As Henry grew into adolescence…he also grew increasingly free willed and independent. Now on his own, with a mixture of anxiety and resolve that may be imagined, he fixed a westward course into the unknown.1
—ROBERT UTLEY
HENRY ANTRIM REMAINED in Silver City for almost a year following the death of his mother. He did not always manage, however, to stay clear of trouble. Far from it. Try as he might to keep on the straight and narrow, trouble had a way of finding Henry and turning him upside down. Silver City was wide open now with midwestern migrants filing in on their way to California, and Mexican emigrants passing through on their way to Albuquerque and Denver. Without his mother’s guidance, not even the boldest gambler would have risked taking odds on Henry ever becoming a productive citizen. In some ways, the Antrim brothers might as well have been orphans. Although stories alleging that Bill Antrim was an abusive stepfather are without merit, he appeared to be a man who not only did not want the burden of looking after Catherine’s sons but really did not know how to do it. As one writer cleverly puts it, Antrim seems to have done little for Henry “other than to lend him the second of three last names he used interchangeably.”2
Other historians are kinder to William Antrim. They place most of the blame for Henry’s problems squarely at his own diminutive boots, or more accurately his moccasins, since that was the footwear he and his chums preferred to wear.3 Despite the less than ideal circumstances of Henry’s upbringing and the dysfunctional aspects of his early life, many other children from similar backgrounds became productive members of society. Indeed, much of the nineteenth century was not ideal for a child growing up in the East or West.
There was little or no time for grieving over the loss of Catherine. When Antrim finally came home, he quickly farmed out his stepsons to obliging families while he sold the cabin on Main Street. Then he lit out again to prospect new mineral strikes in nearby Arizona Territory.
There is conjecture about the sequence of households that accommodated the Antrim brothers from early autumn of 1874 until the next year. For a brief period Henry and Joe may have stayed at the residence of Richard and Mary Hudson. The Hudsons owned the Legal Tender Livery and Feed Stable in Silver City. They later bought what became Hudson’s Hot Springs, the place where Catherine had tried without success to regain her health. Mary had been one of Catherine’s caregivers during her final months, so it makes sense that Antrim might have prevailed on the couple to take in his stepsons for a short time.4 Others who knew Catherine also helped out, including the Knight family and, of course, Clara Truesdell, who later in the year gave Henry a place to live in her family home.
After a brief period of mourning, both Henry and Joe returned to school. On September 14, 1874, only two days before Catherine’s death, public school classes started once more in Silver City, this time with Mary Phillipa Richards as the teacher. Described as “a willowy twenty-eight-year-old English gentlewoman,” she supposedly was fluent in French, Italian, German, and Portuguese (no mention of Spanish) and claimed to be related to Alfred Lord Tennyson, Benjamin Disraeli, and John Ruskin. She had been schooled in England, Germany, and Paris. Her fancy pedigree aside, Mary Richards had also lived along the Texas-Mexico border as a young girl and moved to Silver City from a ranch in south-central Texas.5
When the Antrim brothers resumed book learning, their compadres quickly recognized that Henry was smitten with Miss Richards. A picture of refinement in her long bustled gowns, the stylish teacher parted her dark hair in the center and pulled her rolled tresses back smoothly into a chignon of braids, most likely made from someone else’s hair, as was the mode in the mid-1870s.6 Perhaps Henry developed a close attachment to his teacher because of the void left by the very recent loss of his mother. According to some sources, he was so taken with Miss Richards that he even fantasized that they were blood kin.
“He thought this because they were both ambidextrous,” the teacher’s daughter, Patience Glennon, said in later years. “My mother could write equally well with either hand, and so could Billy [Henry]. He noticed this and he used to say to my mother that he was sure they were related because she was the only other person he had ever seen, besides himself, who could do things equally well with either hand.”7
Miss Richards proved to be a capable teacher. For the most part, Owen Scott, the crusading newspaper editor who considered taming the village arabs his personal crusade, frequently applauded her. While he praised her for transforming unruly youngsters into conscientious scholars, he also doled out criticism, including a critique of the students’ poor posture. Following one of his periodic visits to the school, Scott wrote: “The larger boys, we are sorry to see, were inattentive. It is a shame for the big lubberly boys to lean against each other, or hang their bodies while in recitation class.”8
Miss Richards taught in Silver City until October 5, 1875, when she wed Daniel Charles Casey, a carpenter from Wisconsin. The couple moved to Georgetown, New Mexico Territory, where they raised six children and where Mary died on the first day of January 1900.9 Before her death the former teacher of the Antrim brothers recalled the few months they were in her charge. She said that the student Henry Antrim was “a scrawny little fellow with delicate hands and an artistic nature…always quite willing to help with the chores around the school-house. He was no more of a problem than any other boy growing up in a mining camp.”10
In 1937, Augusta Levy Abraham, wife of Louis Abraham, shared more memories of those school days as told to her by her husband. “I didn’t know Billie [sic] the Kid, but my husband went to school with him. The boys and girls that knew him never thought of him as a criminal, but a boy that was full of fun and mischief. He like all boys liked to put a snake on the teacher’s desk or chase a girl with a mouse, and the other hundreds of things that fun loving mischief boys like to do. His eyes were always dancing and full of mischievous fun.”11
Henry’s eyes left an impression on other folks as well. “His eyes were full of fun,” remembered Silver City resident Dick Clark. “He was generous and kind to everyone until someone did him dirt then he would seek revenge, which was his beginning on the road to crime.”12
Sheriff Harvey Whitehill had a different opinion about Henry Antrim’s eyes. Whitehill thought the young man’s eyes may have danced but that only meant they were shifty and indicated Henry had larceny in his heart. “There was one peculiar facial characteristic that to an experienced manhunter, would have marked him immediately as a bad man and that was his dancing eyes,” Whitehill told a reporter in 1902. “They never were at rest but continually shifted and roved, much like his own rebellious nature.”13
Whitehill, whose children ran with Henry, was not yet an established manhunter when he first became acquainted with the Antrim family. He had served as the county coroner until 1874, when Sheriff Charles McIntosh suddenly vanished. It turned out that McIntosh, recovering from wounds received in the line of duty and weary of low pay, absconded with three thousand dollars in county funds and took out for Mexico. In April 1875 the voters gave the job to Whitehill.14
By then William Antrim had decided his obligations as stepfather were coming to an end. It was high time for Joseph and Henry to make their own way in the world. After the brief stint living with the Hudsons following Catherine’s death, the boys joined Antrim as boarders in the home of Richard and Sara Knight. Henry worked part-time at Knight’s butcher shop, as did William Antrim when he was not off somewhere prospecting.
