by Ron Hansen
An Irish mail contractor who was friendly with the Kid shoved his way into the jailhouse with packages of new gabardine suits and other attire for the prisoners because he thought it only right that the notorious ruffians face execution in high style. Their ankle shackles and handcuffs were chiseled off so they could change out of foul clothing that soon would be incinerated.
Because he was about the same age and seemed agreeable, Lute Wilcox, the city editor for the Las Vegas Gazette, was granted an interview by a chipper Kid, who found himself in his element as he joked and chatted with somewhat terrified bystanders.
“You appear to take it easy,” Wilcox said.
“Well, what’s the use of looking on the gloomy side of everything? But I guess you could say this laugh’s on me.” He glanced around at his surroundings and asked, “Is the jail in Santa Fe any better? This is a terrible place to hold a fellow in.”
Sheriff Romero told him in Spanish there was nothing better in store for him there.
And the Kid just shrugged. “I guess I’ll put up with what I have to for the time being.”
Wilcox wrote, “He was the main attraction of the show, and as he stood there, stamping his boots on the stone floor to keep his feet warm, he was the hero of the ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ romance which this paper has been running in serial form for six weeks or more.”
With some surprise and pride, the Kid said, “There was a big crowd gazing at me in the plaza, wasn’t there? Well, perhaps some of them will think me half man now instead of some sort of wild animal.”
Wilcox wrote, “He did look human, indeed, but there was nothing very mannish about him in appearance, for he looked and acted a mere school boy, with a frank, open countenance and the traditional silky fuzz on his upper lip. Clear blue eyes, with a roguish snap about them; light hair and complexion. He is, in all, quite a handsome looking fellow, and he has agreeable and winning ways.”
Sheriff Garrett and his deputies shifted the prisoners to the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad depot in East Las Vegas on Tuesday, December 28, and the Kid leaned out an open window of a yellow smoking car to affably continue his interview with Lute Wilcox, hints of self-pity coloring his tone as he said, “I don’t blame you for writing of me as your editors have. You had to believe others’ stories. But then I don’t know as anyone on the outside would ever believe anything good of me anyway.” Reckoning what he’d later claim in a courtroom, he lied in telling Wilcox, “I wasn’t ever the leader of any gang—I was for Billy all the time. About that Los Portales cave, it was the start of a property I owned with Charlie Bowdre. I heard a stage line would run by there and I wanted it to become a way station. But I have found to my sorrow there are certain men who won’t let me live in the Territory, and so I was going to leave for Old Mexico. I haven’t stolen any stock. I made my living by gambling. But some forces wouldn’t let me settle down. If they had, I wouldn’t be here today.” He held up his handcuffed wrists in illustration as he said, “Chisum got me into all this trouble and then wouldn’t help me out of it.”
The Kid seemed willing to go on with his complaints, but he was distracted by hundreds of seething Mexicans crowding around and rocking the railroad car as they shouted for Dirty Dave Rudabaugh to be handed over and hung strangling from the windmill in the plaza.
Rudabaugh sank down in his seat, like a knob of butter melting on a skillet.
Sheriff Garrett sidled down the aisle of the railcar and crouched next to the Kid. “We have a situation here. Could be I’ll have to give you a gun. Would you promise me you won’t try to escape?”
The Kid sighed, but said, “You have my word. Dang it.”
The sheriff then went out to the platform between the railway cars and shouted, “I have promised these men safe passage to Santa Fe! It is my duty as a federal marshal to preserve and protect them!”
Sheriff Romero was below near the knuckle coupler. Looking up at the tall man, he told Garrett, “We have chase the engineer off, so you not goin anywheres. We no care if you take the Billies. Rudabaugh only we wants.”
Garrett’s right hand rested on the hilt of his Colt .45 Peacemaker as he glared down and dared Sheriff Romero with “Then why don’t you try to take him?”
Romero considered both the offer and its consequences for half a minute, and then he and his frightened delegation slunk away. Garrett told Barney Mason, “They look like a covey of hard-backed turtles sliding off the banks of the Pecos.”
