Billy the Kid

by Robert M. Utley

  In Silver City the Antrims established themselves in a log cabin at the head of the “Big Ditch,” the stream bed that ran next to the town’s main thoroughfare and carried runoff from mountain storms. Uncle Bill Antrim worked at odd jobs while indulging a lifelong compulsion to search for the elusive strike that would bring mineral riches. Catherine supplemented the meager income by taking in boarders. “Mrs. Bill Antrim was a jolly Irish lady, full of life and mischief,” remembered a neighbor.9

  Now known by his stepfather’s name as well as McCarty, Henry ran with the other boys and did little to set himself apart from them. He was “a scrawny little fellow with delicate hands and an artistic nature,” recalled his schoolteacher, “always willing to help with the chores around the school house. Billy (they called him Henry then) was no more of a problem in school than any other boy growing up in a mining camp.”10

  The New Mexico climate failed to head off Catherine’s tuberculosis, and gradually she grew weaker. Bedridden for four months, she died on September 16, 1874, nineteen months after her marriage to Bill Antrim. The funeral took place the next day in the Antrim cabin, with burial following in the town cemetery.11

  After Catherine’s death, Bill Antrim and the two boys boarded at the home of Richard Knight. Uncle Bill exercised little parental oversight. In fact, he may have been absent for months at a time. With other restless denizens of Silver City, he was drawn by the new mineral strikes in Arizona that gave birth to the town of Globe.

  Richard Knight ran a butcher shop in Silver City and a ranch at the southern end of the Burro Mountains, southwest of the town. Mrs. Knight’s younger brother, Tony Connor, became one of Henry’s close friends. They worked together in Knight’s butcher shop.

  “Billy was one of the best boys in town,” recalled Tony years later. “He was very slender. He was undersized and was really girlish looking.” “I never remember Billy doing anything out of the way any more than the rest of us,” he added. “We had our chores to do, like washing the dishes and other duties about the house.”12

  “He was quiet, I remember,” related another friend, Chauncey Truesdell, “and never swore or tried to act bad like the other kids.” For a time after their mother’s death, Henry and Joe lived with the Truesdells.13

  During these youthful months, Henry grew passionately fond of music. He and other boys formed a minstrel troupe that played to appreciative audiences at Morrill’s Opera House. “Billy was Head Man in the show,” commented a fellow thespian.14 For the few years remaining to him, he would love to sing and dance.

  Besides music, noted Tony Connor, “Billy got to be a reader. He would scarcely have his dishes washed until he would be sprawled out somewhere reading a book. It was the same down at the butcher shop.” Soon, books gave way to lighter reading such as dime novels and the Police Gazette, which may have filled the young mind with fantasies of which his mother would not have approved.15

  Whether incited by the Police Gazette or simply by the absence of parental restraint, Henry drifted toward petty thievery. “His first offense,” recalled Sheriff Harvey Whitehill in later years, “was the theft of several pounds of butter from a ranchman by the name of Webb, living near Silver City, and which he disposed of to one of the local merchants. His guilt was easily established, but upon promise of good behavior, he was released.”16

  “He was a good kid,” declared another friend, Louis Abraham, “but he got in the wrong company.”17 The wrong company was George Shaffer, locally known, because of his headgear, as “Sombrero Jack.” According to the sheriff’s son, another of Henry’s friends, “Every Saturday night, George would get drunk. But he thought a lot of Billy and Billy used to follow him around. This fellow George liked to steal; he had a mania to steal and was always stealing.”18

  And so, thanks to Sombrero Jack, Henry Antrim took his first big step toward a life of crime. One night a year after his mother’s death, Henry accompanied his inebriated friend on a foray against the local Chinese laundry. They made off with a bundle of clothing. Henry hid the loot at the home where the family now boarded. The proprietress, Mrs. Sarah Brown, discovered it and turned the boy in to Sheriff Whitehill. Hauled before the justice of the peace, Henry found himself in the toils of the law.19

