ranch. Roswell took root in 1869, the enterprise of Van C. Smith. A colorful, convivial character, Smith had sought refuge in this remote location in an effort to conquer his addiction to gambling. He erected two large adobe buildings and named the little community Roswell, for his father.

  Roswell formed a pleasant green oasis amid the sweep of yellow plains, for no less than three streams united here to flow into the Pecos. Deep, crystal-clear, and swarming with all manner of fish, the North and South Spring rivers and the Hondo sent water coursing through a network of acequias to nourish cornfields, fruit orchards, and shady cottonwood trees. Chisum’s South Spring ranch, another oasis, lay four miles to the southeast.

  Van Smith failed to vanquish his compulsion and returned to Santa Fe to open a gambling house. He thus lost his chance to be remembered as the “Father of Roswell.” That title went instead to Joseph C. Lea. A Confederate veteran full of shrewd ambition, “Captain” Lea bought the Smith property in 1877.

  Lea’s store clerk, and also Roswell’s postmaster, was Marshall Ashmun Upson. “Intellectual handyman” for the surrounding area, Ash Upson was a restless journalist who loved words, people, and the bottle, in reverse order. He would meet Henry Antrim for the first time in October 1877 and ultimately decisively influence the world’s image of the young outlaw.5

  As Lincoln looked to Mesilla for its window on the outside world, Roswell and Seven Rivers looked northward, 160 miles up the Pecos River, to Las Vegas.

  Las Vegas rested on a scenic fault, with the Great Plains rolling off to the east and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rising in rugged splendor on the west. The remnant of the Santa Fe Trail linked Las Vegas with the advancing end of track of the Santa Fe Railroad in Colorado, and lumbering freight wagons pulled by oxen drew up in a plaza barren of vegetation and fronted on four sides by nondescript adobes. From the storehouses of the great mercantile firms such as the Ilfield Company, merchants from down the Pecos loaded their wag
ons with hardware, dry goods, firearms and ammunition, and groceries. Judging from appearances, an eastern reporter concluded, Las Vegas “certainly must date back to the birth of Christ.” The town boasted “the identical ass on which Jesus rode into Jerusalem,” he added. “We saw it grazing just outside the city.”6

  Roughly midway between Las Vegas and Roswell, Fort Sumner stood on the east bank of the Pecos. Adobe barracks, residences, and storehouses arranged around a parade ground, the fort had been established during the Civil War to watch over the Navajo Indians colonized at the Bosque Redondo (Round Grove of Trees) after their conquest by the army. Government beef contracts for the Navajos and their guardian bluecoats had first drawn John Chisum and other Texas cowmen into New Mexico. After the Navajos went back to their homeland in 1868, Fort Sumner lost its mission and was abandoned.

  Lucien Maxwell, who had recently sold the vast Maxwell Land Grant, bought Fort Sumner from the government in 1871. Some twenty-five or thirty Hispanic families accompanied him from his previous headquarters at Cimarron and settled in the buildings of the fort or built little adobes nearby. They farmed the irrigated fields abandoned by the Indians and ran sheep and cattle. Anglo cattlemen began to drift into the area in the middle 1870s, mingling their herds with the sheep pastured by Hispanics. Lucien died in 1875, but his son Pete—Pedro—carried on the Maxwell interest. Although a family enterprise, the fort served settlers and travelers as a town, complete with residences, stores, and saloons.7

  Such was eastern New Mexico in 1877, when Kid Antrim first forded the Rio Grande to put his Arizona past behind him. In Lincoln County it was a volatile land, even then verging on explosion. To the north, in San Miguel County, it was a land of lively commerce verging on dramatic transformation as the railroad drew closer. Henry Antrim would come to know this land and its people intimately, and he would leave a lasting mark on both.

  On October 1, 1877, a band of nine outlaws slipped into the Pass Coal Camp in the Burro Mountains, not far from Richard Knight’s ranch, and made off with three horses. Included in the group were several of New Mexico’s foremost desperadoes: Jesse Evans, Frank Baker, Bob Martin, George “Buffalo Bill” Spawn, Nicholas Provencio, and one Ponciano. The next day, making their way through Cooke’s Canyon on the road from Silver City to Mesilla, the thieves met a traveler named Carpenter. He recognized one of the horsemen and later named him: Henry Antrim.8

  Thus the Kid had teamed up with the most notorious gang of outlaws in southern New Mexico. Evans and his men formed a loose coalition of bandits whose numbers varied between ten and thirty and whose depredations, aimed chiefly at horses and cattle, ranged from Silver City on the west to the Pecos River on the east. Sometimes they operated as one band, more often as several. They called themselves “The Boys.” Albert J. Fountain, editor of the Mesilla Valley Independent, labeled them “The Banditti,” and he waged a strident crusade against them that provoked first their ire and later their retribution.

  The most prominent and professionally talented of The Boys was their leader, Jesse Evans—“Captain” Evans, as Editor Fountain scornfully branded him. Of medium stature and slight build, with gray eyes and light hair and complexion, Evans was about twenty-five in 1877. He pursued his calling with boldness, arrogance, rapacity, callousness toward his victims, and contempt for anyone who interfered or even protested, including the law. Yet he also projected an air of relaxed insolence and wry wit that some thought charming.

  Evans had come to New Mexico from Texas in 1872 and gone to work for John Chisum on the Pecos. The cattle baron’s horse remudas had suffered grievously from raids of the Mescalero Apache Indians, based on their reservation high in the mountains to the west. Determined to retaliate in kind, Chisum sent his cowboys on systematic plundering forays against the Indian herds. Evans participated.

