Billy the Kid

by Robert M. Utley

  “A smart devil and a regular confidence man,” according to one who knew him,16 Riley was a partner in the mercantile firm of James J. Dolan & Co., formerly L. G. Murphy & Co. As both customer and client, he was an important personage for Evans and The Boys. Headquartered at Lincoln, across the mountains to the east, the Dolan firm dominated the economy of Lincoln County. Dolan and Riley supplied much of the contract beef used by the Apaches at the Indian agency and by the soldiers at Fort Stanton. Federal beef contracts had become so competitive, however, that no supplier could make a profit legitimately. One solution was to buy rustled stock at five dollars a head and turn it in on government contracts at fifteen. Evans and The Boys regularly furnished Dolan and Riley with stolen cattle while also occasionally performing other shady chores to which they preferred to have no visible link.

  As friends and business associates of Evans’s, therefore, Riley and Longwell, a company employee, probably stayed for the night’s festivities. It is an easy guess that Riley penned the literate, satirical account that later appeared in the Independent under the pseudonym of “Fence Rail.”17

  The night’s activities disclose much about The Boys and the examples they set for Billy Bonney. Evans mounted a stump to congratulate his men for their brilliant attainments and to suggest the need for “perfecting the organization.” This took the form of electing Evans to the rank of colonel and Baker, Provencio, and Ponciano, “on account of their proficiency in horse lifting,” to the rank of captain. All others, presumably including recruit Billy, received promotions to the grade of captain by brevet (an honorary military rank).

  The revelers next adopted a series of resolutions. One thanked all who had aided or harbored them. Another thanked a friendly press (the Mesilla News) that had ridiculed the Independent’s claims of organized lawlessness in southern New Mexico. Still another castigated the Independent. And a final one proclaimed “that the public is our oyster, and that having the power, we claim the right to appropriate any property we may take a fancy to.”

  The ceremony ended around a huge bonfire. Nick Provencio produced a copy of the Independent and consigned it to the flames. While Frank Baker rendered the “Rogues March” on a comb, “Colonel” Evans led his band in a raucous procession around the “funeral pyre.” The group then divided, one turning up the south fork of the Tularosa, the other taking the main road up the north fork, over the mountains to the Ruidoso, and on down to the Pecos.

  Sometime in the middle of October, Evans and at least part of his gang reached the lower Pecos at Seven Rivers, where they put up at the ranch of crusty old Hugh Beckwith, patriarch of an extended family and the leader of the Chisum opposition.18 For unknown reasons, Billy Bonney bunked with the neighboring Heiskell Jones family. The Joneses had eight sons ranging in age from one to twenty-two, and a twelve-year-old daughter besides. Barbara—“Ma’am Jones”—enjoyed a far-flung reputation for hospitality and hearty cooking.19

  Whatever Billy’s reasons for staying with the Joneses, they proved fortunate, for at the Beckwith ranch some of Jesse Evans’s past sins caught up with him. On September 18 he and Frank Baker had stolen some horses and mules from the ranch of Richard Brewer, on the Ruidoso southeast of Lincoln. They belonged not only to Brewer but also to John H. Tunstall, a young Englishman who had come to New Mexico to make his fortune in stock raising. With some friends, Brewer gave chase, all the way to Mesilla, but had to return empty-handed. When district court convened in Lincoln early in October, Brewer served as foreman of the grand jury and made certain that indictments for larceny were returned against Evans and his friends. Brewer then enlisted a posse of fifteen men and persuaded Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady to lead it down to the Pecos, where Evans was known to be. On October 17 Brady’s men closed in on the Beckwith ranch and, after a brief exchange of gunfire, arrested Evans, Baker, Tom Hill, and George Davis. Three days later, the four found themselves locked in the Lincoln jail.20

  At the nearby Jones ranch, meantime, Billy Bonney made the acquaintance of the Casey family. Ex-soldier Robert Casey had come up from Texas in 1867 and established his growing family on the upper Hondo River east of Lincoln. For years his mill and store had served the sparse population of the area. In 1875, however, Bob Casey had been shot dead in Lincoln, leaving his widow, Ellen, to care for four children and the property. In May 1877 financial reverses cost her most of her cattle, which were sold at a sheriff’s auction to satisfy debt. On behalf of John Tunstall, Lincoln lawyer Alexander McSween bought the cattle. Richard Brewer, who served as Tunstall’s foreman in addition to tending his own ranch, drove them to the Englishman’s recently acquired spread on the Rio Feliz, thirty miles south of Lincoln.21