  “It did not amount to anything,” observed Anthony Connor, “and Mr. Whitehill only wished to scare him.”20 The sheriff’s son agreed: “He didn’t want to put him in a cell. He was just a boy who had stole some clothes. . . . He didn’t want to be mean.”21

  Henry did not regard the matter this lightly. With the combination of cunning and sincerity that marked his later escapades, he persuaded the sheriff to let him have the run of the corridor outside the cell. “And right there is where we fell down,” conceded Whitehill. The sheriff left the boy unguarded for half an hour. “When we returned, and unlocked the heavy oaken doors of the jail, the ‘Kid’ was nowhere to be seen.”22 Not for the first time, the slim, wiry youth had climbed up a chimney to safety, as described satirically by the local editor in the first of the budding criminal’s press notices:

  Henry McCarty, who was arrested on Thursday and committed to jail to await the action of the grand jury, upon the 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.23

  The escape stamps fifteen-year-old Henry Antrim as clever, resourceful, and daring—traits that would carry him through many a scrape in the next few years. It also betrays the first stirrings of a reckless temper, together with a determination to do as he pleased. The death of his mother, for whom he later voiced an abiding affection, had freed him from parental influence. He got along well enough with Bill Antrim, who treated Catherine’s sons with kindness and consideration but did not attempt to impose authority. As Henry grew into adolescence, therefore, he also grew increasingly free willed and independent. The escape from Sheriff Whitehill’s jail was the ultimate assertion of independence, cutting all family and social ties and, in his own mind at least, making him a fugitive from the law. Now on his own, with a mixture of anxiety and resolve that may be imagined, he fixed a westward course into the unknown.

  2

  The Adolescent

  After squirming his way up the chimney of the Silver City jail in September 1875, Henry Antrim all but vanished from recorded history for nearly two years. Although reams of creative fantasy have filled the void, enough of his trail can be followed to suggest the outlines and even yield some of the contents.1

  Henry’s range for two years lay just beyond New Mexico’s western border. Apache Indians claimed this tangle of mountain and desert, drained by the upper Gila River and its tributaries, but a scattering of white prospectors and cowmen had begun to challenge their dominion. Soldiers based at Camps Thomas, Grant, and Bowie scouted against Indian raiders and comprised a market that attracted still more whites.

  Henry’s activities centered on Camp Grant, a cavalry post picturesquely located at the southwestern base of Mount Graham. Not far from the parade ground, along the southern edge of the military reservation, civilian enterprises had begun to take root—the Hotel de Luna of Miles L. Wood, a general store run by Milton McDowell, the saloon of George Atkins, and the “hog ranches” that sprouted near every army post to cater to the soldiers’ appetites. Rolling off to the south, the rich grasses of the Sulphur Springs Valley nourished the cattle herds of Henry C. Hooker, who supplied beef to the military posts as well as to the Apache Indian agency of San Carlos.

  For a time Henry Antrim worked at the Hooker ranch.2 In this setting the boy picked up the basic skills of punching cows, tending horses, handling wagon teams, riding and roping, and performing the myriad chores necessary to keep a ranch running. He also began to familiarize himself with rifle and pistol. His youth, however, unfitted him for a man’s work, and the Hooker fo
reman, William Whelan, discharged him.3

  Late in 1876 Henry turned up among the hangers-on who congregated at the edge of the Camp Grant reservation. At first he worked at Miles Wood’s hotel but soon, as Wood recalled, “got to running with a gang of rustlers” based in the little community. With this bunch, he took his next step toward a life of crime.4

  Henry’s particular friend and cohort was John R. Mackie, a Scotsman who had served as a drummer boy in the Civil War and put in an enlistment in the Sixth Cavalry. Even before leaving the army, Mackie had collided with the law. In September 1875, in a dispute over cards, he had shot a civilian in the neck. The bullet was not fatal, and Mackie was released on a plea of self-defense. Discharged from the army in January 1876, he remained in the vicinity of Camp Grant and teamed up with Henry, who was ten years his junior.5

