The Mammoth Book of the West (25 page)

Such was the simmering country into which William H. Bonney, Billy the Kid, rode in September 1877.

Born Henry McCarty in the immigrant Irish slums of New York in 1859, the Kid moved west to Kansas during the Civil War. After the Kid’s father died in Coffeyville, his tubercular laundress mother moved on to the healthier, drier climes of Colorado. The first time the Kid entered the official records was on 1 March 1873. On that day Henry McCarty stood in Santa Fe’s First Presbyterian Church with his brother Joseph, as witnesses to the marriage of their mother, Catherine McCarty, to one William Henry Harrison Antrim, a sometime prospector and barkeep.

In the raw mining settlement of Silver City the Antrims built themselves a log cabin home near the bridge which spanned Big Ditch. The Kid had an ordinary boyhood. His teacher, Miss Mary Richards, remembered him as being “no more a problem in school than any other boy.” Among his favourite pastimes were singing and dancing, and with other boys he formed a minstrel troupe
which played to appreciative audiences at Morrill’s Opera House. His other passion was reading. In the few years left to him, the Kid would read voraciously.

On 16 September 1874 Catherine Antrim succumbed finally to the tuberculosis mining into her. Henry was 14. With the removal of parental discipline, the Kid began to err towards petty crime. One dark night, the Kid accompanied a local thief, Sombrero Jack, on a raid on the local Chinese laundry. The duo absconded with a bundle of washing. Henry’s part in the deed was soon discovered and Sheriff Harvey W. Whitehill locked the Kid up. Displaying the cunning that would distinguish his later career, the Kid persuaded the sheriff to let him have use of the corridor outside his cell. Left unguarded for half an hour, the Kid squeezed up a chimney and out of gaol. In what would be the first of the Kid’s many press notices, the escape was related by the local newspaper,
Grant County Herald
, with some sarcasm:

Henry McCarty, who was arrested on Thursday and committed to jail to await the action of the grand jury, upon charge of stealing clothes from Charley Sun and Sam Chung, celestials, sans cue, sans Joss sticks, escaped from prison yesterday through the chimney. It’s believed that Henry was simply the tool of “Sombrero Jack”, who done the stealing whilst Henry done the hiding. Jack has skinned out.

The Kid also “skinned out”. At 15 he was now officially a fugitive from the law. Alone, he struck a course towards Mount Graham, Arizona, where he worked as a teamster and cowboy. These occupations equipped him with the necessary lore for life on the violent frontier, including the handling of a pistol and rifle. The Kid’s tender years, though, did not properly allow him to do a man’s work on
a ranch. So, on being discharged as a cowpoke, he drifted into cattle rustling and horse theft. On 17 November 1876 the Kid stole a horse too many, the mount of a cavalry sergeant. He was tracked down and placed in Camp Grant’s guardhouse. The army, like Sheriff Whitehill before it, discovered that the Kid was hard to imprison. He escaped on the same day he was confined, 25 March 1877.

By high summer the Kid was back in the Camp Grant area. According to a ranch acquaintance who saw him arrive, the Kid was “dressed like a ‘country jake’, with ‘store pants’ on and shoes instead of boots. He wore a six gun stuffed in his trousers.”

If the Kid had the air of a strutting youth looking for trouble, he soon found it. Frank P. Cahill was a civilian blacksmith attached to Camp Grant, who was nicknamed “Windy” because of his overbearing manner. Windy Cahill used to delight in tormenting the Kid, ruffling his hair, and slapping his face. After a card game on 17 August 1877, the Kid and Windy became involved in a quarrel, with Windy calling the Kid “a pimp” and the Kid replying that Windy was “a sonofabitch”. Cahill wrestled the Kid down, whereupon the Kid pulled Cahill’s gun and shot him through the stomach. Windy Cahill died the next day.

A coroner’s inquest decided that the killing of Frank P. Cahill “was criminal and unjustifiable, and that Henry Antrim, alias Kid, is guilty thereof.”

The Kid was arrested as he ate breakfast at his hotel. Before he could be brought for trial, he escaped.

The Kid returned to the New Mexico he had fled two years previously as a juvenile thief. By the time of his return the Kid, now 17, had taken on the physique and personality that he would retain until the end of his short life. Wiry and lithe, he weighed 135 pounds and stood 5 feet 7 inches tall. Everyone noticed his blue eyes and
wavy brown hair, while most found his buck-teeth attractive rather than ugly. From the hands of the ranches around Camp Grant he had learned the Code of the West, how to use a firearm, the carousing lifestyle of the cowboy (the Kid, although only a modest imbiber of tobacco and drink, was an inveterate card player, singer and girl-chaser), and gunmanship. He was an accomplished rustler, and somewhere along the line had picked up fluent Spanish.

