To Hell on a Fast Horse

by Mark Lee Gardner

  As the last rays of daylight began to fade from the Rio Bonito Valley, Billy walked down to the courthouse’s first floor and out to the front of the building, where Gauss had, with some difficulty, led the troublesome mount, a pony belonging to William Burt, deputy probate clerk. Billy had been able to break apart only one of the ankle bracelets, so the cumbersome shackles remained attached to one leg. The shackles undoubtedly spooked the already flighty horse, or perhaps it smelled death on the Kid, because as Billy tried to mount, the horse jumped sideways and broke loose. Billy ordered the animal retrieved, and after taking a moment to settle the pony, he climbed back into the saddle and rode to the west, shouting to no one in particular, “Tell Billy Burt I will send his horse back to him.”

  He went only a few hundred yards when he abruptly stopped at the home of a Hispanic resident next to the road and bought a rope. The escaping outlaw, well accustomed to taking whatever he wanted, actually bothered to pay for the rope. That is fairly remarkable, but it also shows the kind of character that endeared him to New Mexico’s native population.

  After he had completed this transaction, Billy the Kid disappeared into the twilight.

  “When he rode off he went on a walk,” wrote an eyewitness, “and every act, from beginning to end, seemed to have been planned and executed with the coolest deliberation.”

  BILLY BONNEY KNEW THAT the only way he could keep ahead of the law was to rely on friends. A few miles west of Lincoln, he turned north, crossed the Rio Bonito, and started up Salazar Canyon. He stopped at the home of José Córdova just long enough to get help removing the shackles that had been pestering him and the stolen horse, and then he rode on, circling back east across the Capitan foothills and canyons to Agua Azul (Blue Water). A few miles more brought him to the small settlement of Las Tablas, where his friend Yginio Salazar lived. Salazar, a brother-in-arms from Billy’s Lincoln County War days, fed him and gave him some blankets to sleep out a safe distance from his house. Salazar urged Billy to head across the border into Mexico, but Billy was not sure what he would do. Maybe he would go to Texas, he said.

  Before leaving the Las Tablas area, Billy Burt’s pain-in-the-butt horse got away from the Kid, and this time no one was standing around to catch the animal. The horse loped off for home. The Kid managed to get another horse and saddle (perhaps it was a gift of a confederate, perhaps not), and left young Yginio with the memories of a friendship he held on to for the rest of his life (carved on Salazar’s tombstone are the words “Pal of Billy the Kid”).

  Billy now seemed to be headed south to Texas and then Mexico, but he only got as far as the upper Peñasco River, approximately forty miles south of Lincoln. He showed up unannounced at the cabin of his friend John Meadows just as Meadows and ranching partner Tom Norris were inside preparing supper, their backs to the open door.

  “I’ve got you covered,” the Kid said as he stepped into the cabin.

  “Yes, and what in hell are you going to do with us—” Meadows replied as he turned. “By God, that’s the Kid,” he blurted out, both surprised and elated.

  Meadows told Billy to sit down and join them for a plate of beans, and the three men talked till late into the night. The Kid told the story of how he had pulled off his escape from the Lincoln County courthouse in broad daylight, and how he had killed James Bell and Bob Olinger. He also told them how much he deeply regretted shooting Bell.

  “It was a case of have to, not of wanting to,” Billy said.

  “You’d better go into Mexico while the going’s good,” Meadows told the Kid.

  “You can make it there now, and you can do well there.”

  “I haven’t any money,” Billy said. “What could I do if I went to Mexico or some other place with no money? I’ll have to go back and get a little before I can leave.”

  “You go back to Fort Sumner and Garrett will get you as sure as you go back,” Meadows warned. “He ain’t laying down on his job.”

  “Garrett will get me if he can,” Billy said, “but I’ve got too many friends there.”

  What Billy did not tell Meadows was that he had another reason besides money to return to Fort Sumner. Whatever he had been thinking when he arrived on the upper Peñasco, Billy left that place with only one destination in mind, and neither Meadows nor anyone else could talk him out of it. The Kid was going home, to his friends, to where he was loved.

  Back in Lincoln, while residents were still excitedly talking over the escape and trading stories and rumors of the Kid’s whereabouts, Billy Burt’s horse wandered into town. It was dragging a rope.

