Throughout his brief stay in Las Vegas, Billy played to the crowd. The next morning, December 27, Sheriff Desiderio Romero admitted a Gazette reporter into the jail to talk with the outlaws while they were being made presentable for the railway journey to Santa Fe. Their shackles had to be removed for them to don the new clothes Garrett had sent for. During this process, a “glum and sober” Billy Wilson “scarcely raised his eyes and spoke but once or twice to his compadre,” observed the reporter. “Bonney, on the other hand, was light and chipper and was very communicative, laughing, joking and chatting with bystanders.”3
“You appear to take it easy,” remarked the newsman.
“Yes,” replied the Kid. “What’s the use of looking on the gloomy side of everything. The laugh’s on me this time.” Then, glancing around, he asked, “Is the jail at Santa Fe any better than this? This is a terrible place to put a fellow in.”
“There was a big crowd gazing at me wasn’t there,” said Billy, clearly pleased with his notoriety. “Well, perhaps some of them will think me half man now; everyone seems to think I was some kind of animal.”
The reporter agreed that Billy did not look like an animal:
He did look human, indeed, but there was nothing very mannish about him in appearance, for he looked and acted a mere boy. He is about five feet eight or nine inches tall, slightly built and lithe, weighing about 140; a frank open countenance, looking like a school boy, with the traditional silky fuzz on his upper lip; clear blue eyes, with a rougish snap about them; light hair and complexion. He is, in all, quite a handsome looking fellow, the only imperfection being two prominent front teeth slightly protruding like squirrel’s teeth, and he has agreeable and winning ways.
As the shackles were riveted back in position over the new clothing, Billy observed, “I don’t suppose you fellows would believe it but this is the first time I ever had bracelets on.” In this boast he stretched the truth slightly: bracelets had encumbered him briefly in Arizona.
The captives had scarcely been lodged in the Las Vegas jail when the temper of the town turned ugly. Hostility focused on Rudabaugh, whose abortive attempt to break John Webb out of jail had cost the life of a jailer. Fearing a lynch mob, Garrett and his men stood guard at the jail throughout the night of December 26, then prepared to hurry the prisoners out of town the next day.
Sheriff Romero demanded the surrender of Rudabaugh. Garrett refused. He held three of the prisoners on federal charges—Bonney for the murder of Buckshot Roberts on a federal reservation, Wilson for counterfeiting, and Rudabaugh for robbing the U.S. mail. As a deputy U.S. marshal, Garrett intended to take the federal fugitives to Santa Fe and turn them over to the chief U.S. marshal. Romero could have Tom Pickett, but Garrett made it clear, as he had promised Rudabaugh at Stinking Springs, that the others would remain in federal custody.4
Shortly after noon on the twenty-seventh, Garrett loaded Bonney, Wilson, and Rudabaugh into public hacks and hauled them from Old Town, the site of the jail, to New Town, where the railway depot stood. Stewart, Mason, East, and Emory went along as guards, together with another deputy U.S. marshal, James W. Bell.5 The train to Santa Fe rested on a sidetrack, delayed until a northbound train could pass. The deputies and their prisoners boarded the smoking car and settled in their seats to wait.
Spurred by angry citizens, Sheriff Romero had not given up. He had telegraphed Governor Wallace for an order barring the removal of Rudabaugh. Receiving no answer as the train’s departure time approached, Romero formed a posse of thirty-five men and descended on the depot.
Garrett stood on the platform at one end of the smoking car as a group of five men, headed by the sheriff’s brother, approached.
“Let’s go right in and take him out of there,” said one, and they pushed up the steps to the platform.
“I merely requested them, in my mildest tones, to get down,” said Garrett, “and they slid to the ground like a covey of hardback turtles off the banks of the Pecos.”6
Determined to prevent the train from leaving, Romero sent a force to seize the switch to the main line and another to neutralize the engineer and the fireman. The rest of the men, backed by a gathering mob, crowded around the coach containing the prisoners.
Undaunted, Billy chose this moment to have another interview with the Gazette’s reporter. Leaning from the window, he exclaimed, “If I only had my Winchester, I’d lick the whole crowd.” “The prospects of a fight exhilarated him,” commented the newsman.
