To Hell on a Fast Horse

by Mark Lee Gardner

  Winter was the main season for hunting buffalo on the Staked Plains, because the hair on the robes was longer and thicker and thus more valuable. Pat Garrett abandoned the buffalo range in the off-seasons, gambling away his earnings in places like Dodge City and St. Louis. He would, years later, recall meeting Bat Masterson in Dodge, and, also years later, Wyatt Earp would remember Garrett as among the cow town’s legendary cast of gun-toting characters.

  By the spring of 1878, reports were coming in from the different trading points that the once endless herds of bison were all but “played out”—approximately two hundred thousand hides had been harvested that last season alone. There were simply no more buffalo to kill. Very few hunters came away from the business with a great deal of money, especially if they, like Garrett, had developed a fondness for gambling. And the Glenn-Garrett party had experienced the extra misfortune of having lost hundreds of hides, as well as horses and supplies, in two different Comanche raids in 1877. So, early in 1878, Garrett, Glenn, and fellow skinner Nick Ross abandoned their wagons and personal possessions near a place known as Casas Amarillas (Yellow Houses) and headed west. Garrett never explained why the three chose to go to New Mexico Territory. A writer friend of Garrett’s chalked it up to “a love of adventure.”

  IT WAS A COLD February day when Pat Garrett and his two companions first showed up at Fort Sumner on the Pecos River. The military post of Fort Sumner had been established to oversee thousands of Navajos, as well as several hundred Mescalero Apaches, confined on the Bosque Redondo reservation. Once the Navajos were allowed to return to their ancestral lands three hundred miles to the west, there was no need for a reservation or a garrisoned post.

  Fort Sumner was abandoned in 1869 and its buildings sold the following year. The buyer was Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell, who paid $5,000. With more than thirty Hispanic and Indian families in tow, Maxwell moved from his old home in Cimarron to Fort Sumner. They dammed the Pecos, planted crops, and tended thousands of cattle and sheep. The fort became an instant small town, its several adobe buildings converted into family residences, a dance hall, a store, even a saloon. Lucien Maxwell died in 1875, leaving his son Peter to maintain the family empire. Instead, “Pete” Maxwell, who made his home in the substantial officers’ quarters overlooking the former parade ground, oversaw its gradual decline.

  Pete Maxwell and the residents of Fort Sumner were accustomed to seeing some rough characters come in off the surrounding nothingness, but the twenty-seven-year-old Garrett must have been among the scariest. When he arrived in February 1878, his hair was long and scraggly, and he had a scruffy beard. It was impossible on the frontier to get store-bought pants for a man six feet, four inches tall, so Pat had sewn nearly two feet of buffalo hide to the bottoms of his duck canvas trousers. His drooping, broad-brimmed hat was grimy from campfire smoke and being handled time and again by its owner’s greasy hands, and his belt bristled with skinning knives and cartridges for his Sharps buffalo gun. Glenn and Ross looked nearly as rough, and all three men were hungry and broke.

  Pete Maxwell (seated) and friend Henry Leis.

  Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico

  Between them, they had a total of one dollar and fifty cents as they walked into Fort Sumner’s store. The simple establishment served meals for fifty cents each, but Pat opted to invest all of their funds in flour and bacon, grub they could stretch out into several meals. A little later, as they sat on the bank of the Pecos enjoying their breakfast feast, they saw a cloud of dust rising in the distance. This turned out to be a herd of cattle and several riders working it.

  “Go on up there and get a job,” Pat prodded Ross.

  The man headed over to the cow outfit but soon returned, saying the boss, Pete Maxwell, did not need any extra hands.

  “Well, he’s got to have help,” Pat said as he got up off the ground.

  Looking as wild as ever, Garrett went straight up to Maxwell and made his pitch. Maxwell declined again. Garrett told him with some conviction that he had come to work and work he would—Garrett, as Glenn later observed, “was always persistent in getting what he went after.”

  “What can you do, Lengthy?” asked Maxwell.

  “Ride anything with hair and rope better than any man you’ve got here.”

  It was the right thing to say at the right time; Pat Garrett got his job.

