To Hell on a Fast Horse (6 page)

One of Catherine’s boarders in the spring of 1874 was Marshall Ashmun Upson, known by friend and foe alike as “Ash.” Born in Wolcott, Connecticut, in 1828, Ash was a gregarious newspaperman who claimed he had once tutored the children of Mormon leader Brigham Young. He appeared to be constantly on the move, finding it difficult to remain in one place for very long. He also found it difficult to remain sober for very long, and to prove it he had several battle scars, including a “badly damaged” nose. In one of those extraordinary coincidences that history often throws at us, Ash Upson eventually became Pat Garrett’s best friend and the ghostwriter of Garrett’s 1882 biography of Billy the Kid.

Upson boarded with Catherine and the boys for no more than three months, during which time he must have witnessed Catherine’s worsening condition. In this age well before antibiotics, there was no real remedy for tuberculosis. The famed prairie or wilderness cure was largely a myth, an illusion fed by health seekers who never had TB and a few others, the lucky ones, whose disease went into remission. True consumptives were never cured, and, like Catherine Antrim, many died. Her brief obituary ran in the September 19, 1874, issue of the
Silver City Mining Life.

Sometime before her death, Catherine extracted a pledge from Clara Louisa Truesdell, a Good Samaritan and friend who cared for her at the end. Catherine was justly concerned about her boys, remembered Clara’s son, Chauncey, “and she made my mother promise to look out for them if anything should happen to her.” Catherine
knew she could not depend upon her husband. And sure enough, William Antrim farmed the boys out—and kept farming them out. When Henry was not in school, he made a little money working at the butcher and blacksmith shops, but he also spent more and more time at the card tables. He “was a very fine card player,” remembered schoolmate Charley Stevens, “and had picked up many card sharp tricks.”

Henry’s first bit of trouble involved an attempted theft from a combination candy and furniture store, but his next escapade got the sheriff’s attention. In April 1875, he stole several pounds of butter from a rancher by the name of Abel L. Webb. Henry sold the butter to a local merchant, and with butter bringing a dollar a pound, it was more than simple pocket change. The theft occurred shortly after Harvey H. Whitehill, a six-foot-two-inch, 240-pound former miner and Silver City town father, became the Grant County sheriff. Whitehill had no trouble connecting Henry with the stolen butter, but he let the boy go with a promise to stay out of trouble. Some twenty-seven years later, Whitehill recalled this episode and many other tidbits about young Henry McCarty for a Silver City reporter, none of it very flattering. In a colorful but highly doubtful example of nineteenth-century criminal profiling, Whitehill claimed that the young man “had one peculiar facial characteristic that to an experienced man-hunter would have marked him immediately as a bad man, and that was his dancing eyes. They never were at rest but continually shifted and roved, much like his own rebellious nature.”

Even this run-in with the law failed to make much of an impression on Henry. The same could be said for a newfound friend, named George Schaefer. A stonemason by profession, Schaefer had acquired the outlaw-appropriate nickname of “Sombrero Jack,” presumably because of his distinctive headgear. On Saturday night, September 4, 1875, Schaefer and a number of accomplices broke into the laundry operated by Chinese immigrants Charley Sun and Sam Chung
(or Chong), making off with clothing, blankets, and two six-shooters. Days later, Mrs. Brown discovered some of the stolen property in Henry’s quarters, and she wasted no time getting word to the sheriff. Whitehill arrested Henry McCarty on Thursday, September 23, and took him to the adobe jailhouse (Sombrero Jack hightailed it out of town before the sheriff could learn of his involvement). “Billy was the most surprised boy in the world when he landed in the jail,” recalled Sheriff Whitehill’s daughter, Josie. “But he didn’t stay there long. He never did.”

A day or two into Henry’s confinement, he complained to Sheriff Whitehill that the jailer was picking on him and restricting him to solitary confinement, where he could get no exercise. Whitehill ordered the jailer to give Henry the freedom of the building’s corridor for a short time each morning. “And right there is where we fell down,” Whitehill admitted, “for the ‘Kid’ had a mind whose ingenuity we knew not of at that time.” The sheriff continued: “He was only a boy, you must remember, scarcely over 15 years of age.”