Seeing the still-furious ruckus outside, a railroad postal inspector hurried through a dining car to get to Garrett, telling him he’d earlier worked as a railroad engineer, “But my lungs couldn’t handle the soot and smoke.”
Garrett seemed to wonder about the relevance.
“What I’m saying is I could get you out of Las Vegas real fast.”
“Good. Go do it.”
The Kid watched as the postal inspector snaked his way through the mob to get to the locomotive. “This is exciting!” he told Lute Wilcox. “It’s my first train ride!”
And suddenly the locomotive’s iron driving wheels screeched as the throttle was pulled fully open, roughly jerking the passenger cars west. The Kid tilted out his window to grandly wave his hat to the Gazette reporter and shout back, “Adíos, Lute! Call on me in Santa Fe!” And then he held on to his passenger seat between his knees as the train got close to a thrilling fifty miles per hour.
* * *
The Kid made the front page of the Chicago Daily Tribune on December 29, when it named “Billy the Kid” as the leader of “the notorious gang of outlaws composed of about 25 men who have for the past six months overrun Eastern New Mexico, murdering and committing other deeds of outlawry.”
Somehow the Illustrated Police News in Boston soon got hold of the 1880 ferrotype of the Kid and engraved the image in its pages in the first national portrait of the “Boy Chief of New Mexico Outlaws and Cattle Thieves.”
In Santa Fe, the gloomy adobe jail was at the corner of Water Street and Bridge Street, a quarter mile southwest of the Governor’s Palace, and because of his fame as an escape artist, the Kid was confined to a windowless stone basement cell with multiple jailers on watch. Sheriff Garrett was released from his custodial duties as soon as the captives were locked up, and he returned to Lincoln to impatiently await his five-hundred-dollar reward. The governor was in the East again and would not get back until February, but the Kid’s jailers gave no hint of that, letting him mail a plaintive one-sentence note to Lew Wallace saying,
I would like to see you for a few moments if you can spare the time.
Because of his celebrity, though, the Kid was seen by a host of others, including Miguel Antonio Otero, Jr., who was just one month older and in 1897 would become the first Hispanic governor of New Mexico. With nothing much to do, the Kid took up smoking for a few days, and Otero brought him gifts of cigarette papers and Old Kentucky tobacco, as well as Wunderlee candy corn, Whitman’s chocolates, and Fleer’s Chiclets chewing gum.
Years later Governor Otero wrote in a memoir, “I liked the Kid very much, and nothing would have pleased me more than to have witnessed his escape. He was unfortunate in starting out in life, and became a victim of circumstances. I had been told that Billy had an ungovernable temper, however I never saw evidence of it; he was always in a pleasant humor when I saw him—laughing, sprightly, and good-natured.”
Judge Ira E. Leonard visited his client in January but just engaged in small talk about his recent move to Lincoln while saying he’d tell the Kid his legal strategy for the forthcoming trial when he returned from the East later that month. The lawyer failed to fulfill his promise.
Still jailed in Santa Fe on March 2, 1881, the Kid wrote to the governor again, claiming,
I have some letters which date back two years, and there are Parties who are very anxious to get them but I shall not dispose of them until I see you, that is, if you will come immediately.
Enticing as those secret letters would seem
to have been, they were probably just a fiction.
Hearing nothing from a governor whose office was just three blocks away, the Kid sent another letter on March 4.
Dear Sir, I wrote you a little note the day before yesterday but have received no answer. I expect you have forgotten what you promised me, this month two years ago, but I have not and I think you had ought to have come and seen me as I requested you to. I have done everything that I promised you I would and you have done nothing that you promised me. It looks to me like I am getting left in the cold. I am not treated right by Sheriff Sherman as he lets any stranger with curiosity see me, but will not let in a single one of my friends, not even an attorney. I guess they mean to send me up without giving me a show but they will have a hard time doing it. I am not entirely without friends in New Mexico. I shall expect to see you some time today. Patiently waiting I am truly yours, respectfully, Wm. H. Bonney.
