When I was 17 and in my first ship, I was often known to the “ancient” mariners onboard as “Benny the Kid,” not to be confused with New Mexico’s Billy the Kid who killed 21 men before he was 21. The only thing I’d killed was a woodpecker when I was about 7. I shot him out of a cedar tree with my BB gun. I ran over to pick up his body, and he wasn’t dead. He looked up at me with big, luminous, questioning eyes, as if to say, “Why did you do this to me?” I had no answer, and that was the forever end of my hunting career. “Fin.” The real Billy the Kid, aka Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim, and Billy Bonney, had no such remorse.
When you are known as “The Kid” in any circumstance, it usually comes with a set of challenges. Such was my case. I was stuck as the permanent compartment cleaner, the always available working party “volunteer,” the presser of the petty officer’s shirts in the ship’s laundry, and the chump who spent six months mess cooking instead of the normal three. All this, of course, except for mess cooking, was in addition to my normal underway watch standing. But, if you are smart, you keep your eyes open, your mouth shut, your head down, and wait for better days.
Billy the Kid was not smart. He started shooting people. Let’s go back. Later in my life, I graduated from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and since that city was the epicenter of Billy’s short life, I was exposed to much of the lore, legends, and lies about him. From an early age, he had a certain “Je ne sais quai” (an indescribable, distinguishing feature) that set him apart – his teeth? His eyes? His slight build? Whatever it was, the young man had charisma.
It’s hard to separate the man from the myth or, rather, the boy from the myth. It’s fairly well documented that “Billy” was born in September or November, 1859, in New York City, to recent Irish immigrants who soon moved west, and that he was orphaned at age 15. It’s also a matter of record that he was shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett on 14 July, 1881, at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Today, its adobe ruins are just off Route 66, several miles south of Tucumcari, and worth a visit. Everything in between his birth and death has been obfuscated by dime novels, unreliable newspaper accounts, flat-out lies, and at least 50 Hollywood movies.
For example, Billy’s persona, for many, has become conflated with the way Kris Kristofferson played him in “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (1973). Other than Kristofferson “emoting” his best Marlon Brando, this movie was noteworthy for folksinger Bob Dylan’s theme song and bit part as a knife-throwing drifter. As far as I was concerned, Slim Pickens’ death scene stole the show. In fact, every time Kristofferson rode up on his horse, instead of the film’s theme song, I kept hearing his song from 1969 in my head:
Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train
Feeling nearly as faded as my jeans
Bobby thumbed a diesel down just before it rained
And rode us all the way to New Orleans
(“Me and Bobby McGee”)
Billy was described as small for his age with slender and delicate hands, small feet, and a soft high voice. One of his later friends said: “He was undersized and really girlish looking. I don’t think he weighed over 125 pounds.” Best known for his slightly bucked front teeth, Billy was known as a good dancer who smiled and laughed often. Another friend remembered him as “a mild-mannered, flaxen-haired, blue-eyed boy.” Apparently, the local Spanish did not call him “El Chivato,” (The Infant Rascal) for nothing. Growing up in New Mexico Territory, he spoke Spanish like a native and, most important to his later “profession,” “his gun draw was faster than a hiccup.” Being of small stature, Billy was once quoted as saying that his six gun was his “equalizer.”
Billy’s whole outlaw life revolved around the famous Lincoln County War (1878-1881), a conflict between rival factions in Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory, later to become the State of New Mexico. Almost a continuation of Old-World Irish vs. English hostility, the “war” pitted rival merchants and ranchers vying for commercial control of a large swath of cattle country. There were two main groups, one led by rancher, Lawrence Murphy, and his factotum, Sheriff William J. Brady, and the other by a young Englishman, John Tunstall. Billy rode for Tunstall, and when Tunstall, his revered father figure, was murdered by Brady’s posse, he vowed revenge, and the killing began. Before the war was over, at least 23 men had died and 23 had been seriously wounded.
It is doubtful that Billy killed 21 men; however, he did kill at least 3 of Murphy’s followers, and since Murphy’s faction had strong political backing in the territorial government, the Kid became a wanted outlaw and was ultimately sentenced to hang. He was offered a pardon by Governor Lew Wallace, a retired Civil War Union general, and the author of the “sand and sandals” novel about Jesus Christ, “Ben Hur” (1880). Ensconced in the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe which, incidentally, is the oldest public building in continuous use constructed by European settlers in the continental United States (1610), Wallace later denied he had issued such a pardon which could have saved Billy’s life. Billy’s bounty was set at $500 which was around $15,000 in those days.
The Murphy organization, gaining the upper hand and with the support of the U.S. Army, this being before the passage of the “Posse Comitatus Act” which would have prevented the use of federal troops for domestic law enforcement, hired as Sheriff Patrick Floyd Garrett, an Alabama native, specifically to track down, arrest, and preferably kill Billy. Using informers, Garrett finally tracked Billy down in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, waited for him in a darkened room, and shot him in the chest as Billy whispered in Spanish: “Quien es?” “Quien es?” (“Who is it? Who is it?”). Instead of enjoying the expected notoriety for killing Billy the Kid, Garrett spent the rest of his life dealing with accusations of cowardice for the circumstances of the death.
