'The New Mexican' helped fuel tall tales about Western icon Billy the Kid

Such was life for the man who was, and probably remains, New Mexico’s most famous outlaw. Less than seven months before his death, he was not just confined by jail bars but by a growing celebrity that made him out to be a deadly killer and head of a band of outlaws.

The newspapers and dime novels ate it up, and The New Mexican played its part. The headline of the paper’s Dec. 28, 1880 coverage of Billy in Santa Fe sang out “Behind the Bars. ‘The Kid’ and Two of His Gang in Limbo — They Now Roost in Santa Fe Jail.”

Two days later, the paper “carried no less than four news items pertaining in some way to the Kid,” wrote Mark Lee Gardner in his book To Hell On a Fast Horse: The Untold Story of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett. The paper’s focus was on the jail itself, described by Gardner as “a dismal, one-story adobe building on Water Street.”

Reporters from nearby newspapers came to interview Billy during his time in the Santa Fe jail. Days later, in early January, The Illustrated Police News, a Boston weekly, ran a story on the “Boy Chief of New Mexico Outlaws and Cattle Thieves” that included an image of Billy posing with a rifle and six-gun.

Suddenly, the youth of about 21 was a national figure, burdened with all the angst and challenges that go with such a role but devoid of any of the joy that can accompany fame.

“When he was captured, he was essentially ordained an outlaw celebrity,” Gardner said in an interview.

“The media did him no favors,” Gardner added. “He thought it was really surreal to see the notoriety that he had from the top newspapers in New Mexico to these eastern newspapers.”

New Mexico State Historian Rob Martinez said the saga of Garrett capturing Billy and his band just a few days before Christmas gave the story a scope and sweep that helped build the reputation of both Billy and the man who would later kill him.

Martinez thinks the enormity of Billy’s position in the saga of the West at the time “probably also affected him in a not-so-nice way, in the way it affects young people who get famous today. It’s something everyone wants — fame and wealth. But they don’t think about the downside.”

Billy had, by the time he was jailed in Santa Fe, already been accused of shooting a marshal to death in the Lincoln County War and had gained a reputation as a killer on the run, forever stealing horses and committing other crimes, getting caught and escaping.

He once hightailed it out of a jail by pulling a reverse Santa Claus and clamoring up the chimney and away to freedom. He had similar hopes to escape from jail here.

Much of his few months spent in Santa Fe was taken up with figuring a way to dig out and pleading, via letter, with then-Gov. Lew Wallace to grant him a pardon. Wallace, who had issued a $500 reward for the capture of Billy earlier in December, was on the road promoting his novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.

The previous year, Billy, aware there was growing pressure to nab him, wrote Wallace with an offer to testify as a witness in the killing of a lawyer named Huston I. Chapman in Lincoln. Believing that offer would buy him amnesty, Billy sent a number of letters from the Santa Fe jail to Wallace pleading for his help.

Billy was in for a cold shock. Western historian and author Bob Boze Bell said Billy was “essentially pissing up a rope. The real villain in that chapter is an author [Wallace] out on a tour who doesn’t care much about this kid.”

Bell said whatever deal Billy thought he had with Wallace was not seen as a deal by the governor.

So Billy and his jailed companions — identified by Gardner as Billy Wilson, Edward Kelly and Dave Rudabaugh — came up with another plan. They began digging what Gardner in his book calls “an impressively large hole in the floor” and hiding the dirt and rock in one of the jail’s beds. An informer tipped off the law and the escape plot was foiled, to the chagrin of the outlaws.

All Billy got was “extra shackles and closer scrutiny from his guards,” Gardner wrote.

It was just another turn of bad luck for a kid who would live fast, die young and leave a not-so-good looking corpse.

Who was this Billy the Kid?

Gardner calls Billy the Kid “New Mexico’s most famous citizen.”

Bell says today he is an “international celebrity” who “towers above all the other famous Western outlaws, including Jesse James.”

Martinez likens Billy’s fame to that of a current teen pop or movie star and notes attaining that type of attention in the days long before radio, film, television and other media was pretty difficult.

Martinez is fascinated by the young outlaw’s meteoric rise and fall and wonders if anyone will really know the true story of his days before he got embroiled in the Lincoln County War of the late 1870s.