Billy then launched into a protestation of innocence such as he had already inflicted on Governor Wallace:
I wasn’t the leader of any gang—I was for Billy all the time. About that Portales business, I owned the ranche with Charlie Bowdre. I took it up and was holding it because I knew that sometime a stage line would run by there and I wanted to keep it for a station. But, I found that there were certain men who wouldn’t let me live in the country and so I was going to leave. We had all our grub in the house when they took us in, and we were going to a place about six miles away in the morning to cook it and then light out. I haven’t stolen any stock. I made my living by gambling but that was the only way I could live. They wouldn’t let me settle down; if they had I wouldn’t be here today. Chisum got me into all this trouble and then wouldn’t help me out.7
The temper of the growing mob, meantime, had turned ominous. Men brandishing Winchesters surged against the smoking car.
Garrett shouted, “If you wanted the men so badly why didn’t you go out and take them?”
“We’ll take them now,” cried several.
Stewart answered, “As soon as the first shot is fired we will free every man and arm him.”8
“We shoved up the windows,” remembered Jim East, “and Tom Emory took one and I another. . . . We made all the prisoners get down on the floor of the coach so they could not shoot them through the windows.”9
For a time bloodshed seemed inevitable. Garrett and his deputies clearly meant business. But voices of moderation gradually made themselves heard in the crowd, and the combative urge subsided. As a face-saving gesture, Garrett agreed to take two representatives of the sheriff with him to Santa Fe to certify that the prisoners had been safely locked in the jail there.
At the head of the train, although the main line was now clear and the switch thrown, the possemen held the engineer and the fireman at bay with rifles. The trainmen blustered about obstruction of the U.S. mail, but that failed to deter the irate townsmen. Finally J. F. Morley, a former railway engineer now serving as a postal inspector, jumped into the cab and hit the throttle. “He was a little excited, I guess,” observed Jim East, “jerked it wide open, and the wheels spun around a few times but took hold and by the time we got to the end of the siding it seemed like we were going a mile a minute, and the Mexicans stood there with their mouths open. The engineer and fireman caught the train as it pulled out.”10
That evening, at the railway depot in Santa Fe, Pat Garrett turned over his captives to federal authorities, who promptly clapped them in the county jail on Water Street. Townspeople poured out their thanks to the lawmen for ridding the territory of its most notorious desperadoes. “The arrival here of the prisoners created a good deal of excitement,” reported the New Mexican the next day, “and Sheriff Garrett is the hero of the hour.”11
Garrett basked in the accolade but had more tangible evidence of public gratitude in mind—the five-hundred-dollar reward the governor had posted for Billy the Kid two weeks earlier. But Wallace had left for the East on December 28, and the acting governor, territorial secretary William G. Ritch, seized on a technicality to withhold payment. Indignant citizens took up a purse and advanced Garrett the amount of the reward.12
With Garrett and his “posse of brave men” the heroes of the hour, the Kid suffered an abrupt eclipse. For nearly three months, while awaiting trial, he endured an unaccustomed immobility. Even so, his busy mind never stopped seeking some way out.
His first thoughts turned t
o Governor Wallace, whose bargain nearly two years earlier remained firmly fixed in his memory. On January 1, 1881, Billy scrawled a short note to the dignitary whose office now stood scarcely two blocks from his cell: “I would like to see you for a few moments if you can spare the time.”13 But, as the Kid soon learned, Wallace was not in his office but on a train speeding toward Washington, D.C.