The Kid could not have known that March 4, the date of the inauguration of the twentieth President of the United States, James Abram Garfield, was also the date that Governor Lew Wallace tendered his official letter of resignation to the president, his fame as a novelist having earned him the grander job of Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople. Handed the Kid’s latest letter, Wallace scoffed in his reading and returned it to his secretary, saying, “Would you hurt a man keenest, strike at his self-love.”
The first of the gang’s trials featured Dave Rudabaugh being convicted for robbing the United States Post Office when he was still a policeman in Las Vegas. Condemned to a ninety-nine-year prison sentence for that offense, he was then sent east to Las Vegas to be prosecuted in another trial for his murder of the jailer Lino Valdez, at which he was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. While waiting for execution in a decrepit Las Vegas jail, in December 1881 Rudabaugh managed to escape with six other prisoners by hacking a hole through the deteriorating adobe wall of their cell with dinner knives and spoons. He fled west to Arizona, where he hired on with the Clanton gang in their war against Wyatt Earp and his brothers, joining in the killing of Morgan Earp and in the effort to kill Virgil Earp before he skinned out for Old Mexico. Working as a despised vaquero and rustler there, Rudabaugh got into a gunfight over a card game in Chihuahua, killing two men and injuring another before he himself was shot dead in his thirty-first year and had his miserable, psychotic, unclean head sawed off with a machete. It was displayed on a high pole for three weeks before wheeling vultures finally picked it clean.
On January 21, Billie Wilson had been arraigned for robbery and passing counterfeit currency in Santa Fe, but Judge Warren Bristol found that some paperwork was not filed by another judge on time and he declared a mistrial. Wilson, though, was still held for further prosecution, and on March 27 he was sent with the Kid for trial in Mesilla, the shackled pair being escorted by five guards on an Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe train that had its deadhead in Rincon, about 250 miles to the south.
Just a day earlier the Kid had sent his fourth and final letter to Lew Wallace, who was being replaced as governor by Lionel Allen Sheldon, a three-term congressman from Louisiana.
Dear Sir, for the last time I ask. Will you keep your promise? I start below tomorrow. Send answer by bearer. Yours respectfully. W. Bonney.
Wallace failed to answer, and when a journalist noted that “Billy the Kid appears to be looking to you to save his neck,” Wallace smiled as he said, “Yes, but I can’t see how a wild fellow like him should expect any clemency from a faithful civil servant.”
* * *
Sitting beside the Kid in a wooden passenger car on the route to Mesilla was Deputy Marshal Tony Neis of Santa Fe, and just opposite him with a shotgun across his tree-trunk thighs was Deputy Marshal Ameredith R. B. “Bob” Olinger of Lincoln, whose floor-mop hair was as long as Samson’s. Born in 1850, he’d grown up, like Billy, in Indiana and Kansas, and followed his older brother, Wallace Olinger, to Seven Rivers, making do as a cattle detective and poker cheat, finding a mentor in Jimmy Dolan, hunting counterfeiters and Regulators, and joining in the siege of Alexander McSween’s house before being commissioned, at Jimmy Dolan’s urging, as a deputy marshal for Lincoln County. He invented the nickname Pecos Bob, but no one called him that. A Las Vegas editor once praised him as “the tall sycamore of Seven Rivers,” but more characteristic was a Texas Ranger’s assessment that he was “the meanest man in New Mexico,” and there was Pat Garrett’s own warning that the cold-blooded Olinger “was born a murderer at heart. I never camped out with him that I was not vigilant lest he harm me. But we had to use for deputies such as we could get.”
Along the way to Rincon, Bob Olinger asked Tony Neis, “You notice little Billy won’t look me in the eye?”
“I did.”
“Hates me is why. A few years ago Apaches swiped his horse and boots and he was famished and afoot for days. Heiskell and Ma’am Jones let him get well over to their Seven Rivers homestead. The Joneses was nine sons! Each of em rustlers. Was John Jones your age?” Olinger asked the Kid. “Heard you’d do chores with him and hunt or whatever.”
The Kid said nothing.
Olinger told Neis, “I find it strange that Johnny was on our side during the McSween besiegement, but him and the Kid still stayed friends.”
The Kid said, “Johnny was just dirt poor and getting paid for it. He didn’t have no dog in the fight.”
