April 30, 2010

Billy The Kid, a legend of New Mexico

Billy The Kid legend is a legend that can not be separated from the Wild West legends. The Legend of Billy The Kid found in the Wild West includes New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. Billy The Kid legend in New Mexico territory started in the last nine years of Billy The Kid’s life. Henry McCarty called New Mexico as home.

Billy the kid 197x300 Billy The Kid, a legend of New Mexico

Billy The Kid was the nickname of Henry McCarty, who is known as a bandit and a folks hero on the American frontier in the 19th century. This legend is almost the same as Robin Hood legend in England. Henry McCarty also known as Henry Antrim and William H. Bonney. Booney was the name used at the time of fame and is also often used in correspondence.

The Legend of Billy The Kid has become famous legend as a result of the Lincoln County War. The Lincoln County War is a conflict had erupted between the established town merchants, Lawrence Murphy and James Dolan, and competing business interests headed by Tunstall and McSween. John Tunstall, an English cattle rancher, banker and merchant, and his partner, Alexander McSween, a prominent lawyer, hired Henry McCarty as a cattle guard in late 1877. When Tunstall was shot and killed in the wintry twilight of February 18, 1878, the Lincoln County War erupted.

Adventures of Billy The Kid was ended when he was shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett at Pete Maxwell’s house on 14 July 1881. At that time, Billy The Kid was nineteen or twenty years.

Billy The Kid Legend Travel

In Silver City, go to Hudson Street and Broadway and park at the Silver City/Grant County Chamber of Commerce. West of the northwest corner, adjacent the chamber’s Visitor Center, is a marker that approximates the site of the Kid’s 1873-74 boyhood home. On the southwest corner, a second marker denotes the site of one of the Kid’s foster homes, the Star Hotel; and on the northeast corner, a third marker attends the site of the city jail, where the Kid escaped by shimmying up the chimney. The Kid’s mother is buried in quiet Memory Lane Cemetery, two miles northeast.

Fleeing Silver City, the Kid drifted to Camp Grant, Arizona, 35 miles north of Willcox. Less than three miles southwest of the former post, McDowell’s Store (which he frequented) still stands. The foundation of the Hotel de Luna, where the Kid was arrested for horse thievery in March, 1877 (and hauled to the post guardhouse, from which he escaped), is a quarter-mile northeast. Adjacent the store is the foundation of George Atkin’s Saloon, where the Kid shot blacksmith Frank ‘Windy’ Cahill that August. Cahill died the next day, and the Kid fled back to New Mexico (private property).

Founded in 1849, La Mesilla witnessed the Kid’s incarceration, two-day trial and conviction in April, 1881, for the April, 1878, murder of Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady. The former courtroom is today an art gallery and souvenir shop on the southeast corner of the plaza, and the former jail another gallery one block east at 105 Calle de Parian. The Kid’s original jail cell is in the Gadsden Museum, two blocks east of the former jail.

The original plot containing Pat Garrett’s Grave can still be seen in the southeast corner of Las Cruces’s rarely visited Odd Fellows Cemetery at Compress and Brown Roads. The Garrett family purchased a larger plot across the street in the well-tended Masonic Cemetery in 1957, where the remains of Garrett, his second wife Apolinaria, and seven of their eight children are interred.

Six miles northeast of Las Cruces, a simple marker on the old San Agustin Pass Road in rugged Alameda Arroyo commemorates Pat Garrett’s Murder Site where, while approaching Las Cruces in the company Pat Garrett of two other men in February, 1908, rancher Garrett was shot from behind and killed after climbing down from his buckboard to urinate. One of the men, rancher Wayne Brazel, confessed but was, incredibly, acquitted.

Local legend says the Kid supposedly rode 81 miles in late 1876 to spring a pal named Melquiades Segura from the San Elizario, Texas, jail, built in 1850. The restored two-room adobe, its two original cells intact, is 21 miles southeast of El Paso.

On the sheltered face of a rugged peak in remote Faulkner Canyon overlooking a cattle rustlers’ box canyon three miles southwest of the ruins of Fort Selden (1865-90), today a state monument, is the inscription “William Bonney”, and those of his pals Tom O’Folliard (“OF”), Charlie Bowdre (“Bowdre”), and Dave Rudabaugh (“DR”).

Garrett homesteaded his 160-acre San Augustin Ranch, six miles northeast of San Augustin Pass (and three miles north of Chalk Hill, where Col. Albert J. Fountain and his son were murdered in 1896), circa 1898-99. Here he halfheartedly tried mining, then raised horses and cattle. After one-term stints as a county sheriff and customs inspector, Garrett returned to ranching here until his death (White Sands Missile Range property).

Today nearly gone, the two-story, lumber-producing adobe structure that was onetime Iowa dentist Joseph Blazer’s Mill marks the site of an epic gun battle on April 4, 1878. Though mortally wounded, Andrew ‘Buckshot’ Roberts held the Regulators at bay, wounding the Kid and two others, and killing their leader, Dick Brewer. Both are buried in a tiny cemetery on a hill above the dilapidated, boarded-up Blazer home where Roberts is believed to have held his attackers at bay (private property).

