STORIES
The Legend of Billy The Kid
Deputy Robert Ollinger lovingly wiped down his 10-gauge shotgun with a lightly oiled cloth. He was very proud of the weapon and its' unusual ammunition. He had laboriously loaded both barrels with his own hand-made cartridges containing 56 silver dimes (28 in each barrel); “enough to spread you out like a crazy lady's quilt,” as he had told young Billy, currently in custody here at the Lincoln County Jail and Courthouse. It was a humid, airless day on 28 April 1881.
Sheriff Pat Garrett was out of town, and Ollinger and his fellow deputy James Bell were assigned the dangerous job of guarding the notorious outlaw Henry McCarty (aka William H Bonney), widely known in the area as ‘Billy the Kid'. Both deputies were acutely aware that Billy was also notorious as a gifted escape artist. He was in jail awaiting his own hanging on 13 May, having been found guilty of the murder of Sheriff William Brady on 1 April 1878. His trial had taken exactly one day.
Though a devout Christian, Ollinger had a sadistic streak. Once, he had jammed the barrels of his shotgun into Billy's mouth, urging him to repent his evil ways and give his “soul to Jesus” before he died at the end of a noose. Failing that, Ollinger told Billy that he would love any excuse to blast him to ‘kingdom come' before his appointed date with death. “Just try and escape, kid, and I'll be happy to blow you apart with these fifty-six silver dimes,” he snarled, “and I won't even have to clean up the mess!”
At noon, Bell was left to guard the prisoner as Ollinger went off to his lunch in the saloon across the dusty main street. Billy asked permission to use the outdoor privy and was escorted there by Bell . As he shuffled along with his legs and hands manacled, Billy talked casually to the deputy: whilst he detested Ollinger, he got along well with the amiable James Bell. But what the trusting deputy didn't know was that one of Billy's sympathisers had placed a loaded Colt revolver among old newspapers inside the privy. After relieving himself, the Kid picked up the gun and placed it under his shirt before Bell escorted him back to the courthouse jail.
When they reached the top of the stairs to a landing housing the cells, Billy turned and pointed the gun at Bell , snapping the hammer back. “Throw me the keys, Jim”, he said. “I'll lock you in a cell and no one will get hurt.” But the startled Bell reached for his holstered pistol and thus signed his own death warrant. Billy shot him twice before Bell could even clear leather; and his body tumbled to the foot of the stairs.
The Kid scrambled down to Bell , extracted the keys and freed himself of his manacles. Then he went to the gun rack and extracted Ollinger's shotgun before returning to the outdoor landing overlooking the main street. Within seconds Ollinger ran out of the saloon, his own pistol drawn. “Hello Bob!” Billy shouted before firing both barrels at the hapless deputy. In about 30 feet of space the ammunition spread, and Ollinger himself was blasted to kingdom come as the coins from his own weapon tore him open. Billy laughed. “Keep the change, Bob!” he said laconically, tossing down the shotgun.
With both lawmen in town dead, no citizen of Lincoln was prepared to obstruct the Kid as he casually saddled a horse and rode away singing loudly. Once again, he had come out ahead in a lethal confrontation and added to his growing legend. But he had only 76 days left to live.
Henry William McCarty was born in Manhattan , New York but his given birth date of 23 November 1859 is high dubious. It is more likely that he was born sometime in 1860. During his short lifetime, he used the aliases Henry Antrim and William Harrison Bonney. His parents were of Irish Protestant descent, but their exact names, and thus McCarty's own surname are not known for certain. Variations for his parents' names include Catherine McCarty or Katherine McCarty Bonney for his mother and William Bonney or Patrick Henry McCarty for his father, who died in 1865.
In 1868 Billy's mother met William Antrim and after several years of travelling around with Henry and his half-brother Joseph, the couple married and settled in Silver City , New Mexico in 1873. Antrim worked as a bartender and carpenter, but then left his family to go prospecting for gold. He never returned.