  8

  The Darkened Room

  I am not going to leave the country, and I am not going to reform, neither am I going to be taken alive again.

  —BILLY THE KID

  Let those doubt who will.

  —PAT F. GARRETT

  SANTA FE, APRIL 30 1881. Governor Lew Wallace sat at his desk in his office in the Palace of the Governors. Before him was the death warrant for one William Bonney, alias Kid, alias William Antrim. This handwritten document directed Sheriff Garrett to carry out Billy’s death sentence on Friday, May 13, as ordered by the district court in Mesilla, but before any of this could happen, the governor had to sign the warrant.

  The fifty-four-year-old Wallace, a native of Indiana, was an extremely intelligent man who could speak knowledgeably on any topic. Known for his dry wit, he was also slightly pompous, opinionated, and rather defensive. His father, a West Point graduate, had served as both lieutenant governor and governor of Indiana. Wallace, who as a child dreamed that he would become victorious and famous on the battlefield, interrupted his law school studies to join an Indiana regiment in the U.S.–Mexican War of 1846–1848. Thirteen years later, when the Civil War broke out, he again gave up his law practice to become a soldier. As his state’s adjutant general, he raised and organized six regiments of Indiana men and then accepted the command of one of those regiments as its colonel. By March 1862, Wallace had achieved the rank of major general of volunteers—he was only thirty-four years old. General Wallace was not tall, but he was a dashing figure with his long beard and bushy mustache, jet black hair, and piercing dark eyes. His men affectionately nicknamed him “Louisa.”

  Lewis “Lew” Wallace, territorial governor of New Mexico and author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.

  Robert G. McCubbin Collection

  But unfortunately, Wallace’s glory days were short-lived. At the bloody Battle of Shiloh, on April 6–7, 1862, he became the scapegoat for the Union’s near defeat and its shocking loss of men when more than thirteen thousand were killed, wounded, or captured. When General Ulysses S. Grant ordered him to rush reinforcements to the front, Wallace had sent his division over the wrong route, and by the time the mistake was caught, hours had been lost. Wallace’s men did not unite with the rest of Grant’s force until after the first day’s fighting was over. His division fought during the next day’s battle, but even though that day ended in a victory for Grant, Wallace’s Civil War career was subsequently sidetracked and forever tainted with charges of tardiness at Shiloh. The accusations caused Wallace to spend the rest of his life defending his actions.

  One episode demonstrates just how sensitive Wallace became to the subject of Shiloh. In June 1881, while sitting in a State Department reception room, Wallace noticed on a table a copy of the first volume of Adam Badeau’s three-volume Military History of Ulysses S. Grant. Wallace picked the book up, immediately flipped to the pages covering Shiloh, and then became incensed at Badeau’s criticism of his performance. Wallace grabbed a pen and wrote a stinging rebuke in a margin of the offending page: “There are more willful falsehoods in the foregoing paragraph than in any other of the same length in English literature. Lew Wallace.”

  President Rutherford B. Hayes had appointed Wallace territorial governor of New Mexico (at an annual salary of $2,600) in September 1878, with the primary task of ending the Lincoln County troubles. So far, Wallace had failed, despite
good intentions and considerable effort. His amnesty proclamation had allowed some of the worst offenders in the war to go scot-free while effectually leaving others the choice of either fleeing the Territory or living outside the law. He had failed to get anyone convicted for the murder of Huston Chapman, and although he got Gold Lace Dudley removed from command at Fort Stanton, that officer was later exonerated of any wrongdoing for his actions during the Big Killing in Lincoln.

  And then there was William H. Bonney and the exasperating talk of a pardon. For one thing, Wallace never understood the boy—of course, not many did—nor did he understand the sympathy and friendship the outlaw enjoyed with native New Mexicans. Wallace’s haughty estimation of Bonney was revealed early on in a letter written at Lincoln on March 31, 1879: “A precious specimen nick-named ‘The Kid,’ whom the Sheriff is holding here in the Plaza, as it is called, is an object of tender regard. I heard singing and music the other night; going to the door, I found the minstrels of the village actually serenading the fellow in his prison.” Not surprisingly, Wallace’s opinion of the Kid failed to improve over time.