  Garrett and his fellow hide hunters moved into one of the fort buildings, quickly discovering Sumner’s primary attraction (besides the saloon): the several good-looking Hispanic girls who also lived there. Garrett and his friends were soon sharing their modest quarters with some of these young ladies. While Garrett had probably picked up some Spanish in Texas, he received a crash course here. In Spanish, his name was pronounced “Patricio,” although some preferred to call him by the nickname Juan Largo, meaning Long John.

  Maxwell’s sister, Paulita, remembered that everybody at Fort Sumner liked Garrett: “He was an easy-going, agreeable man, a good storyteller, and full of dry humor. He was fond of a social glass, and was a great hand to play poker and monte.” Garrett also liked to cut a rug, and, by all accounts, he was good at it. The weekly baile (dance), held in the spacious former Quartermaster’s Depot, drew attractive young ladies from the communities of Puerto de Luna, Santa Rosa, and even Anton Chico, ninety miles distant. Yet Sumner’s female offerings and gay times were not enough to keep Glenn and Ross at the fort; they left before the summer was out. It was about this same time, for reasons long ago forgotten, that Garrett and Maxwell had a falling-out. The former hide hunter collected his wages but he did not pull up stakes, not this time.

  Some accounts say Garrett opened a short-lived eating place with his saved cowboy wages. He is also said to have raised hogs and eventually partnered in a saloon and grocery business. In late 1879, Garrett and his friend Barney Mason opened a butcher shop. It might have been a success had they not been caught processing beef that did not belong to them. Garrett promised to pay the owners of the cattle, which he never did, and the shop went out of business after about a month. Whether or not all these ventures really took place, they do reflect a pattern in Garrett’s life. A proud man, Pat Garrett was determined to get ahead, to be successful, and thus retrieve a semblance of what his family had lost in Louisiana. He was willing to try just about anything that had the promise of financial rewards and, if not a certain social status, at least respect. “Pat was a working devil,” recalled his friend John Meadows. “He’d work at anything.” That anything would eventually include the job of manhunter.

  LIKE GARRETT, BILLY THE KID came to New Mexico in a roundabout way, although he never called himself “Billy the Kid”—a name folks started calling him in the last six months of his life. Before that, he was Billy Bonney, Kid Antrim, or just “the Kid.” And not long before that, he was little Henry McCarty, the son of the widow Catherine McCarty. His string of aliases and nicknames does not say much about the origins and childhood of Billy the Kid, and the enigmatic outlaw had more than a little to do with keeping it that way.

  At Fort Sumner in June 1880, Billy told census taker Lorenzo Labadie that his name was William Bonney, that he was twenty-five years old (which meant he was born in 1855), and that he had been born in Missouri, as had both of his parents. If the person who gave this information to Labadie was indeed Billy the Kid, then he was offering up a complete fabrication, a whole new identity to go along with his Bonney alias. Six months later, after Pat Garrett’s much-publicized capture of Billy, the Kid told more than one person that he was born in New York City. According to Garrett’s 1882 biography, the outlaw was born in that beckoning metropolis on November 23, 1859, although it is anyone’s guess how that date was obtained. Birth certificates were not required in the mid-nineteenth century, and there is no family bible entry for the babe who would one day become America’s most famous gunman. In January and April 1881, New Mexico newspapers reported that Billy’s age was twenty-one. If his birthday did occur in Nov
ember, that would make 1859 his year of birth.

  The few tantalizing hints of Billy’s early life must necessarily come through his mother, Catherine McCarty. She had been born in Ireland but later emigrated to the United States, perhaps while still a child but maybe as a young bride. A plucky woman, Catherine and her two boys, Henry and Joseph (born in 1863), called Indianapolis, Indiana, home for a short time in the mid-to late 1860s. She is recorded in Indianapolis city directories for 1867 and 1868 as the widow of Michael. Michael McCarty may or may not have been Billy’s father. And he may have died in New York City, or he may have perished in the Civil War as a member of an Indiana regiment. As far as we know, Billy never spoke his father’s name to any of his New Mexico acquaintances. In any case, the Catherine McCarty family was not much different from other families that found themselves without a husband and father immediately following the Civil War. And little Henry McCarty was probably not much different from other boys his age—hating school and living for play and mischief.