  Thus versed in the art of rustling, in 1875 Evans drifted westward to the Rio Grande and landed in the Mesilla Valley, where he found work on the ranch of John Kinney, three miles north of Mesilla. In Kinney, he found also a kindred soul, destined for a stature in the gallery of southwestern outlaws even greater than his own. A ruddy-faced New Englander, with brown hair and mustache, Kinney was about Evans’s size, but five years older. During a stint in the U.S. cavalry, he had served at Fort Selden, fifteen miles north of Las Cruces, and on his discharge as a first sergeant in 1873 he had returned to go into the cattle business. For Kinney, the cattle business meant the same as it did for Evans, and by 1877 the Kinney ranch had acquired a reputation, as Fountain declared in the Independent, as “the headquarters and rendezvous for all the evil doers in the county.”9

  The offenses of both Evans and Kinney went beyond mere rustling. On New Year’s Eve of 1876, Kinney, Evans, and several friends got into a brawl with some soldiers at a dance hall near Las Cruces, and Kinney was badly beaten. The vanquished withdrew, only to reappear at the doors and windows with blazing six-shooters. A soldier and an unlucky civilian who happened to be in the line of fire died instantly, and three soldiers were severely wounded, one mortally. No charges were brought against the murderers. As the victims’ commanding officer reported, “It is much safer to kill a soldier in New Mexico than to be caught gambling, or defrauding the revenue.”10

  Within days of the New Year’s Eve massacre, Evans got into another shooting affray. Accused, with two others, of putting six bullets into Quirino Fletcher on the main street of Las Cruces, he stood trial for murder. In that land of lax frontier justice, however, juries rarely convicted, and the defendants went free.11

  By this time, Evans had his own gang. He undoubtedly continued his association with Kinney, who occasionally participated in the exploits of The Boys. They in turn used the Kinney ranch as a refuge, as Fountain charged. Evans’s field of operations, however, extended all the way across southern New Mexico, whereas Kinney seems rarely to have strayed very far from his Mesilla Valley ranch.

  Into this heady environment, in late September 1877, ventured Henry Antrim. Accused of murder in Arizona, he doubtless felt that he had found a suitable milieu and a congenial set of associates for the next stage of his life. Even if Arizona had taught him more about life than came to most teenagers, he must have been an impressionable adolescent, susceptible to the influences of the older men with whom he had cast his lot.

  Typically, they and their kindred sported several aliases. Henry Antrim still went by his stepfather’s name, and he brought with him from Arizona the nickname of “Kid.” With his youth, his appearance, and his behavior, Kid Antrim fit the part. Increasingly, however, he adopted an alias of his own: William H. Bonney. Where that name came from remains a mystery, despite diligent efforts to find a Bonney family connection. At least one boyhood friend remembered his schoolmates using it in Silver City.12 Within a matter of weeks, Henry Antrim became Billy Bonney, with Antrim regarded as an alias. People still called him the Kid, but not for another three years would anyone know him as Billy the Kid.

  The escapades of the Evans gang in the two weeks following the theft of the horses at the Pass Coal Camp reveal the influences now playing on Billy Bonney and dramatize the values of his new world. Arizona had given him a taste of this world. In October 1877 he swallowed a heavy dose.13

  After meeting Carpenter in Cooke’s Canyon, Evans and his eight followers, including the Kid, continued on the road toward Mesilla. Seven miles east of old Fort Cummings, they stopped a westbound stagecoach. Assured by the driver that he carried no bullion, Evans replied, “Well, we’ll let you pass this time,” though he insisted that they have a drink together before the gang rode on. There were still nine men, according to the driver, each armed with two six-shooters and a Winchester rifle and draped with two belts full of cartridges.

  At each of the three roadhouses along the way to Mesilla, The Boys partook of food and liquid refreshments, then told the proprietor to “chalk it up.” “They desired to have it distinctly understood,” reported the Independent, “that they were ‘gentlemen,’ and did not pr
opose to be insulted by having beggarly tavern keepers thrust bills under their noses.” At one of the stops, they found a copy of the Independent, containing one of Fountain’s tirades against the “banditti.” Irritated, Evans announced that he intended to present Fountain with “a free pass to hell.”14

  On October 5, at Mule Springs, three more of Evans’s men joined the group. They had stolen two horses at Santa Barbara, thirty-three miles up the valley from Mesilla, and had a six-man posse on their trail. When the possemen closed in, however, they found themselves outnumbered and outgunned. They carried only pistols, whereas the fugitives had rifles. The outlaws fired about forty shots, then attacked, drove the posse into a canyon, and rode off with “a shout of derision.”15

  Their number still further augmented, to seventeen, The Boys crossed the Rio Grande and took the road to the east, into Lincoln County. At Tularosa on October 9, they staged a big drunk, shot up the town and terrorized the residents, then proceeded up the road to the home of a man named Sylvester. He had once testified against one of The Boys, so they shot his dog and riddled the house with bullets. As Sylvester frantically shouted for his tormentors to spare his wife and children, they replied with more shots and shouts of drunken laughter, but apparently hurt no one.

  Farther up the road, The Boys paused for provisions at the store of John Ryan near the Mescalero Apache Indian agency. Here, Evans gallantly entrusted to Ryan a horse previously stolen from Kate Godfroy, daughter of the Indian agent. He had heard that Kate was brokenhearted over the loss of her horse, Evans said, and he wanted Ryan to return it with an affectionate kiss. (It had been so badly used that it was no longer serviceable, commented the Independent.)

  That night, near the mountain summit, The Boys continued their partying. For two travelers who chanced by in a buggy, the group turned out in mounted formation to parade along the road in mock honor. The two men were John H. Riley and James Longwell.