  Discouraged by her mounting troubles, the widow Casey decided to return to Texas. Early in October 1877 she packed her children and possessions in a wagon, rounded up her cattle, and struck down the Hondo. Late in October she paused at the Jones ranch and met Billy Bonney. He asked the widow if he could go to Texas with her. But he also coveted one of her horses and offered in trade his own, which she knew to be stolen.22 Despite the urgings of her elder children, Robert A., sixteen, known as Add, and Lily, fifteen, Mrs. Casey firmly refused Billy’s appeal.23

  The impression that Billy projected at this time, after a month or more of exposure to Jesse Evans and his gangsters, is revealing. As Lily remembered, “The Kid was as active and graceful as a cat. At Seven Rivers he practiced continually with pistol or rifle, often riding at a run and dodging behind the side of his mount to fire, as the Apaches did. He was very proud of his ability to pick up a handkerchief or other object from the ground while riding at a run.” Brother Add Casey supplied another dimension. “When I knowed him at Seven Rivers, you might call him a bum,” he recalled years later. “He was nothing but a kid and a bum when I knowed him back there.”24

  In rejecting Billy’s horse trade, the widow Casey had yielded less to probity than to a pragmatic qualm over getting caught with someone else’s horse, as she intimated to Billy. Her own caravan, in fact, was burdened with more than a little stolen property, for it included the two hundred head of cattle that had once belonged to her but now, by virtue of the sheriff’s sale of the previous May, belonged to John Henry Tunstall. Before abandoning her home, she had sent her hands to sweep Tunstall’s range and run his animals into her own herd. When Tunstall learned of his loss, the elation prompted by the recovery of his stolen horses by the Brady-Brewer posse quickly dissolved. Undaunted, the worn-out Dick Brewer assembled six men and headed back down to the Pecos. Ten miles short of the Texas line, the pursuers came up with the Casey procession, faced down the Casey cowboys, and returned with all the stolen stock.25

  Jesse Evans’s coerced journey to Lincoln brought Billy Bonney for the first time to the county seat, for early in November about thirty of The Boys, together with some others interested in the liberation of the prisoners, gathered on the Ruidoso to plot an escape. Among these men was Billy Bonney.26

  Besides The Boys, some of Lincoln’s business and political elite also wanted Evans freed. In fact, he had become one of the players in the factional maneuvers that were leading inexorably to the Lincoln County War. Tunstall and his ally, lawyer Alexander McSween, had launched not only a cattle ranch on the Feliz but also a mercantile institution in Lincoln itself aimed at toppling the monopoly long enjoyed by Dolan & Co. and its predecessor, L. G. Murphy & Co.

  Ambitious, smart, and ruthless, Jimmy Dolan fought back with unscrupulous cunning. He had learned well from his mentor, Lawrence Murphy, founder of “The House” and still a power in the county despite a losing bout with the bottle. Among the weapons in The House’s arsenal was The Boys, who were skilled at intimidation. Indeed, the theft of the Brewer-Tunstall stock that had landed Evans in jail had been part of the program of intimidation. Dolan and his friends, therefore, wanted Evans back in business.

  One of Dolan’s friends was Sheriff Brady. He and Murphy had been wartime comrades and pioneer builders of Linc
oln County. He tended to view matters the same as Murphy. Brady had gone to much trouble to get Evans in jail, but he probably looked on his eventual escape as fated and did little to head it off.

  Even the patrician Tunstall, ambitious to supplant Dolan as economic overlord of Lincoln County, may have toyed with the idea of abetting Evans’s escape. He seems to have hoped that he might win Evans away from Dolan and, if not sign him up in the coming fight, at least neutralize him. Tunstall took the prisoners a bottle of whiskey, jollied with them, and bought two of them new suits. He may also have primed Dick Brewer, his foreman, to act as courier between the jail and The Boys gathered on the Ruidoso and to set up his ranch as a source of food and mounts after the escape.

  The break took place before dawn on November 17, 1877. About thirty of The Boys, including Bonney, rode over from the Ruidoso and showed up at the jail. Thanks to Brady, they found only a lone guard. They put a pistol to his head, knocked in the door to the cell with big rocks that had been helpfully assembled in advance, and rode out of town with their leader and his three lieutenants, together with another prisoner held on other charges.

