It was more than an hour, after he killed Olinger and Bell, before he left. He had at his command eight revolvers and six guns [rifles]. He stood on the upper porch in front of the building and talked with the people who were in Wortley’s, but would not let anyone come towards him. He told the people that he did not want to kill Bell but, as he ran, he had to. He said he grabbed Bell’s revolver and told him to hold up his hands and surrender; that Bell decided to run and he had to kill him. He declared he was “standing pat” against the world; and, while he did not wish to kill anybody, if anybody interfered with his attempt to escape he would kill him.20
Gauss had trouble saddling Burt’s spirited pony but at length led him to the front of the building and tied him to the hitching rail. Before descending, Billy smashed Olinger’s shotgun over the porch railing and hurled the pieces at his victim’s bloody corpse.
“Here is your gun, God damn you,” he shouted. “You won’t follow me with it any longer.”21
Emerging from the back door at the foot of the stairs, the Kid glanced down at the motionless form of Jim Bell.
“I’m sorry I had to kill you,” he said, “but couldn’t help it.”
He then made his way around the building to the street, where he paused at Olinger’s body.
“You are not going to round me up again,” he said, nudging the corpse with the tip of his boot.22
Encumbered with shackles and chain as well as pistols and rifles, Billy encountered difficulty controlling the skittish pony. As he tried to swing into the saddle, the animal broke loose and trotted toward the river. He called to Alex Nunnelly, one of Olinger’s prisoners standing in front of the hotel, to catch the animal and bring it back. Nunnelly hesitated, but a quick motion by Billy prompted him to do as ordered.
“Old fellow,” observed the Kid, “if you hadn’t gone for this horse, I would have killed you.”23
Firmly planted in the saddle, his chains slapping his legs and thighs, Billy the Kid pointed his mount to the west and rode out of Lincoln.
“Tell Billy Burt I will send his horse back to him,” he called as he vanished in the distance.24
He left behind a stunned town of Lincoln, whose citizens, said Garrett, “appeared to be terror-stricken.” He thought the Kid could have ridden up and down the town’s only street until dark without interference from a single resident. “A little sympathy might have actuated some of them, but most of the people were, doubtless, paralyzed with fear when it was whispered that the dreaded desperado, the Kid, was at liberty and had slain his guards.”25
The news shocked the entire territory. The spectacular breakout, so clever in conception and bold in execution, validated Billy the Kid’s reputation as a “dreaded desperado.” Five months earlier, prompted by the Las Vegas Gazette, the territorial press had built him up as New Mexico’s premier desperado. He had not earned such fame; his genuine deeds, however remarkable in one so young, did not qualify him for the distinction. The sensational bolt from Lincoln, however, transformed him into the territory’s foremost outlaw in fact as well as in name.
In name he emerged in blacker form than ever, as newspapers drenched him in rhetorical excess. In one breathless paragraph, the Las Vegas Optic branded him a “young demon,” a “terror and disgrace of New Mexico,” a “flagrant violator of every law,” a “murderer from infancy.” He was “malignant and cruel,” “urged by a spirit as hideous as hell,” blind to “the drooping forms of widows and the tear-stained eyes of orphans.” “With a heart untouched to pity by misfortune, and with a character possessing the attributes of the damned, he has reveled in brutal murder and gloried in his shame. He has broken more loving hearts and filled more untimely graves than he has lived years, and that he is again turned loose like some devouring beast on the public is cause at once for consternation and regret.”26
While execrating his character, editors could not suppress admiration for his dramatic leap to freedom. It displayed, said the New Mexican, “a subtle calculation on the part of the prisoner, and a coolness and steadiness of nerve in executing his plan of escape, that the highly wrought story of Dick Turpin can hardly furnish a counterpart to.”27
Such commentary on Billy’s exploit contained little exaggeration. Traits first manifested in the Lincoln County War combined to produce a brilliant if tragically bloody feat. Crafty, utterly fearless, heedless of risk, cool under stress, instantly unflinching in taking any life that stood in his way, he surpassed both his guards in skill and intellect. Billy’s sunny exterior concealed a powerfully coiled spring held in by a hair-trigger. When the spring was released, he struck like a rattlesnake, swiftly and fatally.