His jailers left him alone in the corridor, with no one watching or guarding him. After a half hour they returned and unlocked the heavy oaken doors to the jail. They looked everywhere but Henry was gone. Whitehill said, “I ran outside around the jail and a Mexican standing on a ridge at the rear, asked whom I was hunting. I replied in Spanish ‘a prisoner.’ He came out of the chimney, answered the Mexican. I ran back into the jail, looked up the big old fashioned chimney and sure enough could see where in an effort to obtain a hold his hand had clawed into the thick layer of soot which lined the sides of the flue. The chimney hole itself did not appear as large as my arm and yet the lad squeezed his frail, slender body through it and gained his liberty.”

Covered from head to toe in black soot—like a reprisal of his role as the minstrel show’s interlocutor—Henry fled Silver City and never came back. In Sheriff Whitehill’s opinion, it was then that Henry McCarty “commenced his career of lawlessness in earnest.”

THERE ARE TOO MANY
stories about how Henry McCarty ended up in Arizona to be sure which is the real one. His schoolteacher, Mrs. Mary Chase, said that soon after his jailbreak, Henry appeared at the Knight ranch, fifteen miles southwest of Silver City, where she and her husband were living. She and Mrs. Knight loaned the boy a horse so that he could return to Silver City and turn himself in. If true, Mrs. Chase was not as smart as people thought, because Henry did not go back to Silver City. Chauncey Truesdell said his mother, honoring her pledge to Catherine Antrim, sheltered Henry after his escape and the next morning put him on a stagecoach bound for Arizona, along with her money and some food for the scrawny fugitive to eat along the way. Charley Stevens believed that Henry hid out at a sawmill up in the mountains near Silver City for a time before stealing a horse and leaving the region.

Now that he was out of Silver City, Henry McCarty was living by his wits and whatever survival skills he had picked up in and around town. It was beyond the city limits, however, that survival could be trickiest, especially in the American Southwest of the 1870s and 1880s. Traveling alone put one at greatest risk. If surprised by hostile Apaches or lawless Anglos or Hispanos, you were lucky if you only lost your horse and saddle. An ability to quickly “read” strangers was essential, a skill Henry likely honed while staring across a poker table. Most important of all, perhaps, was the language of the gun. As the saying goes, “God created man, and Colonel Colt made him equal.” With a gun, a cocky teenaged boy with little to lose could kill a grown man just as quick as anybody else. Most westerners knew that; some learned it the hard way.

Much has been written about the culture of violence in the American West, but it should come as no surprise that nineteenth-century America was a violent place, or that violence was, for some, a way of life. Only a few years had passed since thousands upon thousands of
Americans had butchered themselves in a bloody Civil War. Particularly brutal was the guerrilla warfare on the Missouri-Kansas border, with some of the participants making their way to New Mexico after the fighting ended, as did many other Civil War veterans. America’s westward march across the continent had hardly been peaceful, nor, for that matter, had Spain’s northward march into what would become New Mexico during Spanish colonial times. Within Henry McCarty’s lifetime, the bitter struggle between American Indians and the U.S. government was still being played out. Despite the flowery language of treaty makers and signers, there was no such thing as a “permanent peace” on the frontier. Recurring outbreaks of hostilities saw Indians slaughtering setters and settlers and soldiers slaughtering Indians. The newspapers of territorial New Mexico were seldom without some report of a shooting, stabbing, murder, or Indian attack.

Henry may have been headed to the mining town of Clifton, just 103 miles west of Silver City, where his stepfather was then tirelessly pursuing his El Dorado. One story has Antrim giving the boy all the money he had on him; the other has Antrim shunning Henry: “If that’s the kind of boy you are,” his stepfather is supposed to have said, “get out.” Maybe one of these stories is near the truth, maybe neither. In any case, Henry did not remain there long. He drifted southwest, his route taking him along the Gila River and between the rugged Gila and Peloncillo mountain ranges.

Henry eventually ended up at Camp Grant, a military post near the base of Arizona’s massive, pine-topped Mount Graham. One of the more prominent and picturesque ranches in this area was Henry C. Hooker’s Sierra Bonita Rancho, located some six miles southwest of the post. Henry McCarty worked here for a time, although he was now Henry Antrim. Then someone, somewhere, got to calling him “Kid,” and the name stuck. But the Kid lost his job at Sierra Bonita because he was a “lightweight” he simply lacked the stamina and skills to measure up to the other cowhands.