The Kid, Garrett, and other Lincoln County War notables often patronized onetime U.S. army Captain Paul Dowlin’s Mill, a fortresslike flour mill, mess hall, mercantile and blacksmith shop. They gambled, danced at bailes, and bought supplies. Built circa 1850, the mill gradually attracted settlers to the Rio Ruidoso. Today the mill is a museum and curio shop (private property).

Behind a row of Lombardy poplars are the wood-shingled barn and former home of the Frank Coe Ranch . Coe, who had befriended the Kid in late 1877, fought in the Lincoln County War as a Regulator until August, 1878. Originally Dick Brewer’s ranch, Coe bought it in 1883 (private property).

Near the top of Tunstall Canyon in Lincoln National Forest, about 100 yards downhill from poorly maintained Coe Canyon Road, and less than five miles south of the Rio Ruidoso, are two simple markers commemorating the John Tunstall Murder Site. Tunstall, the Kid and four others had been driving a herd of Tunstall’s horses from Tunstall’s Rio Feliz ranch northward back to Lincoln when a 14-man posse overtook them (public land).

The Kid and the Regulators twice battled Lincoln County Sheriff George Peppin’s posses in the village of San Patricio in 1878. The first time ended in a four-hour stalemate along the nearby Rio Ruidoso in June, and the second resulted in the posse’s route from the village in July. The Kid considered the Hispanic residents here friends (private property).

The first structure you’ll notice in White Oaks, a once-bustling gold-mining town founded in 1879, is the restored two-story Goodman-Ziegler & Company mercantile, built circa 1890. Garrett was collecting taxes in White Oaks when the Kid escaped the Lincoln jail. Alexander McSween’s resolute widow, Susan, lived here until her death in 1931. She and Deputy James W. Bell (who was shot and killed by the Kid during that escape) are buried in the nearby Cedarvale Cemetery. 12 miles northeast of Carrizozo.

Deputy Sheriff William Hudgens and his 13-man posse trapped the Kid and his pals at Whiskey Jim Greathouse’s Ranch & Stage Station on December 1, 1880. During the day-long shootout, deputized White Oaks blacksmith Jim Carlyle was killed. After the posse withdrew, the outlaws escaped. The next morning somebody burned the ranch to the ground (private property). 37 miles north of Carrizozo.

Fort Stanton, whose presence infused the short-term economic survival of Lincoln, 11 miles east, possessed the beef contracts that the Tunstall-McSween and Dolan-Riley factions prized. When its commander, Lt. Col. Nathan Dudley, interceded in Lincoln’s five-day siege, his Gatling gun tipped the scales in favor of the Dolan-Riley faction. Although the 200-troop fort (1855-96) eventually became a tubercular sanitarium, a World War II prison camp for Germans, a state mental hospital, and a juvenile prison, its historical integrity remains largely intact. Its west-end parade ground, commanding officer’s home, and a handful of other buildings there were designated a state monument in 2005. Visit the east-end Fort Stanton Museum, in the tiny, onetime post doctor’s home, first.

You can still walk through the village of Lincoln, where more than a dozen buildings that witnessed much of the war still stand. Settled circa 1849, it began as Las Placitas del Rio Bonito and is still home to about 70 residents (public buildings, private residences).

At the Lincoln State Monument’s Anderson-Freeman Visitor Center & Museum, amble west along Main Street. Note the torreon, a circular stone tower the first settlers erected as a defense against raiding Apaches, and the Tunstall Store, behind which the Kid and his pals ambushed and killed the Lincoln County Sheriff and his Deputy in April, 1878. Behind it are Tunstall’s and McSween’s graves. West of the store is the site of the 12-room McSween House, completed in 1877; its torching climaxed the five-day siege and ended the war. Then there’s the restored eight-room Wortley Hotel, built in 1874, where Deputy Bob Olinger had taken five prisoners for pot roast and mashed potatoes on April 28, 1881. When shots rang out, he raced across the street to the Lincoln County Court House, built in 1873-74. There he died instantly at the hands of the shotgun-wielding Kid. Bullet holes in the interior west wall attest to the killing of Deputy James W. Bell, and engraved stone tablets outside mark where the two fell. Walking east, note Justice of the Peace Squire John B. Wilson’s Office. Behind the adjacent San Juan Church, near the acequia (irrigation ditch) stood Wilson’s home where the Kid secretly met and sought a pardon from New Mexico Governor Lew Wallace on the night of March 17, 1879.

The Morton & Baker Murder Site is a moment immortalized in famed artist Charles Russell’s pen-and-ink sketch. The Kid and his pals shot and killed Billy Morton and Frank Baker somewhere along remote Blackwater Canyon Creek in March, 1878. The two had been part of the posse that had killed Tunstall. The Regulators had said they taking the captives to the Lincoln jail and had chosen a less-traveled back road from Roswell (private land).