  Sometime in 1865, Catherine met William H. Antrim, a veteran of the Fifty-fourth Indiana Volunteer Infantry who worked in Indianapolis as a driver and clerk for the Merchant’s Union Express Company. He was twenty-three years old; she was thirty-six. Yet despite their difference in age, the two developed a relationship, perhaps platonic at first, but eventually growing into something more serious. In 1870, before the census taker made his rounds, the McCarty clan and William Antrim left Indiana and headed to Kansas. The move could have been a search for a healthier place to live, because Catherine McCarty is known to have later suffered from tuberculosis. But it could have as easily been about a move westward. Much of America’s population was on the move, and there was an optimism about the West and the prospects it offered for a better life; all one needed was gumption, a piece of open land, and a little good luck. Kansas had the land.

  The McCartys and Antrim settled in Wichita, a delightful culture shock for young Henry if there ever was one. Located at the junction of the Little Arkansas and Arkansas rivers, in south-central Kansas, the young town (founded in 1868 and incorporated two years later) was a true frontier crossroads. It had a strange, somewhat naked appearance—the town had been laid out on the open prairie completely absent of trees—and there was the constant and annoying sound of hammers from the construction of dozens of new houses and buildings. Lining the town’s main thoroughfare were makeshift restaurants, boardinghouses, saloons, butcher shops, bakeries, clothing stores, a barbershop, a drugstore, a livery stable, and several carpenter shops.

  The ten-year-old Henry McCarty saw incredible things, sights his young friends back in Indiana would have given their souls to see. On a daily basis, the pageant of the American West passed before him—a tad begrimed, to be sure. Cowboys, freighters, buffalo hunters, home-steaders, and soldiers clomped noisily up and down the town’s board-walks. Indian men, women, and children, residents of Indian Territory (Oklahoma) to the south, shuffled in and out of stores as they stocked up on supplies. But the longhorn was king. Immense herds of Texas cattle forded the Arkansas here on their way to Abilene. During one three-day stretch that summer of 1870, 18,000 longhorns crossed the river, a fraction of the 200,000 to 300,000 that crossed that season.

  From all appearances, Catherine and William intended to remain in the Kansas boomtown. They both invested in town lots, and Catherine started her own business on North Main Street. The Wichita Tribune wrote about her venture in its inaugural issue of March 15, 1871: “The City Laundry is kept by Mrs. McCarty, to whom we recommend those who wish to have their linen made clean.” If the widow McCarty was suffering from tuberculosis at that time, the tedious hand washing of linens and other laundry in a damp, steamy place certainly did not help her condition. If she was not ill when she arrived in Wichita, her workplace would have made her susceptible to the disease. She then either inhaled the deadly bacteria from a coughing customer, or it came, innocently enough, through the milk of an infected cow.

  Catherine and her two boys probably started out by living in the quarters over the laundry, and at nighttime they were likely treated to some occasional gunfire from the streets below—it was a woolly cow town, after all. William Antrim and widow McCarty were not yet married, and it does not appear that they were living together, although there is not enough evidence to be certain about this. On March 4, 1871, Catherine moved her family into a small frame house that William had built for her northeast of Wichita’s business district. This was definitely an improvement, and it would suggest that everything was going according to plan for the McCartys that spring of 1871. But things happen, and plans change. By the end of the summer, Catherine had sold off all her Wichita property and, along with her two boys and Antrim, had left Wichita for good.

  Perhaps Catherine’s health prompted the hasty departure for Denver. (Billy later told his friend Frank Coe that the family moved to Denver when he was about twelve years old.) Many others stricken with consumption had traveled to Denver for its “bracing atmosphere and pure water,” believing, as did their physicians, that these, along with plenty of sunshine, were the keys to their recovery. The high plains and mountains of the American West had long enjoyed a legendary reputation for healthfulness, bolstered by more than a few miracle cases. The Rocky Mountains also enjoyed a reputation for mineral riches, which could just as easily have been the overriding motivation for the McCarty-Antrim move to Colorado—William Antrim eventually became a miner obsessed with striking it rich.