  Now, that precious specimen was a problem and an embarrassment. Every mention of the outlaw in the newspapers was a reminder of the governor’s failings in Lincoln County. Surely with some satisfaction, then, Wallace signed the death warrant for the Kid, after which the great seal of the Territory of New Mexico was affixed. Wallace knew his term as governor was quickly coming to an end, but with Billy waiting in jail, he would likely still be in Santa Fe when the Kid dropped through a trapdoor and was hanged. So be it.

  Later that same day, a wire arrived at the Palace of the Governors. Wallace may have been enjoying a pleasant smoke at the time—something he was fond to do—or he may have been replying to correspondence from some early fans of his new novel, Ben-Hur. The book had been released by Harper & Brothers on November 12, 1880, and had sold out of its first printing of five thousand copies by December 22. It continued to sell steadily. At any rate, a telegraph message usually indicated a matter of some importance, and Wallace read the telegraph immediately. Sent from Deputy Sheriff Ethan W. Eaton at Socorro, 138 miles to the south, the message contained but one sentence: “Billy the Kid escaped from Lincoln yesterday evening, killing Deputy Sheriffs J. W. Bell and Bob Olinger.”

  Like a deadly contagion, the news that Billy had escaped again raced from person to person throughout the Territory, even if few people knew the particulars of what had happened. Not until two days later did the Daily New Mexican have enough details of the escape to publish an extra edition. And on May 3, the New Mexican devoted even more space to the escape and somehow managed to find new respect for Billy in his ruthless act:

  [It was] as bold a deed as those versed in the annals of crime can recall. It surpasses anything which the Kid has ever been guilty of so far that his past offenses lose much of their heinousness in comparison with it, and it effectually settles the question as to whether the Kid is a cowardly cut throat or a thoroughly reckless and fearless man. Never before has he faced death boldly or run any great risk in the perpetration of his bloody deeds.

  News of Billy’s sensational escape spread across the front pages of the nation’s newspapers as fast as it could be transmitted over the telegraph, and he became even more notorious, and more feared than ever before. The words Billy the Kid danced off the tongues of shopkeepers and housewives, butchers and bakers, schoolchildren and ministers, and he immediately rose to a status alongside the most famous outlaw of that era: Jesse James. Jesse, unlike the Kid, was a hardened professional bank and train robber of many years’ experience, but like the Kid, he was daring, a media favorite, and quite adept at evading the law (even more so than Billy). Whatever was to come for the Kid, the Lincoln courthouse escape had earned him a place in the American consciousness.

  And what was to come began to haunt many in the Territory. “This is terrible,” wrote a Lincoln correspondent to the New Mexican, “and the Kid is free with his threats of murder thick in the air. He said, I understand, that he wanted to live long enough to kill Governor Wallace, or as he put it, ‘that damned old son of a bitch Wallace.’ He [Wallace] cannot be too vigilantly on his guard.”

  Wallace did have to worry that Billy might just show up in the plaza one dark night like some rabid animal, seeking vengeance. Wallace immediately posted another $500 reward for the Kid’s capture, and then put together a plan for his own personal safety. Every morning, he stepped outside the rear of the Palace with a revolver in his hand. He walked quietly to a thick adobe wall where he had had a chalk outline drawn of a human form. He squared himself, took aim and fired several practice shots at the faceless figure. He then returned to his office, laying the pistol on a table at his side within easy reach. “Forewarned, forearmed,” the former Union general told a friend. If Billy ever did ride into Santa Fe, it would be a different Lew Wallace confronting him. This Wallace had turned himself into an expert pistoleer.

  THE NEWS OF THE Kid’s escape and the murder of his two guards quickly reached Pat Garrett in White Oaks. Garrett departed the mining camp for Lincoln the evening of April 29 with a former Colfax County deputy by the name of Goodlett. The sheriff faced not only the gory mess Billy left behind, but also pangs of guilt. True, Bell and Olinger died because of their own carelessness, but Garrett was not completely without blame, as he freely admitted later: “I knew the desperate character of the man whom the authorities would look for at my hands on the 13th day of May—that he was daring and unscrupulous, and that he would sacrifice the lives of a hundred men who stood between him and liberty…. And now I realize how inadequate my precautions were.”

