The Mammoth Book of the West (26 page)

The breakout came shortly after 9 p.m., as the flames from the house lit up the hills on both sides of town. Out the front door, drawing the fire of the Murphy men, went the Kid, Tom O’Folliard, Jim French and Harvey Morris. All, except Morris, made it to the security of the bank of the Rio Bonito.

McSween, who was meant to use the Kid’s break to effect the exodus of himself and the remaining Regulators, dithered and finally hid behind a woodpile. When Murphy’s men approached McSween he tried to surrender. They shot him on sight.

The Lincoln County War was over. McSween was dead. So was Major Murphy, having died of natural causes in a Santa Fe hospital just before the five-day battle began. With Murphy gone, Chisum lost interest in sponsoring the conflict, and angered Billy by denying him the combat pay Billy considered due for his service in the War. Thrown on their own, the Kid and the surviving Regulators drifted into cattle rustling (including, as punishment, the beeves of John
Chisum), selling them in the stock markets of the Texas Panhandle. The Regulators officially became outlaws.

This aimless, dangerous existence soon grated, however, and the Kid tried to find a way back into lawful society. An opportunity seemed to present itself with President Hayes’s appointment of a new territorial governor to New Mexico in August 1878. This was Lew Wallace, Civil War general and future author of the best-selling novel
Ben-Hur
.

Wallace’s first action on arriving in New Mexico was to offer an amnesty to those who had taken part in what he termed the “Lincoln County Insurrection”. The amnesty was not quite broad enough to take in the Kid, under indictment for the murder of Sheriff Brady. However, the Kid got his opportunity to ingratiate himself with Wallace in February 1879. On a midnight excursion into Lincoln, the Kid chanced to see two Murphy men kill Huston I. Chapman, the one-armed lawyer called into town by Sue McSween to help settle her husband’s estate.

The killing of Chapman particularly irked Wallace, coming as it did after the amnesty proclamation. Restoration of public confidence in the law seemed to demand the capture and conviction of Chapman’s murderers. Billy’s sharp mind instantly saw Wallace’s need. On 13 March he wrote a letter to the Governor:

I was present when Mr. Chapman was Murdered and know who did it and if it were not for those indictments [issued against the Kid for the murder of Brady] I would have made it clear by now. If it is in your power to Annully those indictments I hope you will do so as to give me a chance to explain.

The Kid concluded: “I have no Wish to fight any more.” It was signed “W. H. Bonney”.

Governor Wallace was not above bargaining with a 19-year-old outlaw and invited him to come alone to a meeting in Lincoln a few nights later. Wallace related in a memoir:

Billy the Kid kept the appointment punctually, . . . his Winchester in his right hand, his revolver in his left.

“I was sent for to meet the governor here at 9 o’clock”, said the Kid. “Is he here?” I rose to my feet, saying, “I am Governor Wallace”, and held out my hand.

“Your note gave promise of absolute protection”, said the young outlaw warily. “Yes”, I replied, “and I have been true to my promise . . .”

The Kid put down his weapons and shook hands. The men talked for a few minutes and agreed a deal. Billy would submit to an arrest for the Brady killing: while imprisoned he would testify in the Chapman case. For this, the Governor would grant him a pardon for all his misdeeds, including the murder of Brady. Billy would go scot free.

Although the Kid played his part, he did not get his amnesty. District Attorney Ryerson, a Murphy supporter, refused to grant it. Against such implacable legal hostility, Governor Wallace proved powerless, possibly faithless. The Kid escaped to Fort Sumner, the former Navajo reservation now owned by the local Maxwell family, where he passed his days rustling and his evenings playing monte. His grace at the Mexicans’
bailes
(dances) won him the attention of a number of local beauties, including Celsa Gutierrez, whose sister was married to a Texan former buffalo hunter named Pat Garrett.

It was at Fort Sumner that the Kid claimed his next killing. On 10 January 1880 a drunken Texas hardcase called Joe Grant drew a gun on the Kid in Bob Hargrove’s earth-floor saloon. Hearing the challenge, Billy whirled around and shot Grant in the head, three times. The holes were so close together, said one bystander, that “you could cover all of them with half a dollar.”