“Billy the Kid — that’s not his name,” said Martinez, rattling off a number of names associated with Billy. “It’s William Bonney — or is it? Or is it Henry McCarty? We really don’t know who Billy the Kid is.”

Gardner notes in his book he was known as Billy Bonney, Kid Antrim or sometimes just as “the Kid.” What is known is he was born to one Catherine McCarty. When and where he was born has not been determined, though Billy told one census taker he was born in Missouri and told another man he was born in New York City.

At some point, as a child, he moved with his mother and William H. Antrim, who became his stepfather, first to Kansas, then Denver, then New Mexico, settling in Silver City, where his mother died. Shortly thereafter, Billy began a life of crime by stealing some butter from a rancher. Soon he was stealing horses.

According to Gardner’s book, he killed his first man, a blacksmith, in the summer of 1877 in Arizona. He then fled east into New Mexico and kept heading to Lincoln County, doing a lot of practicing with his six gun along the way.

Always ready to join a fight he felt needed fighting, Billy got embroiled in a range war between rival businessmen in Lincoln County. When his employer, John Henry Tunstall, was shot dead in what Gardner calls the first bloody encounter of the Lincoln County War, Billy vowed to kill some of the men responsible.

On April 1, 1878, he joined other men in shooting down Sheriff William Brady, who oversaw the group of men who killed Tunstall, on the streets of Lincoln.

He was now deemed a bona fide killer and outlaw, but one blessed with enough pluck and luck to escape a burning house that was under fire during one of the most intense battles of the Lincoln County War. He spent much of his time on the lam rustling horses and livestock.

Garrett was soon on Billy’s tail, taking him and his criminal cohort prisoner in a surprise assault on a small structure in Stinking Springs just before Christmas Day 1880.

In March 1881, Billy was transferred from Santa Fe south to Mesilla to be put on trial for the murder of Sheriff Brady — the first time he was tried for a crime, Gardner wrote. He was found guilty and sentenced to hang in May.

Most of us know the rest of the story. Billy wasn’t one for being hanged, so he broke out of the jail room he was being held in on the second floor of the Lincoln County courthouse after shooting and killing the two deputies charged with guarding him.

And there was Garrett on his trail again, tracking him to a ranch in Fort Sumner, where he shot the youth dead in a darkened bedroom one July night in 1881. (The outlaw’s grave is a popular tourist destination there.) Most historians believe Billy was no older than 21.

Later that month, The New Mexican hailed Garrett as a hero and “the slayer of the worst man the territory has known.” The paper sent a reporter to interview Garrett, who told the reporter Billy was “as cool under trying circumstances as any man I ever saw.”

Billy, in death, was overshadowed by Garrett’s growing popularity as the man who shot Billy the Kid. Garrett was shot and killed himself in 1908. In the mid-1920s, Walter Noble Burns published a biography of Billy that renewed interest in his life and death. It wasn’t long before Hollywood began depicting his story — over and over again, with an array of actors from Robert Taylor to Audie Murphy to Emilio Estevez engaging in cinematic feats of derring-do that made the Kid seem even more larger than life.

Since the publication of Burns’ book it has been “very hard for historians and writers not to fall in love with Billy the Kid,” Gardner said.

Part of that adoration is due to our romantic worship of Western outlaws to this day.

“I think that’s what we think of, the romantic outlaw hero,” Gardner said. “Most people don’t think about the killing and the thieving. It was a very violent time, and I think Billy the Kid was trying to survive. Everything he did was about surviving.”

Martinez said as people reassess historic figures who engaged in violent or controversial actions — think Kit Carson — it may be tough for some to “square” Billy the Kid today with his actions in the past.

“Do we turn him into a hero?” Martinez asked. “Do we look at him as a criminal, which is how he was seen in his day? There’s still so much we need to do with Billy the Kid to try [to] figure out who he was.”

And had Billy somehow survived not just Garrett’s bullets but also other attempts to kill him, would he have become the mythical figure he is today?

Bell, who said he has given the matter considerable thought, doesn’t think so.

“If he had survived, he would have just been another cowboy who lived past his time,” he said.