…if we believe in that mysterious wind that blows our lives, like tumbling tumbleweeds, into new shapes, we must ride blind with it.1
—CAROL MUSKE-DUKES
WESTERN HISTORIANS ARE certain that Catherine McCarty, her sons, and the dutiful William Antrim quietly slipped into New Mexico Territory in early 1873.2 At about the same time, a newcomer of an altogether different species also took up residence there: the soon-to-be ubiquitous Russian thistle, better known as the tumbleweed.
Tumbleweeds had first appeared in the American West a few years earlier, when some seeds were accidentally imported with shipments of flaxseed from the Russian steppe.3 The tenacious shrubs with no natural enemies gained a foothold on the range and quickly spread across the Southwest, particularly in the decades following the Civil War. Every autumn, as the prickly bushes died and turned rigid, they snapped off at the roots, and the thorny skeletons rolled in the wind, often for miles, scattering more seed. Tumbleweeds arrived in New Mexico Territory in 1873 and 1874 when fertile seeds clinging to the hooves of longhorns trailed in from Texas.4
The tumbleweed, regarded as a nuisance by some and a picturesque symbol of the West by others, shared a kinship with the footloose, such as consumptives like Catherine McCarty and those with gypsy hearts who never stayed in any one place too long. The tumbleweed stood for the sturdy individuals. “I wouldn’t have my New Mexico without its brave pioneers, its rugged individualism, and its tumbleweeds,” writes Robert Leonard Reid. “Like all myths they began in truth. Examined with sympathy and care, they provide important clues to our past and valuable starting points for judging and interpreting history.”5
Like the tumbleweed, Henry McCarty’s nomadic life, also destined to become part and parcel of the West of imagination and myth, truly began in New Mexico Territory. At least the young man’s public existence started there. For it was in the historic city of Santa Fe, snug against the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, that the first indisputable documentation of Henry McCarty’s existence was recorded.
The precise date was March 1, 1873, when, after eight years of courtship and frequent cohabitation, William H. Antrim and the ailing Catherine McCarty at last wed.6 The bride was forty-four, and the groom thirty-one. It was probably a clear, chilly late-winter day, with the air scented by the aroma of piñon and juniper fires warming the adobe houses of the area. The simple marriage ceremony took place in the First Presbyterian Church of Santa Fe, constructed of adobe bricks at the corner of Grant and Griffin streets in 1854. Originally a Baptist mission, it was the first Protestant church in the territory but was eventually abandoned and stood empty until 1867, when the Presbyterians bought it and added a square tower and Gothic windows.7 Officiating at the Antrim-McCarty wedding was the Reverend David F. McFarland, who would be forced to retire in ill health before the end of that same year.8
According to both church and Santa Fe County records for the date, there were five witnesses to the nuptials that changed Catherine’s surname from McCarty to Antrim. The witnesses included Amanda R. McFarland, the minister’s wife; Katie McFarland, the couple’s daughter; and Harvey Edmonds, a local citizen who frequently acted as a backup witness to marriages. The fourth and fifth witness names scrawled in the ledger in Dr. McFarland’s hand were brothers Josie and Henry McCarty.9
Since a couple had to show proof of three weeks’ local residency prior to taking the marriage vows, Antrim and the McCartys must have been in Santa Fe for at least a month before the wedding. They may have temporarily lived with Antrim’s sister, Mary Ann Hollinger, believed to be residing in the city at that time, or taken rooms at the Exchange Hotel, perched on the corner of the Plaza, the termination point of the busy Santa Fe Trail.10 For many years tales persisted of the boy who became Billy the Kid washing dishes in the hotel kitchen and banging away on a lobby piano in his free time.11
No records indicate Henry McCarty ever learned to play the piano, but his appreciation of music was well documented by many of his friends and others who crossed his trail in the Southwest. It was said that his love of song and dance came from his Irish mother.12
In 1873, the year Henry and his family showed up in New Mexico Territory, a song entitled “Silver Threads Among the Gold” made its debut and soon became the most popular tune in the nation. Henry McCarty was taken with the song the first time he heard it played. From then on he declared it was his favorite, right up there with “Turkey in the Straw,” the old fiddle tune derived from an even older Irish ballad.13
Some music critics later said that “Silver Threads” was clichéd and ordinary, but Henry was drawn to the sentimental lyrics that told the story of two people facing fear and denial while growing old together.14 For the rest of his life he reportedly often whistled the song as he rode horseback across the high plains and ranchlands.
Besides the popular mainstream melodies of that time, Henry seemed captivated by the homegrown music of New Mexico Territory. For unlike other Anglo newcomers, who found the territory a foreign and peculiar land mostly populated by Hispanics and Indians, Henry quickly adjusted to his new surroundings.