  Henry and John specialized in petty thievery and occasional horse theft. According to Miles Wood, “Soldiers would come from Fort Grant to visit the saloons and dance homes here. Billy [he was still Henry] and his chum Macky would steal the saddles and saddle blankets from the horses and occasionally they would take the horses and hide them out until they got a chance to dispose of them.” Wood recalled one occasion when two officers attempted to secure their mounts by running long picket ropes from the hitching rail outside to the bar inside. “Macky talked to the officers,” said Wood, “while Billy cut the ropes from the horses leaving the officers holding the pieces of rope.”6

  On November 17, 1876, Henry, probably in tandem with John, stole one horse too many. Sergeant Lewis C. Hartman had tied his cavalry mount outside Milton McDowell’s store, only to have it run off while he was inside. With four soldiers, Hartman took the trail and tracked the thieves northward to the vicinity of the new mining camp of Globe City. There the troopers recovered the horse and set Antrim afoot. Later, in February 1877, Hartman swore out a complaint against Antrim before Miles Wood, who served as justice of the peace and who duly issued an arrest warrant.7

  The constable to whom the warrant was entrusted could not find the culprit, but on March 25 Wood himself looked out the window to see Antrim and Mackie entering the hotel dining room for breakfast. “I told the waiter that I would wait on them,” Wood remembered. “I took a large server and tray and took it in and slipped it on the table in front of them and pulled a six gun from under it and told them to ‘hands up.’” Wood marched his prisoners up to the fort and asked the commanding officer, Major Charles E. Compton, to hold them temporarily in the post guardhouse.8

  As Sheriff Whitehill had discovered, Henry Antrim was hard to confine. Within an hour he had asked to be taken outside on some pretext. There he threw salt in the eyes of his guard and tried to run away. Other guards rushed to the scene and recaptured him. Summoned by the sergeant of the guard, Wood took Antrim to the blacksmith shop and had him shackled. That night Wood attended a social function at Major Compton’s house. Called to the door, Compton returned to report that “the Kid was gone shackles and all.”

  Next Henry appeared in the Globe area, and Wood sent the arrest warrant to officials there. Twice a constable arrested him, and twice he slipped away.9

  By mid-summer of 1877, Henry was back in the vicinity of Camp Grant. Gus Gildea, one of the Hooker hands, saw him arrive. “He came to town,” recalled Gildea, “dressed like a ‘country jake,’ with ‘store pants’ on and shoes instead of boots. He wore a six gun stuffed in his trousers.”10

  Henry quickly ran into trouble with Francis P. Cahill, an ex-soldier working as a blacksmith at Camp Grant. “He was called ‘Windy’ because he was always blowin’ about first one thing and another,” said Gildea. “Shortly after the Kid came to Fort Grant, Windy started abusing him. He would throw Billy to the floor, ruffle his hair, slap his face and humiliate him before the men in the saloon.”11

  On the night of August 17, 1877, in George Atkins’s saloon, Windy and Henry got into an altercation. Gildea declared that Windy slapped Henry around with the same sort of provocation that had occurred before. Cahill explained later that he had called Henry a pimp, Henry had called him a son-of-a-bitch, and the two had piled into each other. “I did not hit him, I think,” said Cahill, who “saw him go for his pistol, and tried to get hold of it, but could not and he shot me in the belly.” Whereupon, after giving this statement the next day, Windy Cahill died.

  A coroner’s jury convened at once. Considering the facts available to them, the jurors decided that the shooting “was criminal and unjustifiable, and that ‘Henry Antrim alias Kid’ is guilty thereof.”12

  The finding meant that Henry should be held for the action of a territorial grand jury, which would decide whether he would be indicted and stand trial for murder. But he would not be around for the grand jury’s deliberations; he had fled immediately after the slaying. As Major Compton telegraphed the civil officials in Tucson, “Antrim, alias ‘Kid,’ was allowed to escape and I believe is still at large.”13

  He was indeed. In fact, Henry lost no time in placing himself beyond the jurisdiction of the Arizona authorities. By the first week in September, he had taken refuge at the Richard Knight ranch in the Burro Mountains southwest of Silver City. His friend Tony Connor, Mrs. Knight’s brother, remembered Henry’s arrival. “He told the folks what he had done,” said Connor. “He remained there about two weeks, but fearing the officers from Arizona might show up almost any time, he left for Lincoln County and never returned.”14