The guards gave Billy his opening—Olinger from arrogance and conceit, Bell from a kindly disposition lulled by Billy’s relaxed good cheer. In the face of Garrett’s repeated admonitions, they both underestimated their prisoner. In return, Billy killed them, Bell regretfully, Olinger jubilantly, both unhesitatingly.
Billy the Kid rode out of Lincoln on Thursday evening, April 28, 1881. In White Oaks, Pat Garrett learned of the escape the next day and promptly sent a rider overland to Socorro, on the railroad, with a message to the sheriff there: “I have just received news from Lincoln by courier that Billy the Kid escaped yesterday evening, after killing Deputy Sheriffs J. W. Bell and Bob Ollinger.” Not until Saturday night, April 30, did a one-line telegram from Socorro bring the news to Governor Lew Wallace in Santa Fe.
Only hours earlier the governor himself had written out a document that he supposed would end his troubled association with Billy the Kid. It was a death warrant, which the law required him to sign before an execution could take place. It directed that, on May 13, 1881, between the hours of 10:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M., the sheriff of Lincoln County remove William Bonney from the county jail and “hang the said William Bonny, alias Kid, alias William Antrim, by the neck until he is dead. And make due return of your acts hereunder.”28
As commanded, the sheriff made “due return” under the date of May 24: “I hereby certify that the within warrant was not served owing to the fact that the within named prisoner escaped before the day set for serving said warrant. Pat F. Garrett, Sheriff of Lincoln County.”29
17
The Execution
As Billy Bonney trotted out of Lincoln on the evening of April 28, 1881, he could count on the help of many friends. After riding about a quarter of a mile west on the Fort Stanton road, he veered to the north and crossed the river into the Capitan foothills. He paused at the home of Ataviano Salas, whose son-in-law, Francisco Gómez, poured him a cup of coffee laced with goat’s milk and listened to his story of the escape. The fugitive then rode to the home of José Cordova in Salazar Canyon. Cordova and Scipio Salazar freed him from his shackles. Next Billy headed up the canyon toward the Capitan summit, aiming for Las Tablas, on the other side of the mountains. Here lived his old compadre from the Lincoln County War, Yginio Salazar.1
“I talked with Kid at my house at Las Tablas the next day,” recalled Salazar. “The Kid laid off there for three days. He laid out in the hills and came to my house to eat. I told him to leave this place and go to Old Mexico.” While Billy slept one night near Las Tablas, his horse pulled loose from a sotol stalk and made its way back to Lincoln, to be reclaimed by its owner.2
Stealing a horse from a Las Tablas resident, the Kid headed east, circling the north base of the Capitans to Agua Azul, then headed south, crossing the Ruidoso above San Patricio, and making his way to the Peñasco. There he spent a night at the cabin of another old friend, John Meadows. Until late at night, the two sat on a hillside talking. Meadows suspected that the Kid had come to the Peñasco to do away with Billy Mathews, who had a ranch nearby. Although Bonney denied that he would harm Mathews even if given the chance, he may well have thought to settle old scores. Somehow, the newspapers got word that he had in fact shot and killed his enemy, but the report turned out to be untrue.3
Like Salazar, Meadows urged the Kid to flee into Old Mexi
co and start life anew. Billy’s southward course from Agua Azul may indicate that he was already heeding this advice. But Fort Sumner pulled at him too. It was familiar, congenial, full of friends who would help him, and home to a bevy of damsels who adored him. He thought he would go there, he told Meadows.
“Sure as you do,” warned his friend, “Garrett will get you, or you will have to kill him.”
“Don’t you worry,” replied Billy, “I’ve got too many friends up there. Anyhow I don’t believe he will try to get me. I can stay there awhile and get enough [money] to go to Mexico on.”
The next morning Billy faced his horse toward Fort Sumner. A couple of days later, at Conejos Springs, he lay asleep in his blankets when Jim Cureton and some cowboys rode nearby rounding up cattle. Startled, the Kid jumped up. The sudden movement alarmed his horse, which bolted and left him afoot. A twenty-mile hike brought him to Fort Sumner, which he reached on Saturday May 7, nine days after his escape from Lincoln.4
That night Billy slipped into Sumner and found a tethered horse. It belonged to Montgomery Bell, a rancher from fifty miles upriver who had come to town on business. Billy mounted and rode away bareback. Sunday morning Bell reported the theft to Barney Mason, still a deputy sheriff. Joined by Jim Cureton, Mason took the trail. About fifteen miles down the Pecos they overhauled the quarry at a sheep camp. With four Hispanic allies, Billy made ready for a fight. Mason turned tail; he knew that his part in Stinking Springs, where he had proposed to shoot Billy after he surrendered, had made him a prime target. Cureton, unarmed, rode forward and talked with the Kid, who asked him to tell Bell that he would either return the stolen horse or pay for it.5
Once again, even though a hunted man, Billy Bonney settled into the comfortable life of Fort Sumner. He drifted from one sheep camp to another, bunked at times at a ranch or farm, and on occasion brazenly slipped into Sumner itself to stomp merrily at a baile or keep a tryst with one of his female admirers.