Passages about a fictional Catholic cleric written more than fifty years later in Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather’s novel set on the nineteenth-century frontier, could also describe young McCarty’s attachment to New Mexico: “In New Mexico he always awoke a young man…. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests…that lightness, that dry aromatic odor…one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sagebrush desert…. Something soft and wild and free; something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning….”15
Instead of experiencing culture shock, Henry embraced the strange and foreign New Mexico Territory lifestyle, so different from the other places he had lived in for his first thirteen years. He soon adopted many of the manners, habits, and customs of the local populace. Henry found that the savory native cuisine featured all sorts of new delights seasoned with piquant chile peppers and perfected through the years by both the Indians native to the land and their Spanish conquerors. The aroma of simmering frijoles, tamales, posole, and piping hot tortillas wafted down the narrow streets of Santa Fe. Chocolate was customarily served along with delicious cakes after meals, and the ricos (the wealthy) sipped aguardiente, a domestic brandy that the Anglos commonly called pass whiskey because it was shipped from El Paso del Norte.16
Anglo observers were impressed by the suave Hispanics and noted that their manners were not confined to the higher classes since “the humblest beggars often exhibited an address and air of refinement that a prince of blood might envy.” Both sexes of native New Mexicans smoked fine-cut tobacco, and it was said that a gentleman never lit his cigarito in the presence of another without saying, “Con su licencia, señor [with your permission, sir].”17
Gambling was a vice common to all classes of society, and gambling houses were frequented by rich and poor. Cockfighting was another accepted amusement, but by far the most popular leisure activities were the many bailes, balls, and the colorful fandangos.18 “From the gravest to the buffoon—from the richest nabob to the beggar—from the governor to the ranchero—from the soberest matron to the flippant belle—from the grandest señora to the cocinera [female cook]—all partake of this exhilarating amusement,” wrote Josiah Gregg, chronicler of the Santa Fe Trail. “To judge from the quantity of tuned instruments which salute the ear almost every night in the week, one would suppose that a perpetual carnival prevailed everywhere.”19
Still, there was more to Santa Fe than music and dance, gambling dens, engaging señoritas, and zesty gastronomical fare. On the dusty and teeming Plaza the local merchants mingled with both traders from El Camino Real, the trail winding northward from the old colonial capital of Mexico City, and freighters who traversed the Santa Fe Trail. The townspeople shared stories of highwaymen and marauding bands of Plains Indians who preyed on the Pueblo Indian people and the trade caravans journeying across the plains.
A steady flow of newcomers had been coming to the territory ever since the Santa Fe Trail opened in 1821. Many went back and forth on the trade route between the ancient city and Missouri, but others stayed. They made themselves at home in a land that in some ways had changed little since the arrival of the conquistadors. The Spaniards came with a cross in one hand and a sword in the other and forced both on the tribal people living along the Rio Grande.
A wealth of stories sprang up about the Plaza being the site for bullfights, public floggings and executions, gun battles, political rallies, and fiestas. Running the full length of the Plaza’s north side was the Palacio, the Palace of the Governors, a simple adobe structure built in 1609–1610 and used continuously as a seat of government. By the time Henry McCarty and his family reached Santa Fe, four different flags had flown over the Plaza and El Palacio: Spanish, Mexican, Confederate, and United States.20
Undoubtedly Henry and his brother, Josie, like other youngsters who passed through the city, heard the tales of how justice was meted out in the old adobe palace. It was known to be one of the first in the territory to have windows with glass, and, in the not-too-distant past, the ears severed from slain Indians had adorned the outside walls. “The festoons of Indian ears were made up of several strings of dried ears of Indians killed by parties sent out by the government against the savages, who were paid a certain sum for each head,” writes R. E. Twitchell in his history of New Mexico. “In Chihuahua, a great exhibition was made with the entire scalps of Indians which they had killed by proxy. At Santa Fe only the ears were exhibited or retained.”21 Although the Anglo and Hispanic citizens of New Mexico Territory were still in conflict with several Indian tribes, especially assorted bands of Apaches, the macabre custom of hanging human ears for public viewing had thankfully ended and remained only in accounts told to recent arrivals and visiting Yankee traders.
William Antrim, his alert ears secured in place, surely heard such grisly tales, but he also heard the stories of mineral riches in the territory and was anxious to try his hand in the mines well to the south of Santa Fe. The high desert of mountainous New Mexico Territory also made sense for the family’s new home since much like Colorado, it was a haven for people stricken with consumption like Catherine Antrim.
Antrim grew increasingly anxious to find his sickly wife a comfortable home. He also wanted to get the two boys into school, and there was no public education in Santa Fe at the time.22 Moreover, and probably most important, Antrim was eager to try his hand in the silver mines.
Late that spring, after no more than two months in Santa Fe, the Antrim family—for by then Henry and Josie had dropped the name McCarty and assumed the surname of the man who married their mother—left the city. Railroads were still years away from the territory, so the Antrims undoubtedly took a stagecoach to Albuquerque. From there they would have turned south and followed El Camino Real flanking the Rio Grande through the center of New Mexico Territory. After long days traversing desolate country frequented by bandits and renegade Apaches, they reached La Mesilla, so named because the settlement was on a small tableland rising above the Rio Grande floodplain. The Antrims then turned west and headed for Grant County, formed in 1868 and named for Ulysses S. Grant, the Union general credited with winning the Civil War and by 1873 into his second term as president.23
Once in the county, they reportedly paused in the mining camp of Georgetown, site of the first important silver strike in the territory. Catherine immediately disliked what she saw in the makeshift settlement of prospectors and miners. She had hoped for a more suitable town with other youngsters and the potential of opportunity for her sons. Much to Antrim’s chagrin, they hastily departed Georgetown.24
They traveled a short distance to a town that appeared to be booming and was situated in the foothills of the Pinos Altos Mountains. Catherine and the two boys liked what they saw there. The name of the place alone appealed to Antrim. It told him all he needed to know: Silver City.