“Well, a few months after the big killing I was sharing a room at Lewis Paxton’s ranch, me with Milo Pierce, a justice of the peace. And here Johnny Jones rides up and confesses to Milo that he got hot under the collar with John Beckwith over some such and he was so very sorry but he ended up killing his friend. Wanted to turn hisself in. ‘Likely self-defense, wasn’t it?’ Milo says, and I know Jones is for sure getting off. So I invoked some frontier justice and fired a ball into Johnny’s throat. There he was, stunned and drowning on his own blood, making sounds like coffee percolating, then he fell and lost all sense of hisself on the floor. Was funny to see. Looked like a fish with his flopping and twitching. Took him no more’n half a minute to bleed out.”
The Kid filled in, “And I swore to the Joneses that I’d get even.”
Olinger grinned at Neis. “You can see how fraid I am.”
The Santa Fe deputy marshal said, “And now I hafta forget this conversation ever happened.”
* * *
The final forty miles along the Rio Grande to Mesilla took nine hours as the felons were locked into a hot, shuttered stagecoach with shotgunned guards bracketing them. Olinger told the Kid, “Your days are gettin short, Billy. Even now I can see that scratchy noose around your neck. You feel it chafing?”
The Kid just squinted out through the shutters.
There was the now-standard crowd waiting for the Kid’s arrival in the flatlands of Mesilla (Spanish for “table”), but as Wilson and Bonney squeezed out of the stagecoach a journalist was forced to ask, “Which of you is Billy the Kid?”
The Kid grinned as he aimed the gun of his thumb and finger at a waiting Ira Leonard and said, “That would be him.”
The journalist found that amusing enough to be recorded and then asked, “Are you looking forward to your day in court?”
The Kid said, “I’m looking forward to some of those famous green chiles you grow here. I hear they’re the best in the world.”
“Yes, they are.”
Billie Wilson was admiring the spires of the blue and majestic Organ Mountains to the east. “Aren’t they pretty,” he said. “There’s still snow!”
“And us without our sleds,” joked the Kid.
The journalist pressed on, asking, “Looking back on your life from this unfortunate vantage point, I wonder if you could tell our readers what you have learned?”
“Well,” the Kid said, “I would advise your readers to never engage in killing.”
The Kid remained the mixture of contradictions that had made him a heralded criminal, while Billie Wilson became so much an afterthought
that there was a continuance of his trial in Mesilla, and another continuance in Santa Fe. Even by September 1882, Wilson had not been tried, and he and two other prisoners managed to overcome a jail guard as he was locking their cell door, then ran up the stairway to the roof, from where they jumped far down to Water Street without grave injury. After Wilson had hitchhiked his way to Texas, he reassumed his original name of David Lawrence Anderson. He became a small-time rancher in Uvalde County, married and fathered two children, and just for old times’ sake he sought reacquaintance with Pat Garrett when he, too, moved to Uvalde, in 1891. Eventually Garrett graciously solicited a presidential pardon for Anderson from Grover Cleveland. Which in turn allowed Anderson to become a United States customs inspector and then the sheriff of Terrell County, where in 1918, at age fifty-six, Anderson was killed in the line of duty by a drunken friend.
* * *
The Third Territorial District Court’s spring meeting in Mesilla, the seat of Doña Ana County, was held in a whitewashed, windowless, fourteen-by-twenty-eight-foot room in a plain, one-story building that later would achieve garish fame as the Elephant Saloon. The judge was fifty-eight-year-old Warren Henry Bristol, who’d been appointed associate justice of the supreme court of New Mexico by President Ulysses S. Grant and since then had become a hanging judge, sentencing more men to the gallows than all his judicial peers combined. Bristol ought to have recused himself from the proceedings, for he was a close friend of L. G. Murphy and Jimmy Dolan and the fierce enemy of John Henry Tunstall and Alexander A. McSween. Yet on Wednesday, March 30, he called for Case number 411, The United States of America vs. Charles Bowdry, Dock Scurlock, John Middleton, George Coe, Frederick Wait, and Henry Antrim alias Kid, indicting them for the murder of Andrew L. “Buckshot” Roberts at Blazer’s Mill.