Billy next tried to find legal help. Ira Leonard, also en route for the East, visited him sometime in January and promised to stop on the way back. When he failed to appear, Billy turned to Dave Rudabaugh’s attorney, Edgar Caypless, who not surprisingly wanted a retainer. To raise the money, Billy sold Caypless the beautiful bay mare, judged by many to be the fleetest in New Mexico, that had borne him in many an adventure and that, but for a blocked doorway, might have extricated him from the rock house at Stinking Springs. But Billy’s title to the mare turned out to be clouded. After Stinking Springs, he had given her to Frank Stewart—or so Stewart claimed—and Stewart in turn had presented her to the wife of the proprietor of the hotel at the Las Vegas Hot Springs, W. Scott Moore. Caypless brought suit against Moore for possession of the animal, but pending the outcome of the case Billy languished in jail without any help from the lawyer.14
Billy now tried more direct measures. In February, with Rudabaugh and Wilson, he began the slow and tedious task of digging beneath the cell wall toward the street, hiding the dirt and stones in the bedticking and in turn using it to cover the excavation. Fearing just such an attempt, Sheriff Romulo Martínez planted an informer in the jail and, virtually on the eve of success, learned of the scheme. On the last day of February, Martínez and Marshal Sherman’s chief deputy, Tony Neis, barged into the cell, uncovered the hole, and aborted the plot. Billy and his friends wound up heavily ironed and constantly guarded.15
Thwarted, the Kid turned once more to Governor Wallace, now back from his eastern travels. On March 2, only two days after the collapse of the escape stratagem, he again wrote to Wallace, this time throwing in a hint of blackmail:
I wish you would come down to the jail to see me. It will be to your interest to come and see me. I have some letters which date back two years and there are Parties who are very anxious to get them but I shall not dispose of them until I see you. That is if you will come immediately.16
Billy had in mind the letters Wallace had written him in March 1879, offering amnesty in the Brady killing in exchange for testimony in the Chapman killing. Publication of the letters could not have caused much political harm, especially since a new president had been elected and Wallace hoped for an appointment that would post him to a more appealing place than New Mexico. Doubtless also irritated by the crude threat, he ignored the missive. Two days later, March 4, Billy wrote again:
I wrote you a little note the day before yesterday, but have received no answer I Expect you have forgotten what you promised me this month two years ago, but I have not, and I think you had ought to have come and seen me as I requested you to. I have done everything that I promised you I would, and you have done nothing that you promised me. I think when you think the matter over, you will come down and see me, and I can then explain everything to you.
Judge Leonard Passed through here on his way east in January and promised to come and see me on his way back, but he did not fulfill his Promise. It looks to me like I am getting left in the cold. I am not treated right by Sherman. He lets every Stranger that comes to see me through curiosity in to see me, but will not let a single one of my friends in, not even an attorney. I guess they mean to send me up without giving me any show, but they will have a nice time doing it. I am not entirely without friends. I shall expect to see you some time today
Governor Wallace read the letter, filed it with Billy’s earlier messages, and made no response. Possibly he felt a twinge of guilt, though probably not. He could rationalize his behavior as well as could Billy, and the boy’s effrontery surely roused indignation in the stately occupant of the Palace of the Governors.
So far as it went, the letter expressed the truth. Billy had done everything he promised, and Wallace had done nothing, at least nothing that had produced any benefit. The tone of reproach and injured innocence would have been justified in the summer of 1879. In the spring of 1881 it no longer reflected reality. However much the press had magnified his stature as a criminal, Billy had incontestably turned more and more to crime in 1880. He had thus forfeited whatever claim he had once had on executive clemency. Whether or not Billy truly believed that he still deserved the governor’s aid, he perceived his prospects with clarity: he had become New Mexico’s No. I outlaw, and “they” did indeed intend to send him up, with or without “any show.”
Time had run out. Billy was to be tried in Judge Bristol’s court in Mesilla, and as the spring term approached, so did the end of the Kid’s sojourn in the Santa Fe jail. On March 27 he made one final attempt to catch the governor’s attention: “for the last time I ask, Will you Keep your promise. I start below tomorrow Send answer by bearer.”