Billy's mother took in boarders to make some money and provide for her sons, but sadly died of tuberculosis on 16 September 1874. McCarty then worked in a hotel where he impressed the manager who boasted that he was the only youngster who never stole from him. His schoolteachers also praised the lad, who had become fluent in English and Spanish and learned to read and write. McCarty was not a retard, as some historians have suggested.
He was a cheerful child with a quick wit, blue eyes and prominent front teeth. McCarty developed an interest in guns quite early in his life. As soon as he could afford a handgun, he purchased one and spent hours honing his shooting skills so that by the age of 14 he was an accomplished marksman with his Colt .44. But he was arrested for hiding a bundle of stolen clothes for a man playing a prank on a Chinese laundryman. Two days after he was imprisoned, the scrawny teenager escaped by worming his way up the jailhouse chimney. From then on, he was a fugitive for much of the rest of his life.
He fled to Arizona where he found work as a ranch hand and shepherd. In 1877 he became a civilian teamster at Fort Grant Army Post in Arizona , hauling logs from a timber camp to a sawmill. The civilian blacksmith at the camp was Frank ‘Windy' Cahill who took pleasure in bullying the youngster. On 17 August he punched Billy to the ground after a verbal exchange. Billy retaliated by drawing his pistol and shooting Cahill, who fell mortally, wounded and died the next day. He had notched up his first kill at the age of seventeen.
Once again McCarty was imprisoned, this time in the camp's guardhouse awaiting the arrival of the local marshal and a trial for murder. But he did not wait around for the lawman, and escaped captivity. After a hazardous journey during which his horse was stolen by Apache Indians, forcing him to walk many miles to the nearest settlement, he arrived at the house of Heiskell Jones in Pecos Valley , New Mexico . Mrs Jones nursed him back to health and Billy repaid the Jones family by doing chores and running errands for them.
McCarty next moved to Lincoln County , New Mexico where he was hired as a cattle guard by John Tunstall, a prosperous English rancher. Billy had ridden straight into a bitter feud. The conflict was known as the Lincoln County War and it raged between the establish town merchants (‘The House') and Tunstall's men, who were fiercely loyal to him.
On 18 February 1878 Tunstall was caught unarmed whilst herding cattle on an open range and shot dead by two members of ‘The House', named Bill Morton and Frank Baker. This cowardly murder enraged Bonney and the other ranchers and they formed their own group, known as ‘The Regulators'. Led by Dick Brewer they proceeded to hunt down the two posse members who had killed Tunstall.
Near Auga Negra on 6 March, they captured Morton and Baker and hanged them both on 9 March after holding an outdoor kangaroo court. Whilst returning to Lincoln , Bonney also killed Bill McCloskey; one of their own gang whom Brewer strongly suspected was a traitor.
Then on 1 April Regulators Jim French, Frank McNab, John Middleton, Fred Waite, Henry Brown and Bonney ambushed Sheriff William Brady and his deputy outside Lincoln , killing them both in the ensuing fire fight.
At Blazer's Mill on 4 April they tracked down and killed an old buffalo hunter known as ‘Buckshot Roberts' whom the Regulators suspected of involvement in the Tunstall murder. Before he died Roberts blasted Brewer with his 12-gauge shotgun, and the Regulators had to bury two bodies by the mill. Bonney then became the gang's new leader, now known locally as ‘Billy the Kid'.
In July 1878 the Regulators were trapped in a house in Lincoln by some of Brady's deputies and members of The House. During a fierce gun battle Bonney killed Deputy Bob Beckwith whilst losing two of his own men in a narrow escape from the building which was peppered with bullet holes.