  Exactly how long the McCartys and Antrim remained in Denver is unknown, perhaps only a few months, because soon they were living in Santa Fe, New Mexico Territory. On March 1, 1873, William H. Antrim and Mrs. Catherine McCarty were joined in matrimony at the First Presbyterian Church of Santa Fe. Among the witnesses to the modest ceremony were Catherine’s two sons, Henry and Joseph ( Josie to family and friends). Significantly, the church marriage register described William and Catherine as “both of Santa Fe.” No sooner had Mr. and Mrs. Antrim exchanged vows, however, than they began making arrangements to move again. William, it appears, had become seduced by the fabulous reports of mineral discoveries in the southwestern part of the Territory at a place dubbed, enticingly enough, Silver City.

  Antrim was not the only one. That June, the Santa Fe Sentinel’s editor commented on the starry-eyed prospectors who were passing through the capital each week and expressed his wish that they would find the mines even richer than expected, so that the whole world would know New Mexico as “the great El Dorado of the West.” No matter that the boomtown was 350 hard miles from Santa Fe, or that it was surrounded by rugged hills near the Continental Divide, or that it was located in the heart of Apache country. As the Spanish conquistadors, and countless other dream chasers who came after, could well attest, El Dorados never came easy. And so William Antrim whisked his family off to Silver City.

  The Antrims’ new home was a square-hewn log cabin on Silver City’s south Main Street, near its intersection with Broadway. For whatever reason, the family no longer enjoyed the financial stability it had experienced in Wichita, and as silver ore was not piled around on the ground just waiting to be picked up, both William and Catherine had to work to put bread on the table. William found employment as a butcher and carpenter, trades that could earn as high as six to eight dollars a day. But he does not seem to have worked his jobs full-time. Naturally, he took off to prospect for his own silver mine, and, according to some accounts, to patronize the boomtown’s gambling halls. Unfortunately, William Antrim was lucky at neither mining nor gambling.

  Catherine took in laundry, baked pies and other treats, and even accepted boarders into their small home. Louis Abraham, a playmate of Henry and Joseph McCarty, had fond memories of the Antrim cabin. Mrs. Antrim “always welcomed the boys with a smile and a joke,” he recalled. “The cookie jar was never empty to the boys. From school each afternoon we made straight for the Antrim home to play.” Abraham also remembered Catherine at the weekly dances, where she kic
ked up her heels in a most impressive Highland fling. Such displays became less frequent, however, as her disease progressed.

  Henry McCarty’s friends remembered him as skinny and small, even somewhat girlish. His brother, Joseph, although younger, was actually bigger than Henry. “My sister and I went to school with Billy the Kid,” recalled the sheriff’s son, Harry Whitehill. “He wasn’t a bad fellow.” And according to Louis Abraham, Henry was “full of fun and mischief.” Not surprisingly, Henry and Joseph spent as much time, if not more, in the dance halls and saloons as they did in school and at home. In fact, Silver City’s first public school did not start until January 1874 and lasted less than three months. To keep the pupils out of trouble until school resumed, they were encouraged to put on some kind of theatrical entertainment to raise money for the new schoolhouse. The students decided that a blackface minstrel show was just the thing. Henry, who seems to have had a passion for music, surely reveled in the minstrel show’s raucous nature and crude humor.

  One of Catherine’s boarders in the spring of 1874 was Marshall Ashmun Upson, known by friend and foe alike as “Ash.” Born in Wolcott, Connecticut, in 1828, Ash was a gregarious newspaperman who claimed he had once tutored the children of Mormon leader Brigham Young. He appeared to be constantly on the move, finding it difficult to remain in one place for very long. He also found it difficult to remain sober for very long, and to prove it he had several battle scars, including a “badly damaged” nose. In one of those extraordinary coincidences that history often throws at us, Ash Upson eventually became Pat Garrett’s best friend and the ghostwriter of Garrett’s 1882 biography of Billy the Kid.