Although no bearer arrived with an answer, Ira Leonard appeared to accompany Billy to Mesilla as his defense attorney, a development that may have reflected Wallace’s intent that the youth have at least some “show” in Judge Bristol’s hostile courtroom. Dave Rudabaugh had already been returned to Las Vegas to stand trial, but Billy Wilson accompanied the Kid to face counterfeiting charges in Mesilla. On March 28, with a studied absence of publicity, Tony Neis and another deputy marshal ushered the two Billies aboard a railway coach for the trip down the Rio Grande.17
Word of the move spread quickly in advance. At Rincon, where the main line of the Santa Fe turned west, the party had to switch to another train for the short run into Las Cruces. A menacing mob had gathered, but the deputies faced it down. In Las Cruces another mob threatened the prisoners, but Billy himself, with his customary good humor, defused the tension. When someone asked which was Billy the Kid, he placed his hand on Leonard’s shoulder and quipped, “this is the man.”18
Locked in the squalid Mesilla jail, Billy confronted nearly impossible odds. Both federal and territorial indictments hung over him, and prosecutors had only to work their way from one indictment to the next until one ended in conviction. New Mexico’s court system worked against him, for federal and territorial courts were virtually the same. Prosecutors differed, and records remained separate, but Judge Bristol presided over both courts from the same bench in the same courtroom.
The federal charge took precedence. Ironically, it had originated as a cynical ploy of the Dolan forces in the Lincoln County War. The shooting of Buckshot Roberts at Blazer’s Mills had occurred on an Indian reservation and thus afforded a pretext for mobilizing federal officers on Dolan’s side. This indictment, wrung from a federal grand jury in Mesilla in June 1878, had named all the Regulators who had taken part in the fight and had thus made them all federal fugitives. As nearly everyone knew, Charley Bowdre had shot Buckshot Roberts, and it was his indictment for this deed in the territorial court that had prevented him from claiming Governor Wallace’s amnesty and thus had led him ultimately to the rock house at Stinking Springs. Billy’s name on the federal indictment, however, had provided rationale for his pursuit and apprehension by Pat Garrett in his capacity as a deputy U.S. marshal. Both as a question of guilt and as a question of federal jurisdiction, the case against Billy could hardly have been thinner, but it had sufficed to ensnare him. Not entirely without reason did he believe that “they” meant to get him, show or no show.
On March 30, 1881, Judge Bristol convened the U.S. district court in a rundown adobe building fronting the Mesilla plaza. His gavel fell on a scarred wooden table resting on a raised platform. An open space, for the presentations of the attorneys, separated him from the rough wooden benches filled with spectators. Similar makeshift furniture accommodated the jurors.19
When the clerk of the court called the Roberts case, Billy stood to say that he had no attorney and no money to engage one. Judge Bristol
then appointed Ira Leonard to conduct the defense. This charade was probably contrived to enable Leonard to draw a modest fee from the court for serving as a public defender. U.S. Attorney Sydney M. Barnes then read the indictment, and the formal plea was set for the next day.20
The case against Billy occupied little of the court’s time. The next day, March 31, he entered a plea of not guilty. But when the case came up for argument on April 5, Leonard withdrew the plea and substituted another, alleging lack of federal jurisdiction. Blazer’s Mills, he contended, was private property and not part of the reservation. In fact, Dr. Blazer had settled at South Fork before the establishment of the reservation, and the question of title (and thus jurisdiction) continued to be caught up in a long-running dispute between him and the Indian Bureau. Barnes advanced some lame arguments, but Judge Bristol needed only a day to find Leonard’s position tenable. On April 6 he dismissed the case but directed that the defendant be handed over to territorial authorities for trial in the Brady killing.21
Two days later, April 8, Judge Bristol doffed his federal robes and donned his territorial robes. Billy’s implacable persecutor, William L. Rynerson, was no longer district attorney. His successor, Simon B. Newcomb, rose to call Billy to the docket once again. For unknown reasons, Leonard bowed out of the defense. Judge Bristol appointed the local partnership of Bail and Fountain as counsel.
Both John D. Bail and Albert J. Fountain were men of ability and integrity. Fountain was already well on the way to becoming one of New Mexico’s most notable public men. As editor of the Mesilla Independent, he had crusaded against Jesse Evans and his fellow “banditti” in 1877–78, but he had dropped newspapering after outlaw retaliation almost cost the lives of his sons. As attorney, militia officer, and flamboyant political partisan, Fountain was one of southern New Mexico’s most prominent figures.22
Billy the Kid Page 19