Former Union General Lew Wallace (author of ‘Ben Hur') became the new territorial Governor of New Mexico in 1878. In order to restore peace to Lincoln County , Wallace (1827-1905) proclaimed an amnesty for any man involved in the Lincoln County War who was not already under indictment. Now Billy, who had fled to Texas , was under indictment, but Wallace was intrigued by rumours that the young outlaw was willing to surrender himself and testify against other combatants if amnesty could be extended to him. Bonney wrote to Wallace confirming this.
On 17 March 1879 Wallace and Bonney met in Lincoln to discuss the possibility of a deal. True to his image, Bonney greeted the famous Governor with a Colt revolver in one hand and a Winchester rifle in the other. After several days of discussion, Bonney agreed to testify in return for amnesty.
The arrangement called for Bonney to submit to a token arrest and a short stay in jail until the conclusion of his courtroom testimony. Although his statements under oath help to indict John Dolan, one of the most powerful House faction leaders, the district attorney disregarded Wallace's order to free him after testifying. Instead of riding away from Lincoln a free man, McCarty was jailed in June 1879 to face trial for the killing of Sheriff Brady. A day later he slipped out of his handcuffs and escaped.
For the next year and a half he survived by gambling, cattle rustling and killing. In January 1880 he was playing Poker in a saloon in Fort Sumner near the Pecos River . One of the players was Joe Grant, a bounty hunter who boasted during the game that he would shoot this skinny outlaw named ‘Billy the Kid' if he ever saw him; completely unaware that the man himself was sitting just a few feet away from him across the card table.
In those days gunmen loaded their revolvers with five bullets, and there were no safety catches. Bonney asked the boastful Grant if he could see his ivory-handled revolver, and whilst admiring the weapon he cycled the cylinder so that the hammer would fall on the empty chamber. Then he handed the gun back to Grant and confessed that he was, in fact, ‘Billy the Kid'. Grant ‘fired' his weapon only to hear the hammer click when he pulled the trigger. It was probably the last thing he ever heard. Bonney levelled his own gun and blew him away. “It was a game for two, and I got there first,” he later remarked.
Ten months later Bonney's gang was trapped by a posse whilst visiting an old friend named Jim Greathouse at his ranch house in the White Oaks area of Lincoln . During the standoff, a posse member named James Carlyle ventured into the house under a flag of truce in an attempt to negotiate the gang's surrender, whilst Greathouse was sent out as a hostage for the posse. As it became apparent to Carlyle that the outlaws were stalling, a shot was accidentally fired from outside. Carlyle, assuming the posse had shot Greathouse, ran for his life, crashing through a window into the snow outside the ranch house. Mistaking Carlyle for an outlaw, the entire posse opened fire and killed him as he attempted to get to his feet. Now thoroughly demoralised, the posse scattered, allowing Bonney and his men to slip away. The Kid later wrote to Governor Wallace claiming innocence in the killing of Carlyle.
Several years earlier, Bonney had developed a fateful friendship with an ambitious local bartender and buffalo hunter named Patrick Garrett. Running on a pledge to rid the area of rustlers, Garrett was elected Sheriff of Lincoln County in November 1880 and put together another posse to arrest or kill Billy the Kid who now carried a bounty of $500 on his head.
On 19 December, Bonney barely escaped the posse's midnight ambush in Fort Sumner . During a confused gunfight in the dark, Tom O'Folliard, one of Bonney's men, was shot dead. The gang fled to a remote hideaway at Stinking Springs hotly pursued by Garrett and his men. As the outlaws huddled down in a farmhouse, Garrett's men surrounded the place and waited for sunrise.
When Charlie Bowdre stepped outside to feed his horse, posse members shot him down. As the lawmen began to cook breakfast over an open fire, Garrett and Bonney engaged in a friendly conversation: Garrett invited Bonney to join in the meal, and Bonney invited Garrett to “Go to Hell, Pat!” But later the besieged and hungry outlaws surrendered and sat down to eat with the posse.