As the spring weeks slipped by, the public’s astonishment and outrage over Bonney’s spectacular breakout gave no sign of subsiding. As far away as New York and San Francisco, people waited in fascinated suspense to learn whether the fearless young killer would remain at large. Governor Wallace offered another five-hundred-dollar reward for his capture but did not stay around to gauge its effect. The new president had named him minister to the court of the Turkish sultan, a post exactly suited to his romantic temperament, and on May 30 he boarded a Pullman sleeper to put New Mexico behind him forever.
No one who read the newspapers could doubt that Bonney was living, not very secretly, around Fort Sumner. Beginning with the theft of Bell’s horse, the Las Vegas press regularly reported his presence in Sumner. As the Gazette observed on May 19, “Billy keeps well posted on matters in the outside world as he is well thought of by many of the Mexicans who take him all the newspapers they can get hold of. He is not far from Ft. Sumner and has not left that neighborhood since he rode over from Lincoln after making his break.” Added the New Mexican on June 16: “The people regard him with a feeling half of fear and half of admiration, submit to his depredations, and some of them even go so far as to aid him in avoiding capture.”
The press even picked up a wild tale of Billy’s continuing feud with John Chisum. Billy was said to have ridden up to a Chisum cow camp and shot one of three herders through the brain. To the others he said, “Now, I want you to live to take a message to old John Chisum for me. Tell him during the Lincoln county war he promised to pay me $5 a day for fighting for him. I fought for him and never got a cent. Now, I intend to kill his men wherever I meet them, giving him credit for $5 every time I drop one until the debt is squared.”6 Later exposed as entirely false, the story, besides placing Billy in the Fort Sumner area, nonetheless accurately projected the image that was taking shape in the public mind.
Garrett puzzled over what to do. On the one hand, repeated reports from Fort Sumner convinced him that Billy must be there. On the other, as he said, “it seemed incredible that he should linger in the Territory.” “He was never taken for a fool, but was credited with the possession of extraordinary forethought and cool judgment, for one of his age.”7
Simply riding up to Sumner and searching for the fugitive was hardly an answer. As Garrett later explained, the Kid returned to his familiar retreats because “he said he was safer out on the plains, and could always get something to eat among the sheep herders. So he decided to take his chances out there where he was hard to get at.”8 Short of leaving New Mexico altogether, he was right. Garrett knew that he could not count on the cooperation of the residents, who would turn away in fear or alert the quarry and hide him. Only by the wildest accident of good fortune could he hope to succeed.
In June Garrett wrote to Manuel Brazil, the Fort Sumner rancher whose help had been critical in cornering the Kid and his cohorts at Stinking Springs, and asked if he had seen any sign of Billy. Brazil replied that he had not seen Billy but was sure enough of his proximity to keep out of sight in fear of his vengeance. Garrett received the letter in Lincoln early in July.9
Similar word came from another source—John W. Poe. This stocky former buffalo hunter with a drooping mustache had made a name for himself as a law officer in the Texas Panhandle. Impressed with his steady competence, the ranchers hired him to replace Frank Stewart as detective for the Panhandle Stock Association. Arriving in White Oaks in March 1881, Poe took up the probe, launched by his predecessors, of the relationship between the Pecos Valley rustlers and beef entrepreneur Pat Coghlan. Poe also fell in with Sheriff Pat Garrett and agreed to be commissioned a deputy sheriff of Lincoln County.10
Early in July, about the time of Brazil’s letter to Garrett, Poe received a tip from an old acquaintance who had fallen on alcoholic bad times and was sleeping in the loft of the West and Diedrick stable. One night he had overheard two men, probably West and Diedrick, talking below. Their conversation made it clear that Billy the Kid was hiding out in Fort Sumner and in fact had twice visited White Oaks. Although skeptical, Poe took this information to Garrett in Lincoln. Together with Brazil’s letter, Poe’s report prompted Garrett to mount an expedition to Fort Sumner.11
Under cover of darkness, the sheriff’s little posse pushed off from Roswell on July 10. Besides Garrett and Poe, a third officer had been recruited. He was Thomas K. (Tip) McKinney. Traveling mostly at night on little-used trails, the trio reached the mouth of Taiban Creek, below Fort Sumner, on the night of the thirteenth. Garrett had asked Manuel Brazil to meet him here, but Brazil failed to show up. The lawmen slept until daylight.12
The next step was up to John Poe. Since no one in Fort Sumner knew him, the three men decided that he should ride into town and learn what he could. If that proved futile, he was to go on up the Pecos to Sunnyside and talk with Postmaster Milnor Rudulph, whom Garrett thought might be willing to tell what he knew. After dark the three were to get back together at a designated point four miles north of Sumner.