When the Kid first entered Lincoln County, he hired himself out to whichever side in the growing conflict was willing to pay him. Usually he rode with “The Boys”, a gang led by ex-Chisum hand Jesse Evans, the speciality of which was raiding Chisum’s scattered herds on behalf of Lawrence Murphy. Tiring of “The Boys”, the Kid – who now used the alias “William H. Bonney” – left their ranks and took a job working on Frank Coe’s small ranch on the Ruidoso. Frank Coe noted his easy charm and his preoccupation with guns. “He spent all his spare time cleaning his six-shooter and practising shooting,” recalled Coe years later. “He could take two six-shooters, loaded and cocked, one in each hand . . . and twirl one in one direction and the other in the other direction, at the same time.”

Among the Coes’ neighbours on the Ruidoso was Dick Brewer. As well as managing his own spread, Brewer acted as ranch foreman to John Tunstall. It was probably through Brewer that the Kid was introduced to Tunstall, and hired by him as one of his cowboys-cum-gunslingers. Although Tunstall personally abhorred violence he was realistic enough to see that gunplay might be necessary in the feud with the House. Employing cowboy-gunfighters proved expensive. “It has cost a lot of money,” Tunstall wrote in a letter to his munificent London parents, “for men expect to be well-paid for going on the war path.”

The Kid was recruited to the Tunstall war party in late January 1878, and formed a deep liking for the cultured
Englishman. “He was the only man,” said the Kid of Tunstall, “that ever treated me like I was free-born and white.” The Kid’s idolization of Tunstall would be a key factor in the blood-spilling that led to the Lincoln County War.

The War was initiated at first light on the morning of 18 February 1878, when a posse led by pro-Murphy sheriff William Brady swept into Tunstall’s ranch. Brady had an order to retrieve in cattle what Murphy considered was owed him in the embezzlement case. The posse included several bandits specially recruited for the occasion, one of whom was Jesse Evans.

Finding Tunstall absent, the posse decided to hunt him down. That evening, as dusk was falling, the posse caught up with Tunstall and several of his men on the Lincoln road. Tunstall’s party were ambushed as they breached a hill on the road. The Englishman was killed by a rifle round to the chest in some scrub just off the trail.

The official version of the killing, as reported by Sheriff Brady, was that the Englishman had been shot resisting arrest. Billy the Kid, along with the other Tunstall men, watching from the side of the trail, saw the killing as murder.

The Kid was deeply affected by Tunstall’s death, telling Frank Coe: “I never expect to let up until I kill the last man who helped kill Tunstall, or die in the act myself.”

McSween, to whom leadership of the Tunstall faction now fell, had little appetite for an armed fight with Murphy. Initially, therefore, McSween tried to have Tunstall’s murderers dealt with by legal means. Little cooperation could be expected from Sheriff Brady, so McSween persuaded a Lincoln justice of the peace, John B.
Wilson, to issue warrants for the arrest of the killers. On 20 February Atancio Martinez, the town constable, accompanied by a conspicuously pistolled Billy Bonney and another Tunstall hand, Fred Waite, went to the Murphy store to serve warrants on Billy Morton and Jesse Evans for the murder of the Englishman. Sheriff Brady, by chance in the store, refused to let Martinez serve the warrants. Instead Brady arbitrarily and arrogantly arrested the Kid and Waite (“Because I had the power,” he told complainants). After several days the prisoners were released, but the Kid would never forgive or forget the humiliation he received at Brady’s hands.

McSween, meanwhile, departed town. Sheriff Brady’s action had shown the futility of the lawyer’s approach. Almost all the law enforcement machinery in Lincoln and its environs was in the pay of the Murphy faction.

With McSween’s departure, a number of Tunstall men, led by Dick Brewer and Billy Bonney, declared themselves the “Regulators”. Bound together by a loyalty oath they called the “iron-clad”, the Regulators were a voluntary vigilante organization determined to serve the warrants – forcibly, if necessary – against Tunstall’s killers.

Top of the Regulators’ wanted list was posse member Billy Morton, believed by them to be the actual slayer of Tunstall. The Regulators captured Morton, along with Frank Baker, a henchman of Jesse Evans’s, after a chase along the Pecos. The Kid wanted to dispense immediate justice. “Dick,” said the Kid, “we’ve got two of them and they are the worst of the lot. Let’s avenge John Tunstall by killing them right now.”