  On the way to Brewer’s ranch, the party came on two brothers out hunting deer. They were Juan and Francisco Trujillo. The bandits surrounded Juan, but Francisco broke away. Bonney gave chase and threw down on him with his Winchester. Trujillo dismounted and threw down on Billy with his own rifle. When the others threatened to kill his brother, however, Francisco gave up. The fugitives relieved Juan of his saddle and weapons and rode on.27

  The Boys reached Brewer’s ranch after daylight. Brewer was conveniently absent, but his hands cooked breakfast for the visitors, who then saddled eight of Tunstall’s horses in the Brewer corral and rode off. They left apologies for Tunstall and a promise never to steal from him again. Later, they sent back all but one of the animals. Although Tunstall may have drawn hope from this display of gallant generosity, Evans doubtless regarded it as ample return on the Englishman’s investment of a bottle of whiskey and two new suits.28

  After leaving Brewer’s ranch, Evans and his men turned south to the Feliz and the Peñasco, then made their way back to the lower Pecos, where they again came to rest at the Beckwith ranch. Billy Bonney did not go with them. He remained on the Ruidoso.

  Why? The most plausible answer is that he had made some new friends. In addition, he may have had some second thoughts about the life on which he had embarked. He may have wanted something better, something not so plainly outside the law.

  The Ruidoso offered a setting not plainly outside the law, yet not altogether within it either. Most of the valley’s residents were Anglos in their twenties, single or married to Hispanic women, who grew corn and ran a few head of cattle. They skirted the edges of the law, toiling at honest labor but not averse to rustling an occasional cow or otherwise offending the public order. They were open, friendly, and of a distinctly higher type than the ruffians with whom Billy had been consorting.

  Thus the autumn of 1877 featured three distinct phases in the young life of Henry Antrim. In Arizona, he was an embryonic cowhand and occasional horse thief and cattle rustler. The Cahill killing, however, ended this life by making him, as he supposed, a fugitive wanted for murder and prompting him to return to New Mexico.

  In his childhood haunts around Silver City, Henry threw in with the Jesse Evans gang. Now, Kid Antrim became Billy Bonney. For about a month, he participated in all the iniquities of that iniquitous band of desperadoes and doubtless learned much about their profession.

  Finally, in a third phase, he fell back into a shadow world along the fringes of the law. It was peopled by his new friends on the Ruidoso, men who labored at an honest living but stood ready to break the law when opportunity presented or when impulse dictated. Billy Bonney thus substituted a new set of role models for the thugs who followed Jesse Evans. These new friends were soon to come together as one of the opposing armies in the Lincoln County War.

  4

  The Ranch Hand

  When Billy Bonney first arrived on the Ruidoso to help plan the Evans jail break, he immediately fell in with the Coes. Of all the farmers along the Ruidoso, they were probably the hardest working and most successful. Frank Coe had a spread on the Hondo just below La Junta—the union of the Bonito and Ruidoso. His cousin George had located farther upstream, near Dowlin’s Mill. Ab Saunders, whose sister had married one of Frank’s brothers, helped Frank for wages. Part of a big clan of Missourians who had settled in northeastern New Mexico, these three had moved on more than a year earlier to escape the troubles simmering toward the Colfax County War.1

  “He came to my ranch,” said Frank of Billy, “wanting work. He looked so young that I did not take him very seriously about work. I invited him to stop with us until he could find something to do.” On hunting excursions into the mountains in quest of deer, turkey, bear, and mountain lions, the cousins took a liking to their new friend. “He was very handy in camp,” recalled Frank, “a good cook and good natured and jolly.”2

  The Kid’s preoccupation with guns struck the Coes as it had Lily Casey down on the Pecos. “He spent all his spare time cleaning his six-shooter and practicing shooting,” observed Frank. “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. And I’ve seen him ride his horse on a run and kill snow birds, four out of five shots.”3

  Will Chisum, old John’s nephew, had similar memories. Billy used to while away the time, he recalled, by pitching his Winchester into the air, then catching it. “Always playing with it,” said Will. Will also had vivid recollections of “those little forty-ones.” Although Billy used several kinds of pistol, including the single-action Colt .44 “Frontier,” he grew to favor the more compact .41-caliber Colt double-action “Thunderer,” which could be fired rapidly because it did not have to be cocked manually.4

