Billy The Kid

Henry McCarty
aka "Billy The Kid"

Billy the Kid (1859-1881) born Henry McCarty. The place of his birth is uncertain. He was born either in New York City or Indiana.

Billy the Kid used many names throughout his life, including William H. Boney, Kid Antrim, and the Kid.

After his father’s death, Billy the Kid’s mother moved the family to Wichita, Kansas, where she met William Antrim. The two were married on March 1, 1873, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Afterward the family moved on to Silver City, New Mexico, where William sought his fortune in the mines.

Billy the Kid’s mother died when Billy was 14 years old. After her death he went to Arizona, which was then still a territory. He worked on ranches and spent much of his youth in the rough saloons of the frontier.

Billy the Kid claimed to have shot and killed 21 men in his lifetime, but historians can document his role in only five killings. He became notorious for crimes of robbery, including cattle and horse theft. In 1880 Sheriff Pat Garrett of Lincoln County, New Mexico, where Billy the Kid had become involved in the cattle wars, captured him. Sentenced to hang, Billy the Kid killed two deputies and escaped from the Lincoln County jail on April 28, 1881. Shortly after his escape, Billy the Kid was fatally shot by Sheriff Garrett near Fort Sumner, New Mexico, on July 14, 1881. Many legends and tales have developed around Billy the Kid’s life on the American frontier.

The Early Years
The first indisputable records place Billy's mother, Catherine McCarty, and her sons in Kansas City, where she married William Henry Antrim at a Presbyterian church, with the boys as witnesses. At this point, Billy began to be called Henry in order to distinguish him from the elder William Henry. Not long after the marriage, the new family decamped to Silver Springs, New Mexico. The stepfather absented himself for much of the time, prospecting for silver in the nearby hills. Catherine, ill with tuberculosis, took in lodgers and laundry. The boys attended grammar school and ran in the streets with other boys.

Billy was remembered by his teacher as having an artistic nature, as being intelligent and eager to please. Visibly smaller than other boys his age, he was delicate and girlish-looking. He also showed talent as a singer and dancer, and performed as Head Man in a black and white minstrel show at the Silver City Music Theater.

But within 18 months Catherine had died from her illness. Antrim put Joseph with a saloonkeeper's family and 14-year-old Henry (Billy) with an hotelier's family. Each boy began to work to pay their bed and board. Antrim then dissolved what remained of Catherine's estate and went back to the mining camps.

Early Warnings Of Trouble
At first Billy was obedient and spent most of his spare time escaping into novels and 'detective gazettes'; but within the year he started to get into trouble, culminating with the theft of some clothes from a Chinese laundry.

Billy didn't steal the clothes, but hid them for an older boy; nevertheless he was turned in by the hotelkeeper's wife. Before two days passed, Billy had escaped from jail, where he was put in order to frighten him a little, by scrambling up the chimney and was gone from Silver City for good.

Not too much is known of his whereabouts over the next two years, but when he reappeared he could speak Spanish fluently and he was riding on the fringes of an outlaw gang. It was the final three years of his short life that formed the basis of his legendary status.

The Lincoln County War
Billy soon found employment with the young English rancher John Tunstall, who together with his partners John Chisum and Alexander McSween, was embroiled in bloody Lincoln County Range War.

When Tunstall was murdered February 18, 1878, Billy joined a force called the "Regulators," led by Tunstall's foreman Dick Brewer, who vowed vengeance and loyalty to partner McSween.

The Regulators embarked on a killing spree of those suspected of involvement in the assassination. Billy then hatched and carried out an ambush plot for the leader of Tunstall's murders, Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady.

On April 1, Billy and the Regulators murdered Sheriff Brady and his deputy George Hindman as they strolled through the town of Lincoln.

The Lincoln County War came to a bloody end during the five day Battle of Lincoln in mid July.

After being besieged in McSween's house with a dozen other Regulators, opponents (reinforced by soldiers from Fort Stanton), burned the house to the ground and shot McSween dead.

Billy escaped unhurt, but with a price on his head, he surrendered in exchange for amnesty.

Billy soon formed another gang and took up cattle rustling throughout the county again. In December 1880, after two of his partners were shot and killed, Billy was captured at Stinking Springs by Sheriff Pat Garrett.

After standing trial for murder in Mesilla, New Mexico in April 1881, he and was found guilty and sentenced to hang. On April 28, 1881, Billy escaped jail once again, killing two deputies in the process.

On July 14, 1881 Pat Garrett, together with two deputies, sat in a darkened bedroom at the Fort Sumner ranch home of Billy's friend, Pete Maxwell.

Garrett was asking Maxwell about Billy's whereabouts when Billy, in his stocking feet, unexpectedly entered Maxwell's quarters, spotting, but not recognizing Garrett in the dim light.

"Quien es? Quien es?" -- "Who is it? Who is it?" were the last words Billy ever uttered.

Garret pumped two shots from his revolver, one of which went straight into Billy's heart. Billy the Kid was buried the next day at Fort Summer cemetery between his two outlaw pals,

Tom O'Folliard and Charlie Bowdre, where his grave can be seen to this day. Although he didn't live to celebrate his twenty second birthday, Billy the Kid remains one of the notorious legends of the American West.

His Photograph
One day in the summer of 1879, Billy the Kid and several of his compadres rode into Fort Sumner, New Mexico, after several weeks on the trail. In those days he wasn't yet notorious, but he was well known, as 'Kid' Antrim, aka Billy Boney. He was generally involved in rustling, and he, Charlie Bowdre, Tom O'Folliard, Billy Wilson, and Tom Pickett would go down to the Texas panhandle, pick off some longhorn cattle or a remuda9 of horses, and drive them back up to White Oaks, where they would fence the stolen stock at a livery stable run by Sam Dedrick.

Ordinarily, Billy liked to clean up and change into fancy town clothes as soon as he got in, because he would have at least one girlfriend to visit and he never missed a dance if he could help it; but on this day his interest was caught by a tent out on the street. It was a traveling photographer.

Photographic technology had advanced from daguerrotype10, but hadn't evolved to modern processes, and the most accessible form of picture-taking for those outside the cities was the tintype, or ferrotype, because the metal photographic plates were lighter, cheaper, and easier to handle than glass plates. Using mirrors inside the camera's box to reflect the image, the photographer could, with one exposure, create multiple images (up to 16 thumb-sized, but usually three or four somewhat larger pictures). After developing and fixing the thin metal plate, the photographer would dry it, cut it into singles with tin snips, and present it to the waiting customer. The cost was usually about twenty five cents.

Disappearance of the Original
When Billy was captured at Stinking Springs on Christmas Eve 1880, he gave his copy to a Navajo servant woman named Deluvina Maxwell. Deluvina worked for Pete Maxwell, whose daughter Paulita was Billy's main querida11. Deluvina kept the picture until she died, at which time the image passed into her family's hands, but the tintype was destroyed in a fire in the 1920s. By that time, the tintype had been photographed using modern wet-plate processes, and most of Billy's surviving friends had copies, but they were less distinct than the original.