The Kid

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In the few shabbily made adobes in Tascosa and the fifty or so campaign tents, some of them brothels, the Kid sold the stolen horses to cattlemen hawing their longhorns to Abilene for the railroads and eastern markets. Then he just hung around for some weeks, gambling on games of monte played on Army blankets, happily flinging señoritas at the Mexican bailes, even pitching with both left hand and right at a game of baseball “nines” before he was ejected for loudly doubting the umpire’s impartiality.

An Irish fan dancer originally from Baton Rouge—called Frenchie because of her fluency in the language—became one of the Kid’s familiars in Tascosa. Wild and dazzling, she made a fortune as an adventuress in the sideline of prostitution, and she later remembered Billy as “the best-natured kid and had the most pleasant smile I most ever saw in a young man.”

Another friend there was a handsome, happy mail carrier five years older than the Kid whose name was Henry Franklin Hoyt. A former student at the University of Minnesota and the Rush Medical College in Chicago, but not yet an MD, he’d adventured west and found his way to Uncle John Chisum’s ranch in 1877. Like the Kid, he was urged by Chisum to go to Tascosa for the opportunities, and he’d intended to become a general-practice physician for the injured and ill until he found there wasn’t adequate funding from all the pass-throughs. Although they met in the Howard & McMasters General Store and Saloon, Henry and Billy shared a dislike of intoxicants; both were festive, carefree, inquisitive, and rambunctious; and the Kid’s late-night conversations with Hoyt felt like an education in science he’d lost out on. When Henry Hoyt decided to wander farther northwest to the green meadows of Las Vegas, New Mexico—the Wool Capital and boomtown that was the western railhead of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe—the Kid gifted him with Sheriff Brady’s sorrel racehorse with the brand of BB, even inventing a bill of sale signed by William H. Bonney so Hoyt’s good reputation would not be sullied. In fair exchange, Hoyt gave the Kid a little gold lady’s watch he’d won at five-card poker and the Kid saved it as a Christmas gift for some damsel yet unmet.

In A Frontier Doctor, written forty-two years later, Henry Hoyt remembered: “Billy Bonney was eighteen years old, a handsome youth with a smooth face, wavy hair, an athletic and symmetrical figure, and clear blue eyes that could look one through and through. Unless angry, he always seemed to have a pleasant expression with a ready smile. His head was well-shaped, his features regular, his nose aquiline, his most noticeable characteristic being a slight protrusion of his two front upper teeth. He spoke Spanish like a native and although only a beardless boy was nevertheless a natural leader of men.”

Just before lea

ving, Hoyt offered some final advice to the Kid, telling him that while he was still free and fairly solvent he should run off to Mexico or South America and forget about the outlawry, for the Kid was smart, self-assured, easy to like, and efficient; he’d be a success at whatever he chose to do.

Hoyt was not the first nor last to suggest a getaway, but the Kid hung on to the familiar.

Soon after Henry Hoyt left, so did John Middleton, who petted his handlebar mustache as he complained, “Everything is already stoled out of the country.” He took a job again with the Hunter, Evans & Company firm and its cattle drive north, earning three hundred dollars that he used to finance a grocery store in Sun City, Kansas, and failing in the business. His marriage to a fifteen-year-old girl also failed, and he was cowboying again when he died of smallpox in 1882.

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Word got to the Kid in November 1878 that Thomas B. Catron of the Santa Fe Ring, who was finally under criminal investigation, had formally resigned as United States Attorney for New Mexico; that Lawrence G. Murphy had died in October—his ranch in Carrizozo would much later be purchased by the actress Mae West—and that Rob Widenmann had journeyed from London to Las Vegas, New Mexico, with a gift of one hundred pounds sterling (about five hundred American dollars) from John Partridge Tunstall to Susan McSween. She wrote Harry’s father, “I am truely grateful as I was so very much in kneed,” but then requested five hundred dollars more. She’d also hired a Las Vegas civil engineer and choleric lawyer named Huston Ingraham Chapman to sue Lieutenant Colonel Nathan A. M. Dudley for arson and “the murder of my dear husband.”

President Rutherford B. Hayes had named Lewis Wallace, the fifty-one-year-old Indiana lawyer and former Union Army general, to become the reforming successor to hapless Governor Axtell in New Mexico, and soon after getting to Santa Fe, His Excellency announced “that the disorders lately prevalent in Lincoln County have been happily brought to an end.” He noted that now those

peaceably disposed may go to and from the County without hindrance or molestation.