  Henry had killed his first man of record. The coroner’s jury declared it murder, but Henry never gave the courts a chance to decide. Almost certainly, he could have gone free on a plea of self-defense. The meager records do not indicate whether Windy Cahill had a gun. If so, it seems unlikely that a grand jury would have brought forth an indictment or that a petit jury would have convicted. Even if Cahill carried no weapons, his greater physical strength and (if Gildea and others may be credited) his record of bullying the boy would have solidly supported a self-defense plea.

  At this juncture, Henry could have gone straight with little fear that his past would overtake him. Law-enforcement officers made serious efforts to apprehend only the most chronic and vexatious criminals, and even those managed to pursue their vocation with relative impunity. The Arizona authorities would have done nothing to search for a fugitive who had vanished, especially one who had not even been indicted and whose offense was fraught with extenuating circumstances. Nor would Sheriff Whitehill have bestirred himself to make an issue over the stolen laundry bag in Silver City. Moreover, Henry would have felt no public onus for his youthful indiscretions. Frontier citizens tended to excuse past transgressions so long as they did not recur with unacceptable frequency.

  But Henry Antrim may not have realized how inconsequential he was to the authorities of both Arizona and New Mexico. He may truly have feared that deputies were on his trail and that the courts would treat him harshly. Or he may not have cared. He was only seventeen, not yet graduated from adolescence. To an avid reader of the Police Gazette, perhaps the adventurous life and potential rewards of the outlaw seemed attractive. Arizona had branded him an outlaw, and in fact he had been a rustler and horse thief for more than a year; why not continue in the profession?

  At age fifteen, Henry Antrim had fled New Mexico a petty thief. In two years he acquired an adult range of skills and values typical of raw frontier society. He returned to New Mexico not only an accomplished stock thief but a personality shaped by his Arizona experiences and associates.

  The Hooker cowboys and Henry’s rustler comrades had introduced him to a culture that he had only glimpsed as a boy in Silver City. Their society emphasized horsemanship and gunmanship, which for Henry became time-consuming obsessions. He also absorbed the code of the West, in which the gun figured so prominently. Carousing, gambling, and whoring were part of this life. Later testimony is conflicting, but the weight favors the conclusion that Henry rarely drank intoxicants and did not use tobacco. Even so, saloons offered plenty of attractions. There he
enjoyed the camaraderie of friends, delighted in singing and dancing, and gambled almost compulsively. He grew particularly expert at monte, later achieving a modest reputation as a monte dealer. Whoring in its commercial form does not appear to have interested him, but young women did, especially Hispanic young women, for whom his charm proved unfailingly seductive.

  Sometime during this period he may even have wandered into Mexico. When he resurfaced after the Arizona interlude, he spoke Spanish fluently. That proficiency could have been drawn from Hispanic friends in Arizona, but it would have come more swiftly and surely from a Mexican sojourn. Mastery of the language contributed to the instant rapport and popularity Henry enjoyed with people of Hispanic extraction for the rest of his life.

  By the summer of 1877, Henry had reached late adolescence and taken on the physique and personality by which he would soon become well known.15 Slim, muscular, wiry, and erect, weighing 135 pounds and standing about five feet seven inches tall, he was lithe and vigorous in his movements. Wavy brown hair topped an oval face betraying the down of incipient mustache and beard. Expressive blue eyes caught everyone’s notice. So did two slightly protruding front teeth. They were especially visible when he smiled or laughed, which was nearly always, but people found them pleasing rather than disfiguring.

  In attire, Henry kept himself neat. He affected none of the garish costumes in which sensationalist writers later dressed him, but wore simple, serviceable clothing, often the ubiquitous black frock coat, dark pants and vest, and boots. His only conspicuous garb was an unadorned Mexican sombrero—possibly drawn from the model of his friend Sombrero Jack—a utilitarian shield against the southwestern sun rather than an indulgent showpiece.