Four miles east of Roswell is the Pat Garrett Home, built in 1880 on 1,800 acres that Garrett homesteaded. Here alcoholic ex-newspaperman Ash Upson ghosted the first 15 chapters of Garrett’s book and three Garrett children were born. Garrett sold the two-story porched adobe on the south bank of the Rio Hondo in 1891 (private residence).

The Queen Anne-style John W. Poe Home at 3l1West 7th Street in Roswell was built in 1895. One of Garrett’s deputies outside the Maxwell home when the Kid was killed, Poe succeeded Garrett as Lincoln County Sheriff, became a prominent local banker, and lived here until a few years before his death in 1923 (private residence).

Once nationally famous as the Jingle Bob Ranch, the vast John S. Chisum Ranch was headquartered here at South Springs, four miles south of Roswell, from 1874 until the cattle baron’s death from cancer in 1884. Retired railroad magnate and Garrett business associate J. J. Hagerman bought the ranch in 1892, building two red brick homes, about 1900 (private residence).

Tunstall’s 3,200-acre spread, today known as the Flying H Ranch was headquartered on the Rio Feliz, 40 miles southeast of Lincoln. He began cattle ranching here in April, 1877 and hired the Kid as a hand here in December, 1877. A four-room adobe home believed to have been Tunstall’s (or James J. Dolan’s), and a homesteader’s dugout, built in 1870, remain (private property).

On an old Comanchero trail known as the Texas Road, the caliche caves and springs at Los Portales, seven miles southeast of the city of Portales, were a rendezvous and hideout for outlaws. The Kid and his pals often sheltered their mounts and stolen stock here in 1879-80, and the Kid insisted to have wanted to ranch nearby (private property).

The Kid and the Regulators drove stolen horses to Tascosa, Texas, in September, 1878. He befriended the locals, played cards, raced horses, and danced at Pedro Romero’s weekly bailes. The remnants of the Regulators disbanded for good here that November. Today Cal Farley’s Boys Ranch occupies the site of this once-bawdy Canadian River town, where only tiny Boot Hill Cemetery and the stone-block Oldham County Court House, built in 1884, remain. Both are visitor accessible, 36 miles northwest of Amarillo.

Also on the Comanchero trail, Canada del Tule or “the ravine of the reed”, eight miles south of the village of Melrose, is the site of a spring that served as one of Pete Maxwell’s cattle camps. The Kid often visited camps like these while staying at Fort Sumner (private property).

At Stinking Spring is the 12-by-20-foot foundation of the abandoned rock cabin where Garrett and his 12-man posse trapped the Kid and his gang and killed Charlie Bowdre on December 23, 1880. Garrett soon tantalized them with supper into surrendering here, 17 miles east of the village of Fort Sumner (private property).

Unrestored, most of the original Fort Sumner is today a state monument. Land baron Lucien Maxwell bought the abandoned post (1863-68) in 1870. Here Garrett was a ranch hand and briefly bartended Beaver Smith’s saloon in 1878-79, the Kid shot and killed Joe Grant in Bob Hargrove’s saloon in January, 1880, and Garrett shot and killed the Kid’s best friend, Tom O’Folliard, in front of the old post hospital on December 18, 1880. The commanding officer’s quarters that became Lucien’s and son Pete’s home (where a startled Garrett shot and killed the Kid on July 14, 1881), was cannibalized after 1884. Most of its foundation disappeared in a 1937 flood. In the nearby old post cemetery, behind the Old Fort Sumner Museum, are the marked graves of the Kid (whose smaller tombstone was stolen twice but recovered), Bowdre, O’Folliard, and the Maxwells, seven miles southeast of the village of Fort Sumner and the Billy the Kid Museum.

After his capture at Stinking Springs in 1880, the shackled Kid, guarded by Garrett and his posse, enjoyed a two-hour Christmas Day turkey dinner at Polish ex-priest Alexander Grzelachowski’s Home & Store. This Territorial-style sandstone and adobe structure, built in 1874, is in Puerto de Luna, 10 miles south of Santa Rosa (private property).

Settled shortly after 1822, the Pecos River settlement of Anton Chico attracted merchants, ranchers and outlaws. Here the Kid and the Regulators scared off San Miguel County Sheriff Desiderio Romero and his posse in Manuel Sanchez’s saloon in August, 1878, and Garrett married Apolinaria Gutierrez (the older sister of the one of the Kid’s queridas) in January, 1880, in St. Joseph’s Church, built in 1857. 40 miles northwest of Santa Rosa.

In the Victorian-era city Las Vegas, the site of the county jail where the Kid spent the night after his capture at Stinking Springs, is at 200 Valencia Street, a block northwest of Old Town Plaza. The site of the old depot, where Garrett and the manacled Kid boarded the next-afternoon train to Santa Fe, is just east of the railroad tracks beyond Railroad Ave., between Jackson and Tilden Streets.

In Santa Fe, the site of the original First Presbyterian Church, where the Kid’s mother married William Antrim on March 1, 1873, is at 208 Grant Street. The site of the county jail, where from December 27, 1880, to March 28, 1881, the Kid awaited his transfer to La Mesilla for trial (and from which he nearly escaped), is on the south side of Water Street, a half-block west of Galisteo.