And that the people of Lincoln County may be helped more speedily to the management of their civil affairs, and to induce them to lay aside forever the divisions and feuds which, by national notoriety, have been so prejudicial to their locality, the undersigned, by virtue of the authority in him vested, further proclaims a general pardon for misdemeanors and offenses committed against the laws of the Territory in connection with the aforesaid disorders, between the first day of February, 1878, and the date of this proclamation.

The governor also pardoned officers of the United States Army stationed in Lincoln County, affronting Colonel Dudley, who construed the pardon as a slander against “the gallant officers of my command for offenses we know not of, and of which we feel ourselves guiltless.”

The governor denied a pardon for any person “under indictment for crimes and misdemeanors, nor shall this operate the release of any party undergoing pains and penalties” for his wrongdoing.

The Kid read the statement over and over again, yet he so fully believed in his innocence that he seems not to have recognized that he was one of those unpardonable criminals, for he was under indictment for murder. And because he did not see it, he thought it was a favorable time to return to the New Mexico he thought of as his home. The Mesilla News foresaw that result, noting that “peace was dawning in Lincoln County when Governor Wallace extended a pardon to absent thieves, cutthroats, and murderers and virtually invited them to come back and make a fresh start in their occupations.”

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THE PARLEY

Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell left Illinois at seventeen to become a fur trapper in Nebraska, headed farther west as a scout alongside Kit Carson, and providentially married Ana Maria de la Luz Beaubien, whose heritage was of the French and Spanish aristocracy. With an inheritance from his father-in-law of 1,714,765 acres of rangeland in the New Mexico Territory and southern Colorado, Lucien developed a cattle operation that rivaled John Chisum’s; founded three merchandise stores, a major gristmill, the Azteca Mine, and the First National Bank of Santa Fe; and in Cimarron constructed a glorious hacienda full of European wines, silver dishware, a redundancy of servants, and so many houseguests that there were two dining rooms. And then, as if he foresaw he would die of kidney failure four years later, in 1871 he sold off properties, gave up his rangeland to an English syndicate for $1,350,000—less than a dollar an acre—and moved his wife and six children two hundred miles south along the Goodnight-Loving cattle trail to Fort Sumner.

A forty-square-mile government Indian reservation on the Rio Pecos had been constructed there for 8,500 Navajo and 500 Mescalero Apache prisoners. Washington politicians hoped for civilizing instruction in farming and Christianity, but the project was a tragedy, offering only malnourishment, poisonous water, and, at an elevation of four thousand feet, overexposure to the fierce cold of winter. In frustration and defeat, the federal government finally released the Indians a few years after the Civil War, and the Army that had overseen and serviced the reservation abandoned the neighboring Fort Sumner, selling its many buildings to Lucien Maxwell for just five thousand dollars. Maxwell forsook his grand hacienda in Cimarron and converted the officers’ quarters into a handsome twenty-room, two-story adobe house for his wife, Doña Luz; his only son, Pedro; and his five daughters, Emilia, Maria, Sofia, Paulita, and Odila. Twenty Mexican families followed him to the fort, establishing apartments in buildings such as the company barracks, the stables, the quartermaster store, the commissary, and the Indian hospital.

And that’s where the Kid, now age nineteen, sought out Scurlock and Bowdre in December 1878, trotting his horse southwest from the Staked Plains of Texas along the Portales–Stinking Springs Road and entering the fort near the parade grounds where Pete Maxwell’s sheep were gardening the wintry grama grass. The Kid saw Beaver Smith’s saloon to his right and the great barn of a dance hall to his left, then rode the wide avenue between the Maxwell house and the former enlisted men’s barracks to an orchard at the north end and Bob Hargrove’s saloon. A hundred yards east were the old Indian corrals and then the former Indian hospital, where Doc Scurlock, Charlie Bowdre, and the sisters Herrera were housed.

Doc and Charlie had been hired as wranglers on Pete Maxwell’s horse-overrun ranch and told Billy they’d found Fort Sumner congenial, with good hunting on the treeless plains, a peach orchard on the property, weekly frolics and dances, and fame among the Mexicans for the Regulators’ stance against the House and the Santa Fe Ring in the Lincoln County War.

The Kid was mystified. “But we lost.”

“We won their hearts and minds,” said Doc.

“So we’re fixin to settle right chere,” Charlie said. “With the outlyings we got near three hunderd peoples so our women got company now, and speakin for Manuela, she’s sore put out with me forever wanderin hither and john.”

The Herrera sisters nodded their agreement.

The Kid smiled and said, “Wow, if times get any better you’ll have to hire me to help you enjoy em.”

“Well, we’re tired of falling on stony ground,” said Doc.

With a tad too much interest, Manuela inquired, “And what are jour plan?”