Brewer persuaded the Kid that the two men should go to trial, and the party started back to Lincoln with the prisoners. They stopped at John Chisum’s South Spring River ranch on 8 March, where Billy went fishing with Chisum’s 14-year-old nephew, Will.

While Billy was fishing, news reached the Regulators that the House had sent out a posse to apprehend them. The next day the Regulators resumed their journey to Lincoln, but took a back trail up Blackwater Creek. There, at a site later called Dead Man’s Draw, Morton and Baker were shot. Believing that the posse would free Morton and Baker, the Regulators chose to kill them instead. The victims received eleven bullets apiece, one for each Regulator present, suggesting ritual execution. A Tunstall hand who was adjudged too friendly with Murphy’s men was shot as a spy.

More killing followed on the broiling morning of Fool’s Day, 1 April. The Kid and five other Regulators hid behind an adobe wall next to Tunstall’s corral in Lincoln. As Sheriff Brady and four deputies came into sight, the Regulators suddenly rose and fired their Winchesters, sending a fusillade of bullets down the street. Brady died instantly. A deputy, Hindman, was also killed. The other lawmen managed to scramble to safety. A wild round caught Justice Wilson in the buttocks as he hoed onions in his garden.

Three days later at Blazer’s Mill, the Regulators cornered Andrew L. “Buckshot” Roberts, a Murphy gunman and a member of the posse which had killed Tunstall. The Kid’s homicidal reputation was obviously growing, for when Roberts was called upon to surrender he laughed, “Surrender? Never, while I’m alive. Kid Antrim is with you and he would kill me on sight.”

Roberts proved to be a one-man army. Though shot through the gut he made a stand in a doorway which wounded Regulators Charlie Bowdre, George Coe and John Middleton. Calculating that Roberts had run out of ammunition, the Kid impetuously rushed him, only to be repulsed by a Winchester butt to the stomach. Roberts forced a way into the room behind, found a Springfield
and ammunition and carried on the battle. At this, Dick Brewer decided to take a sniping shot at Roberts from behind a woodpile, only to have the top of his head blown away. The Regulators, knowing that Roberts must die from his stomach wound (as he did), chose discretion, and retreated. With Brewer’s demise, the Kid became the sole leader of the Regulators.

The War carried on throughout the summer of 1878, Murphy cowboys and Regulators meeting in running skirmishes across the range country. The Kid, however, also found the time to woo Chisum’s niece, Sallie, giving her gifts of candy hearts and an Indian tobacco sack.

The relationship, however, had little chance to develop. Alexander McSween, tiring of the War’s indecisive course, determined on a final, climactic battle. Accompanied by nearly 50 Regulators, McSween slipped into Lincoln on the night of 14 July and deployed his forces – many of them Hispanic friends of the Kid’s – at strategic points around town. McSween himself, his wife Sue, the Kid and 14 other Regulators barricaded themselves in McSween’s house on Lincoln’s lone street.

The so-called Battle of Lincoln began the next day. Murphy’s force, strengthened by cowboys from the Seven Rivers country and hired guns of outlaw John McKinney, surrounded Regulator positions and began blasting away. For three days the fighting continued, with neither side gaining an advantage, but on the morning of 19 July the rattle of gunfire in Lincoln was interrupted by the sound of bugles. Lieutenant-Colonel Nathan A. M. Dudley, four of his officers and 35 enlisted men drew up outside McSween’s door. With them was a Gatling gun and a mountain howitzer, which Dudley aimed at Regulator strongpoints.

Certain defeat before him, McSween sent out a letter offering to surrender to the cavalry. Dudley refused, insisting that McSween’s men enter the custody of the legally
appointed sheriff, George “Dad” Peppin. Since Peppin, a Murphy supporter, was leading the attack on them, the Regulators balked at this.

While the parlaying was taking place, some Murphy men crept to the rear of the McSween house and set the kitchen afire. Although the fire burned slowly, eating a room at a time, it defeated every attempt of those inside to extinguish it.

The mood of the Regulators sank, with the exception of the Kid. Recalled Sue McSween later: “The Kid was lively and McSween was sad. McSween sat with his head down, and the Kid shook him and told him to get up, that they were going to make a break.” The Kid suggested to Mrs McSween that she surrender, saying “A dress ain’t very good to run in.” Not wishing to impede the others, she agreed.