This was one lawless act too many for the area’s incipient business community. Under Roswell’s Joseph C. Lea a coalition of entrepreneurs and cattlemen formed to silence the Kid’s guns. Prominent in the coalition was John Chisum, who organized the election of the tall, drawling Patrick F. Garrett – an erstwhile cardplaying friend of the Kid’s – as sheriff of Lincoln. Almost as Garrett pinned the tin star to his chest, the Kid killed again, a blacksmith named Jimmy Carlyle, on 1 December 1880.

Selecting a posse of the best deputies in the Southwest, Garrett set off on the Kid’s trail. On the night of 19 December the posse laid an ambush for the Kid at Fort Sumner. Hearing horses approaching through the snow, Garrett guessed correctly that it was the Kid and his gang of young guns, and the posse opened fire. The Kid’s lieutenant, Tom O’Folliard, was mortally wounded, but the Kid and the rest managed to get away.

Yet the snow made their tracks easy to follow. The posse caught up with the outlaws at an abandoned rock house near Stinking Springs in the early morning of 23 December. All five outlaws – the Kid, Charlie Bowdre, Billie Wilson, Tom Pickett and Dave Rudabaugh – were asleep, their snores audible to the lawmen. Garrett surrounded the house and waited. At daybreak a lone figure came out of the rock house to feed the horses. The posse
opened fire, hitting – not, as they thought, the Kid – but another Lincoln County War veteran, Charlie Bowdre. The hapless Bowdre fell back inside the hut, only to be pushed outside by the Kid. “They have murdered you, Charlie,” the posse heard Billy say, “but you can get revenge. Kill some of the sons of bitches before you go.” Bowdre staggered forward and fell dead at Garrett’s feet. After some hours of stand-off, the Regulators surrendered. They were taken in shackles to Mesilla to stand trial.

The spectators who packed the courtroom were shocked to see that the infamous “Billy the Kid” – a nickname invented by newspapers; to those who knew him he was always “the Kid” – was a youth with down still glistening his chin. The judgement was a foregone conclusion. “You are sentenced to be hanged by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead,” intoned the judge.

The Kid grinned, and replied in his shrill voice: “And you can go to hell, hell, hell.”

Under heavy guard, Billy was taken to Lincoln and locked in Murphy’s old store.

The Kid made his escape on the evening of 28 April 1881. He asked Deputy J. W. Bell to take him to the privy behind the courthouse. On the way back up the stairs Billy slipped his thin wrists out of his handcuffs and seized Bell’s holstered revolver. The deputy was shot as he ran for help. Hobbling to the window in his leg-irons, the Kid saw the other guard, Bob Olinger, running across the street towards him. The Kid grabbed a shotgun.

A bystander called out, “Bob, the Kid has killed Bell.” Olinger looked up and exclaimed, “Yes, and he’s killed me too.”

After shooting Olinger, the Kid managed to sever the chain connecting his leg shackles. With a leisurely air, he then borrowed a horse, which he would later send back to
Lincoln, said goodbye to a number of citizens and moseyed out of town.

The exploit, so bold and clever, made news across the entire country. Governor Wallace offered a $500 reward for the Kid’s capture. Garrett began a second manhunt for the Kid.

For nearly three months, Garrett could discover no trace of the Kid. Then a whisper – almost certainly from Pete Maxwell, who disapproved of his sister Paulita’s love affair with the Kid – led Garrett to Fort Sumner. Accompanied by deputy Tip McKinney and the cattle-range detective John W. Poe, Garrett reached the Maxwell place in the evening of 14 July 1881.

At around midnight, the Kid appeared on Pete Maxwell’s porch, where he had gone to cut some meat from a butchered steer hanging there. Surprised to see a strange figure on the porch, the Kid called out “
Quien es? Quien es?
” (“Who is it? Who is it?”).

Receiving no reply, he ducked into Pete Maxwell’s bedroom. In the darkness, Billy failed to see the man sitting at the head of the bed talking to Maxwell.

Garrett shot twice. The first bullet hit the Kid just above the heart, killing him instantly. The second went wild. The Kid was unarmed, save for a meat knife.

A crowd gathered on the porch, drawn by the noise of gunshot. Finding that the Kid was dead, many vented their anger and grief. Celsa Gutierrez, Garrett’s sister-in-law, cursed the sheriff as “a piss-pot”. Expecting to be attacked by the Kid’s friends, the lawmen spent the remainder of the night on guard, their guns drawn.

