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The Curious Career of Billy the Kid
| Article
# : |
19632 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
2,456 Words |
| Author
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Gregory McNamee
Gregory McNamee often travels in Mexico. He is the author of
The Return of Richard Nixon and six other books. |
For most of the nineteenth century, the American West was a fairly tranquil place. Hollywood notwithstanding, for every gunfighter there were a hundred stockbrokers, and for every outlaw, ten thousand farmers. In cities like Denver, Seattle, or Albuquerque few citizens owned guns, or had need to. The decades long wars against the Native Americans were staged in remote corners of the country, and, as for bad men, few but the local tall-tale spinner had ever seen one.
Lincoln County, New Mexico, was an exception. For three decades beginning in the 1860s, the sparsely settled pocket of south-central New Mexico Territory saw more than its share of violence: Apache raids, crimes fanned by racial hatred between Anglo and Hispanic, and a business rivalry that would lead to the so-called Lincoln County War. Against this backdrop of bloodshed many legends arose, but only one that has endured: that of William Bonney, alias Billy the Kid.
Born Henry McCarty
He was born between 1857 and 1860, perhaps in New York, perhaps not. The son of Irish immigrants who had fled the Potato Famine, his given name was Henry McCarty. In 1873, his widowed mother moved to Santa Fe, where she married another Irish settler, William Antrim, and her son took his stepfather's name. The new family moved southwest to Silver City, hard by the Western Apache's mountain strongholds hoping to find their fortunes in the mines.
Instead, William Antrim and his wife sickened and died. For the next year, the orphaned Henry skulked about Silver City, committing petty thefts and gambling. Within a year, the bright, formerly well-behaved lad found himself in jail for having stolen a bushel of clothes from the town's Chinese laundry. Rather than await trial, Henry Antrim, slender and short for his age, shinnied up a chimney that opened into his cell and disappeared into the night.
He made his way across the border into Arizona and sought honest work, finding it in the Sulphur Springs Valley laboring as a wrangler on Henry Hooker's ranch. For a time things seemed to be going well for "the Kid," as the older cowboys called him. No one asked questions, and most looked the other way whenever he stole a saddle, a blanket, even a horse from Fort Grant, the nearby army post. When soldiers eventually caught him in the act, he managed to escape northward to the gold and copper mines at Globe, Arizona. What Kid Antrim, as he sometimes called himself, did there is lost to
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