Poe carried out his mission capably. His appearance in town aroused instant suspicion. He explained that he lived in White Oaks but was returning to his home in the Panhandle for a visit. In Beaver Smith’s saloon he ate and drank with townsmen, virtually all Hispanics, but failed to pry any information out of them. The most offhand reference to Billy the Kid silenced everyone and intensified the obvious distrust with which all greeted the stranger. “There was a very tense situation in Fort Sumner on that day,” Poe later wrote, “as the Kid was at that very time hiding in one of the native’s houses there.”
In midafternoon Poe mounted and rode up the Pecos seven miles to Sunnyside. Presenting Garrett’s letter of introduction, he received a friendly welcome from Milnor Rudulph. After supper Poe broached the subject of Billy the Kid. Instantly Rudulph turned nervous and evasive. He had heard that Billy was in the area, he said, but he did not believe it. Further questioning produced only more agitated equivocation. At dusk, to his host’s evident relief, Poe saddled up and rode down the r
iver to rendezvous with his comrades.
In the darkness the three pondered their next move. The reaction of the villagers to Poe’s visit, the behavior of Rudulph, and the tips from Brazil and from Poe’s informant all pointed to Billy’s presence somewhere around Fort Sumner. Yet the foolhardiness of such a course left all three with doubts too. At length they decided to slip into Sumner under cover of darkness, keep watch for a time on a dwelling that Garrett knew housed one of Billy’s paramours, and then hunt up Pete Maxwell and talk with him. He might reveal something.13
On the north edge of Sumner, the lawmen chanced across the camp of a traveler. Coincidentally, he turned out to be an old friend of Poe’s, from Texas.14 Unsaddling here, the trio fortified themselves with coffee and then proceeded on foot. At about 9:00 P.M. they quietly took a station among the trees of a peach orchard on the northern fringe of the community. A bright moon illumined the scene. On the east side of the old parade ground were buildings that had once served as barracks for soldiers. On the west stood a line of dwellings that had housed officers. One had been fixed up as a residence for the Maxwells. Across the parade ground from the orchard, fronting the south side, the old quartermaster storehouse had been divided into rooms. At one end, hidden by officers’ row, was Beaver Smith’s saloon. Billy’s friend Bob Campbell lived at the other end, and next door to him lived Sabal and Celsa Gutierrez.15
As the lawmen crept closer to the buildings, they suddenly heard muffled voices talking in Spanish. Crouching motionless behind trees, they listened. The people were in the orchard too, not far distant, but their words could not be understood. “Soon a man arose from the ground,” said Garrett, “in full view, but too far away to recognize. He wore a broad-brimmed hat, a dark vest and pants, and was in his shirt sleeves.” He said something, jumped the fence, and walked into the compound.16
Garrett did not recognize the figure, and learned only afterward that he was Billy the Kid. Whom he had been with and where he went after entering the old fort depends on which account one wants to accept. He may have ended up with Bob Campbell, or Celsa Gutierrez, or Deluvina Maxwell, or Jesús Silva and Francisco Lobato, among others.17 He is not likely to have gone to Paulita’s, since she lived with her family in the big house on officers’ row and since his companion seems to have been someone in one of the rooms of the old quartermaster building.
Billy the Kid Page 21