Billy picked an ideal area to carry out his escapades. Las Cruces (“The Crosses”) is on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert in Dona Ana County and was incorporated as a town in 1907. For centuries, it lived in the shadow of Old Mesilla, a Spanish settlement a few miles to the south where he was locked up when he was sentenced to hang. The old jail is a major tourist attraction today, and it is adjacent to one of the best Mexican restaurants in the state which has been constructed inside an old Overland Stagecoach stop. Incidentally, the old building that housed the jail is where the Gadsden Purchase or Treaty was signed in 1854 which was an agreement between the United States and Mexico in which the United States agreed to pay $10 million for a 29,670 square mile portion of Mexico that later became part of Arizona and New Mexico.
Although it’s my adopted state, people in New Mexico will argue about anything, and an inordinate number of strange things seem to happen there. Take chili peppers, for instance. Everyone in New Mexico has an opinion. Did you know that New Mexico has an “Official Question?” And that question is, “Red or Green?” Do you prefer red chili peppers or green chili peppers? If you eat at the restaurant I mentioned above, you will have to decide. I’m a green chili pepper guy myself, but I suspect that Billy would have preferred the red. If you want a sweeter/hotter flavor and the healthiest chili pepper, go for the red. If you want an optimally crunchy chili pepper with a slightly bitter and less hot taste, go for the green.
And then there’s the question of where Billy the Kid’s body is buried. It’s agreed that he’s buried in the cemetery at Fort Sumner, but there are two tombstones with his name. One has his name only, and this one is chained down inside a fenced and locked enclosure because it has been stolen three times since it was set in place in 1940. Once it was found as far away as California and returned by the governor of New Mexico. Some say that the locked enclosure means that he will be “behind bars forever.” The other tombstone, a few yards away, is engraved “PALS” and lists Billy’s name along with two of his friends killed in the Lincoln County war. There have also been several individuals who claimed that they were Billy the Kid and evaded death in 1881, including one man who lived until 1917 and is buried in Hico, Texas, under a tombstone reading “Billy the Kid.”
I’m certainly not equating Billy with Christopher Columbus, but I saw the same question regarding his final resting place, only the sites are much farther apart. It’s a convoluted tale, but two places now claim to be the site of his burial – a cathedral in Seville, Spain, and a church in the town of Santa Domingo in the Caribbean’s Dominican Republic. Both sites have conducted inconclusive DNA testing on their respective collection of bones, and his actual whereabouts has not been resolved.
Further speaking of “weird,” just up the road from Las Cruces is the town of Truth or Consequences, formerly known as Hot Springs. In 1950, it sold its birthright for a mess of porridge, like Esau in the Bible, to a then popular radio show of that name. Ralph Edwards, the famous radio show host, had announced that the show’s 10th-anniversary broadcast would be aired from the first town that was willing to change its name to “Truth or Consequences.” Hot Springs won, or lost, as the case may be. Edwards visited the town during the first weekend of May every year until he died.
Just to the north of Las Cruces, toward Silver City where Billy spent much of his youth and his mother ran a boarding house before she died of tuberculosis, is the town of Columbus, New Mexico. This small dust spot on the border has the remains of an old Army fort and is noteworthy as one of the few American cities attacked by a foreign army in “modern” times. In March 1916, around 500 troops of the Mexican revolutionary, Pancho Villa, attacked the town, inflicting heavy damage and killing at least 10 civilians. Driven off by U.S. Army troops, the raid resulted in President Woodrow Wilson sending General Blackjack Pershing and several thousand troops into Mexico on a punitive expedition to catch and punish Villa. The advent of World War I, however, caused Wilson to recall the troops before anything was accomplished.
While speaking of imperfect people, and Villa and Billy the Kid were certainly imperfect, no story would be complete without the curious tale of my ex-brother-in-law, now deceased, who spent a year in the federal penitentiary at Anthony, New Mexico, for insurance fraud. An insurance salesman, he figured out a way to steal the accrued cash value of whole life insurance policies, to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars, and got caught. He moved to Arizona to avoid prosecution about the time of the 9/11 terrorists’ attacks. Feeling confident, but with a warrant out for his arrest, he took a day trip over the border into Mexico. Passports were not yet required for reentry into the United States, and he had the bad luck to be picked for a random identification check at customs when he returned. He later told me that he rather enjoyed his time at Anthony, a “white collar” prison. In fact, he said he won a tennis tournament the first week he was there.
I’ve often wondered why he acted so stupid because he was probably the smartest man I’ve ever known. For example, in seminary, he took Greek and Hebrew, both year-long courses, and very difficult languages, at the same time and made an A in both. You just don’t do that. I loved him, and I cast no stones.
I guess we all write our own stories. I’ve always remembered a line I heard in the John Ford movie, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962), when I was on my first ship and still known as the “Kid:” “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This is what happened with Billy Bonney and will happen, to some extent, to all of us.
Light a candle for me.
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Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