  In his own defense, Garrett maintained that his explicit instructions to the guards were not followed. But as sheriff, it was his responsibility to correct the unacceptable behavior he observed in Bell and Olinger before leaving for White Oaks, or, one might argue, either relieve the deputies from duty or postpone his trip. He did neither. All Garrett could do at this point, however, was to see to the final affairs of his former deputies and once again take up Billy’s trail. This time, though, there would be no taking the Kid alive.

  Governor Wallace’s reward notice for Billy the Kid, published in the Santa Fe New Mexican beginning May 3, 1881.

  Robert G. McCubbin Collection

  “I knew now that I would have to kill the Kid,” Garrett later told writer Emerson Hough. “We both knew that it must be one or the other of us if we ever met.”

  Garrett arrived back in Lincoln the next day and immediately organized a party of volunteer scouts and followed the Kid’s route out of town, hoping to pick up his trail. But the Kid left little to follow, and folks along the way were not talking, at least not to Garrett. Garrett then sent out his deputy, Barney Mason, to see what he could find. Garrett figured that a single man would likely have an advantage over a sheriff’s posse, considering how Kid-friendly the countryside was. Mason, undoubtedly a bit nervous about doing this alone, actually did have better luck tracing Billy’s movements and was able to trail the Kid all the way to Fort Sumner and arrived there on May 7. The next morning, a Sunday, a mulatto stock raiser named Montgomery Bell told Mason that his horse had been stolen. Bell thought the animal had been taken by a “Mexican,” by which he meant a native New Mexican. He asked Mason to catch the thief.

  Mason started out from Fort Sumner with cattleman Jim Cureton. After riding fifteen miles, the two arrived at a sheep camp at the head of Buffalo Arroyo, where they suddenly came upon the stolen horse, as well as its rider—Billy the Kid. The Kid was with four Hispanic men who rapidly positioned themselves as if to shoot it out with the intruders. Mason was the only one carrying weapons, but as soon as he recognized Billy, he whipped his horse around and dug his spurs in deep, leaving a stunned Cureton wondering what had happened.

  As the Las Vegas Gazette reported, and everyone knew, Billy “never had any great love for Barney…especially since he assisted in the capture of Billy and party at Stinki
ng Springs.” Mason, of course, knew this better than anyone else. Cureton supposedly spoke to Billy, who asked him to tell Montgomery Bell that he had taken the horse because he had no other way of getting around, and that he would either arrange to return the horse or pay him for it.

  Back at Fort Sumner, Mason and Cureton tried to raise a posse to go out after the Kid, but they could not find anyone who wanted anything to do with it. Everyone said it was a foolhardy mission. A fellow could get shot—or worse (probably worse). And besides, many people there liked the Kid. Mason eventually sized up the situation for what it was and realized it was unsafe for him to remain in the area. He promptly loaded up his family in a wagon and headed out of town to Roswell.

  Billy had no intention of leaving the Fort Sumner vicinity. He was staying, or being given refuge, in the outlying sheep and cow camps, the small Hispanic settlements, and, of course, within Fort Sumner itself. His friends, mostly native New Mexicans, were always watching out for strangers or suspicious activity, and they brought him the latest newspapers, in which Billy must have read some of the crazy stories being written about him, the wildest being that he had murdered three Chisum cowboys in cold blood because of his grudge against the Pecos cattle king. It was a complete fabrication, but the story was taken for the truth by a public who only knew the Kid as a vicious killer.

  In early June, in a story first published in the Denver Tribune but picked up by several other newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, it was reported that Billy was staying close to Fort Sumner because of a sweetheart. This information had come from Colonel George P. Buell, post commander at Fort Stanton. Sheriff Garrett knew all about Billy’s favorite girl at Fort Sumner, and that girl, of course, was Paulita Maxwell, Pete’s teenaged sister. Billy had had his fair share of female companionship, but Paulita appears to have been the only girl who wrote to him when he was in jail in far-off Mesilla (the Kid had proudly shown Paulita’s letter to Sheriff James W. Southwick). As an elderly woman, Paulita admitted she might have married Billy—if he had asked. Perhaps the Kid intended to, but if so, he waited too long.