Henry then worked off and on as a cook at the modest Hotel de Luna ( just inside the Camp Grant military reservation), as a teamster, and as a haymaker for an army forage contractor, jobs that neither paid well nor lasted long. Helping Henry to become a nuisance—and the Kid seldom lacked assistance in such endeavors—was a former cavalryman named John R. Mackie. A native of Scotland, Mackie was ten years older than the Kid, although similar in size. The year previous, Mackie had nearly killed a man, or at least he tried to kill him, over a card game in McDowell’s store and saloon. Despite being shot in the throat, the man lived, and Mackie got off on self-defense.

John Mackie and Kid Antrim discovered how easy it was to steal from the soldiers visiting the brothels and saloons in the civilian settlement adjacent to Camp Grant. “Billy and his chum Macky would steal the saddles and saddle blankets from the horses,” recalled the Hotel de Luna’s proprietor, Miles Wood, “and occasionally they would take the horses and hide them out until they got a chance to dispose of them.” On November 17, 1876, when Henry dashed away on the horse of First Sergeant Lewis C. Hartman, the camp’s commanding officer, Major Charles E. Compton, ordered Hartman and four other troopers to go after the thief. And even though the Kid had a five-day start, the cavalrymen caught up to him one hundred miles later, near the fledgling mining settlement of McMillen’s Camp. They ordered the Kid off the cavalry mount, grabbed the reins, and started immediately on their back trail to Camp Grant, leaving Henry to hoof it alone.

Three months later, after three more cavalry mounts were stolen, the military was determined to put the Kid behind bars. On February 16, 1877, Sergeant Hartman stood before the recently elected justice of the peace, Miles Wood, and swore out a complaint against “Henry Antrim alias Kid” for stealing his horse the previous November. Arrested in Globe City, a silver-mining town in the foothills of the Pinal Mountains, the Kid promptly escaped. The town constable appre
hended the young man a second time the next day but, being a slow learner, he somehow managed to let the Kid get loose while on their way to Camp Grant. Henry and Mackie, in an attempt to get the military off their backs, returned five horses to Camp Thomas. This may have made the army quartermaster happy, but Henry was still wanted by the law. When he and Mackie showed up for breakfast at the Hotel de Luna on March 25, Miles Wood served them up his pistol.

“I shoved the platter on the table in front of them and pulled a sixgun from under it and told them to put up their hands and then to go straight out the door,” Wood remembered.

With no jail at the civilian settlement, Wood and a volunteer marched the Kid and Mackie to the post guardhouse. Just an hour or so later, Henry, ever watchful for an opportunity to get away, made a run for it. This time, however, he was chased down—and Miles Wood asked for a blacksmith. The justice of the peace stood by and watched as the smith placed shackles on Henry’s ankles and pounded the rivets flat.
This would do the trick,
Wood thought, confidently. But that evening, as the setting sun cast fleeting pinks and purples on the distant mountains, Henry planned yet another escape. Sometime after dark, there was a knock at the door of the commanding officer’s quarters, where the Major and Mrs. Compton were entertaining Wood and some other guests. It was the sergeant of the guard, who told his superior that Kid Antrim was gone. Captain Gilbert Smith, the Camp Grant quartermaster, was convinced that the Kid had received help from a soldier, but, as Wood later explained, Henry “was a small fellow not weighing over ninety pounds, and it was almost an impossibility to keep him imprisoned or hand-cuffed.” Curiously, Henry did not flee the area completely; perhaps because, as Camp Grant cowpuncher Gus Gildea remembered, Henry always had more friends than enemies.

On Friday night, August 17, 1877, Kid Antrim stepped into George Atkins’s saloon at the little Camp Grant settlement. The soldiers, cow
boys, and girls inside looked toward the door and saw a strikingly different man than the scruffy stray they were used to. This Kid was all duded up, having received an advance on his wages from forage contractor H. F. “Sorghum” Smith. Henry came into town looking like a “country jake,” with shoes instead of boots and a pistol stuffed in the waistband of his trousers.

Thirty-two-year-old blacksmith “Windy” Cahill noticed the Kid, too. Cahill, a native of Ireland, had joined the army in 1868 in New York. He had served nearly three years in the infantry, before receiving his discharge. Cahill maintained his ties with the army, though, working as a civilian blacksmith at Camp Grant. He was a stocky, blustering man with a gruff voice, and people called him “Windy” because “he was always blowin’ about first one thing and another.” In short, Windy Cahill was a bully, and the Kid was his favorite victim. “He would throw Billy to the floor, ruffle his hair, slap his face and humiliate him before the men in the saloon,” recalled Gus Gildea.