  Billy lost no time getting to know the other farmers in the valley. “He was the center of interest everywhere he went,” related George Coe, “and though heavily armed, he seemed as gentlemanly as a college-bred youth. He quickly became acquainted with everybody, and because of his humorous and pleasing personality grew to be a community favorite.”5

  One of the Kid’s first acquaintances was Dick Brewer, whom he almost certainly had met at Seven Rivers when Brewer and his men forced Ellen Casey to give back Tunstall’s cattle. Indeed, it is highly likely that Billy accompanied this party as it made its way back to Lincoln at the end of October. And if Brewer was mixed up in the escape of Jesse Evans, as he probably was, Billy got to know him even better as that plot unfolded. A big, handsome man of twenty-six, a fine horseman and accurate shot, Brewer managed his own spread while also acting as foreman of the Tunstall ranch on the Feliz.

  Another friend was Charles Bowdre, an affable, easygoing fellow of twenty-nine with a well-developed compassion for the underdog. Born on a Mississippi plantation, according to Frank Coe, Charley was “a bookkeeper and well educated.” When he could afford to, he sported a black hat and a fancy vest and went on fearsome drunks. With his Hispanic wife, he farmed a few acres on the upper Ruidoso. Billy fit in nicely, for with his fluent Spanish he could communicate with Manuela Bowdre better than could her husband.6

  Lincoln and vicinity, 1878–81

  Still another friend of Billy’s was Charley Bowdre’s partner in farming, Doc Scurlock. The same age as Bowdre, Josiah G. Scurlock was a devoted family man and sensitive intellectual, with medical training somewhere in his background, but also an expert marksman who did not hesitate to kill. He had married Antonia Herrera and, besides farming, was busily raising what would ultimately grow to a family of ten children. Somehow he had lost his front teeth, doubtless in a scuffle that reflected his hair-trigger temper. “He was a scrapping fool, you bet he was,” remembered one who knew him.7

  A regular feature of life in the valley was the baile—exuberant dances and sings animated by the Coe cousi
ns on the fiddle. In this setting Billy shone. “He was a mighty nice dancer and what you call a ladies’ man,” said Frank. “He talked the Mexican language and was also liked by the women.” With the Coes belting out “Arkansas Traveler,” “Irish Washerwoman,” and “Fisher’s Hornpipe,” the revelers frolicked vigorously throughout the night. “Danced waltzes, polkas, but mostly squares,” remembered Frank. Of all the tunes, Billy’s favorite was “Turkey in the Straw.” “He’d come over and say, ‘don’t forget the gaillina [turkey].’”8

  With their typically confused sense of chronology, Frank and George Coe in later years each remembered that Billy had bunked with him through the winter of 1877–78. Billy probably did see a lot of the Coes, as well as Brewer, Bowdre, and Scurlock. They all continued to hunt together, dance together, and otherwise socialize together. Depending on where he happened to be, Billy probably bedded with each one for a night now and then. But he could not have resided with a Coe for more than a month. He arrived on the Ruidoso about the end of October 1877. He and others sprang Jesse Evans from jail on November 17. By early December at the latest, Dick Brewer had signed him on to the payroll of John Henry Tunstall.

  John Henry Tunstall had polish. In addition to his English sophistication, he seemed open, sincere, and public-spirited. Despite his funny clothes and speech, many in Lincoln liked him. He was a youthful twenty-four, moderately wealthy in a desperately poor land, and outwardly bent on using his money to rid people of the tyranny of The House. For that alone, whatever they felt about his strange manners, his neighbors welcomed him.

  Except for his family in England, however, beneficence formed no part of Tunstall’s makeup. His winning ways disguised a single-minded pursuit of wealth. Beginning with a cattle ranch on the Feliz, he had moved on to a mercantile enterprise after noting the apparent prosperity of Dolan & Co. In fact, Dolan verged on bankruptcy, but Tunstall believed that a monopoly like Dolan’s could be made to earn the riches he craved. Like Dolan and Murphy before him, through the judicious use of credit in a cashless economy Tunstall hoped to bind the area’s farmers to his company as both producers and consumers. Controlling their crop yield, he could replace Dolan as the local supplier for government contractors at Fort Stanton and the Indian agency. His aim, therefore, was to substitute Tunstall & Co. for Dolan & Co. as the reigning monopoly. He wrote to his parents in London that he intended “to get the half of every dollar that is made in the county by anyone.”9