Just six weeks later
The True Life of Billy the Kid
was selling on the streets of Eastern cities. The legend had begun. Those fuelling it included Pat F. Garrett, who promoted the mythic nature of his nemesis with his 1882
An Authentic Life of Billy the Kid
(ghosted by itinerant
newspaperman Ash Upson). Among Garrett’s wilder claims was that the Kid had killed 21 men, “not counting Indians and Mexicans”. In fact the Kid’s total of solo kills was a rather more modest four – Windy Cahill, Joe Grant, J. W. Bell and Bob Olinger – although he had a hand in the deaths of more. As a gunfighter, the Kid only ranks in the middle of the West’s ratings, well behind such less glorified – and perhaps less charismatic – killers as Jim “Deacon” Miller and Wes Hardin.

Throughout the long summer of 1886, a wreath of smoke from burning grass fires hung over the range country. Streams shrivelled in the sun’s unceasing heat.

Experienced stockmen became panicky. The bad winter of 1885 had already depleted and weakened their herds. There was not enough good grass on the burning, overstocked, drought-ridden ranges to build them back up again. Many ranchers dumped their beeves on the market. Prices went tumbling. Beeves worth $30 a year before scarcely fetched $10 a head.

Those who sold, at whatever price, were the wise and fortunate ones. The winter of 1886–7 would be the worst in the annals of the west.

All the signs were there, for those who cared to look for them. Herman Hagedorn, who ranched near Theodore Roosevelt’s Dakota spread, recalled the omens of wintry doom in his
Roosevelt in the Badlands
:

Nature was busier than she had ever been in the memory of the oldest hunters in that region in “fixin’ up her folks for hard times.” The muskrats along the creeks were building their houses to twice their customary height; the walls
were thicker than usual and the muskrats’ fur was longer and heavier than any old-timer had ever known it to be. The beavers were working by day as well as by night cutting the willow brush, and observant eyes noted that they were storing twice their usual winter’s supply. The birds were acting strangely. The ducks and geese, which ordinarily flew south in October, that autumn had a month earlier already departed. The snowbirds and the cedar birds were bunched in the thickets, fluttering around by the thousands in the cane breaks, obviously restless and uneasy. The Arctic owls, who came only in hard winters, were about.

On 16 November the thermometer fell below zero and a blizzard blanketed the northern plains with snow so deep that the cattle could not paw down through it. Another blizzard howled across Wyoming three weeks later, halting stagecoach travel. A warm “chinook” wind in late December brought ranchers Christmas hope, but a blizzard on 9 January 1887 deposited snow at the rate of an inch an hour. The thermometer touched 46F below zero.

The Great Blizzard had not finished its work. It returned on 28 January with a fury beyond anything in the memory of cattle country. In the past cattle had withstood snowy tempests by drifting before the wind; now they piled helpless into the barbed wire fences the ranchers had greedily thrown around their acres. Thousands upon thousands of cattle died on the fences, frozen and starving, or were suffocated in drifts as they tried to find shelter in gulches.

Despite a cold that reached 60 below, the cowboys went out to help the cattle, wrapped up in layers of clothing and their faces darkened with lamp-black or burnt matches to stop snowblindness. Some wore their neckerchiefs
over their faces, with eye-holes cut out, bandit fashion. To keep their feet warm they stood their boots in water till ice formed, creating an airtight layer. Teddy Blue Abbott was working in Montana at the time:

The cattle drifted down on all the rivers, and untold thousands went down the airholes. On the Missouri we lost I don’t know how many that way. They would walk out on the ice and the ones behind would push the front ones in. The cowpunchers worked like slaves to move them back in the hills, but as all the outfits cut their forces down every winter, they were shorthanded. No one knows how they worked but themselves. They saved thousands of cattle. Think of riding all day in a blinding snow storm, the temperature fifty and sixty below zero, and no dinner. You’d get one bunch of cattle up the hill and another one would be coming down behind you, and it was all so slow, plunging after them through deep snow that way! You’d have to fight every step of the road. The horses’ feet were cut and bleeding from the heavy crust, and the cattle had the hair and hide worn off their legs to the knees and hooks. It was surely hell to see big four-year-old steers just able to stagger along. It was the same all over Wyoming, Montana and Colorado, western Nebraska and western Kansas.

Maddened, ice-encrusted cattle staggered into Western towns, desperate for warmth and food. Five hundred brawling beeves invaded Great Falls, Montana, and ate the trees the civic-minded townsfolk had recently planted. In Dakota, cattle were reported as eating the tar paper off shacks.