Bonney was jailed in Mesilla whilst awaiting his trial in April 1881, and spent his time giving newspaper interviews and polishing his legend. He also wrote several letters to Governor Wallace seeking clemency. The latter, however refused to intervene, and on 13 April Bonney was sentenced to hang by Judge Warren Bristol. Fifteen days later, he killed deputies Bell and Ollinger as recounted and slipped away.
Responding to rumours that Bonney was still lurking in the vicinity of Fort Sumner almost three months after his dramatic escape, Sheriff Garrett and two deputies set out on 14 July to question one of the town's residents, a friend of Bonney's named Pete Maxwell. Near midnight, as Garrett and Maxwell sat talking in Maxwell's darkened boarding room, Bonney himself entered unexpectedly accompanied by a Mexican prostitute. He noticed figures in the darkness and said “Quien es?” (“Who is it?”). Garrett then drew his Colt .45 and shot him dead.
The body of Henry William McCarty, alias Henry Antrim, alias William Harrison Bonney, alias Billy the Kid was buried the next day in Fort Sumner's old military cemetery, between his fallen companions Tom O'Folliard and Charlie Bowdre. A single tombstone was erected over the graves, with the three outlaws' names and the word ‘Pals' also carved into it.
Soon after, Garrett published a wildly sensationalistic biography of the outlaw entitled ‘The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid'. This self-serving work was a bestseller, embellishing the legend until Billy the Kid became the most famous outlaw of America 's Old Wild West. According to Garrett's version of events, he was forced to shoot back in self-defence when The Kid drew down on him in Maxwell's room.
Two other falsehoods persist about Bonney. First, he did not kill 21 men; one for each day of his life, as Garrett wrote. A total of nine men killed is probably nearer the truth. Secondly, he was not left-handed. This belief came from the fact that the only known photograph of Billy, an undated ferrotype (see picture), shows him with a Model 1873 Winchester rifle in his right hand and gun belt with a holster on his left side. It was obvious that the image was reversed when someone noticed that the Winchester had the loading port on the left, when it was known that all Winchester 1873's had the loading port on the right side. Billy the Kid was in fact wearing his pistol on his right hip just as any right-handed gunman would.
In spite of this, Paul Newman starred as Bonney in ‘The Left-Handed Gun', director Arthur Penn's 1958 movie based on the life of Billy the Kid. The infamous outlaw has also been played on the big screen by Johnny Mack Brown, Robert Taylor, John Carradine, Geoffrey Deuel, Michael J Pollard, Kriss Kristofferson and Emilio Estevez.
IF YOU need a check on my True Crime series of stories, published in the Hua Hin Observer, here is a complete list to date:
April 2002 -The Green Bicycle case, 1921. May 2002 - The Craig/Bentley Case, 1952. June 2002 - The A6 Murder Case, 1961. July 2002 - Murder of the Earl of Errol, 1941. August 2002 - The O J Simpson murder trial, 1995. September 2002 - The Aileen Wuornos case, 1989. October 2002 - The Ronald Opus case, 1993. November 2002 - Madame X, 1929. December 2002 - The Spree Killer, 1984. January 2003 - Shootout at Smiths' Club, 1966. February 2003 - The Christine Dryland case, 1991. March 2003 - Poisoned Pie in Essex, 1982. April 2003 - The Heydrich assassination, 1943. May 2003 - The Diana Davidson Murder case, 1969. June 2003 - The death of Alkibiades, 404 BC. July 2003 - The headsman of Colmar, 1780. August 2003 - The Ruth Ellis case, 1955. September 2003 - The Mel Jones Murder case, 1975. October 2003 - The Bluebeard of the bath, 1915. November 2003 - Murder in a combat zone, 1966. December 2003 - The Barn Restaurant murder case, 1972. January 2004 - The assassination of JFK, 1963. February 2004 - Judge Falcone and the Mafia, 1992. March 2004 - Gilles de Rais/Bluebeard, 1404-1440. April 2004 - The hand in the sand case, 1885. May 2004 - The body in the bag, 1979
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