By the end of 1874 the brothers were split up. Joseph Antrim moved in with Joe Dyer and his family and earned his keep by working at Dyer’s infamous Orleans Club. Under Dyer’s tutelage Joseph learned all about gambling, taking bets, running numbers, and serving hard liquor to thirsty men.
“We used to have a pretty good sized Chinatown in Silver City and there were several opium dens running then,” recalled Olive Whitehill, daughter of the sheriff. “Wayne [Olive’s brother] said he and some other boys used to go there and peek through the cracks in the windows and doors to see who was smoking opium. Wayne told me that they saw Billy the Kid’s brother, Joe, down there smoking opium, along with the Chinamen. At least I never heard tell of Billy doing that.”15
Gerald and Clara Truesdell, pillars of the community and the parents of Chauncey, took in Henry. Clara had established a millinery shop on Hudson Street in late 1874, and a few months later her husband purchased and renovated the Star Hotel, which he renamed the Exchange.16 “When Henry was living with us after his mother died, he earned his room and board by waiting on tables and helping with the dishes,” said Chauncey Truesdell. “After he was gone, my father said Henry was the only kid who ever worked there who never stole anything. Other fellows used to steal the silverware. No, I don’t know if it was real silver but they stole it because that kind of stuff was scarce in camp in those days.”17
When he was not working at the hotel or going to school, Henry spent most of his time with his fellow village arabs. By now the boys’ favorite diversion was tormenting Charlie Sun, a Chinese immigrant who had come to Silver City from Albuquerque and opened a hand laundry on Bullard Street. Sun’s presence so threatened Nellie Johnson, a town laundress, that she placed an advertisement in Mining Life that warned, “Boys, that Chinaman can’t do as well for you as I can. Bring your washing to Texas Street.”18
Charlie Sun did not necessarily endear himself to the white citizens already prone to racial prejudice when it came to the growing number of Chinese moving into Silver City and other mining towns throughout the West. According to Wayne Whitehill, when Sun’s Mexican wife became pregnant, “he was around celebrating around the saloon, treatin’ everybody on account of this baby. And when that baby was born it was a nigger. And so he had an old sow out in the backyard and he took that baby and threw it in there and the sow killed it. No, there wasn’t anything done about it.”19
Even after Sam Chung, who, like Charlie Sun, did not subscribe to all the traditions of ancient Chinese culture such as wearing the distinctive pigtail, became a partner in the laundry, most white citizens still had little respect for the Chinese. “In fact,” writes Frederick Nolan, “the residents of Silver City looked on their presence and their opium dens in Hop Town with undisguised disfavor. It didn’t take the ‘arabs’ long to learn that nobody cared what pranks got played on the Asians.”20
In interviews Wayne Whitehill later granted, he recounted tales of the local boys bullying the Chinese after unnamed adults “gave us orders to chase all the Chinamen out of town, they didn’t want Chinamen there.”21 From then on the boys openly mocked the singsong cadence of the Chinese laundrymen’s speech and even pelted them with rocks. Wayne recalled that one boy threw a rock that found its mark, and as a result, “this Chinamen was floppin’ around like a chicken with his head cut off…. We all took to our heels. God, I was home in no time under the bed…. We knew damn well that Chinamen was killed all right. Well, there was never a thing said about it at all.”22 According to Wayne, among the boys present when the man was stoned to death was Henry Antrim.
The stoning death described by Wayne Whitehill remains in doubt since no record of it has ever been found, at least from the time Henry Antrim was part of the village arabs, 1873 to 1875. If such a crime did take place, it must have been several years later, when Henry was long gone from Silver City. Still, many journalists and dime novelists who heard the story, eager to ascribe as many savage murders as possible to the young man, actually attributed the brutal slaying to Henry as a lone operative. Some claimed he killed the man with a rock; others said that he used a knife to cut the man’s throat.
Over the years more exaggerated stories and outright lies about other crimes and killings supposedly carried out by young Henry also surfaced. One tall tale that made the rounds claimed Henry used a jackknife given to him as a gift by his stepfather to behead a neighbor’s kitten.23 Another falsehood popped up in Pat Garrett’s ghostwritten book. It alleged that the first murder the young man committed was the stabbing death of a blacksmith in Silver City. Henry supposedly knifed the man, after he insulted Catherine Antrim and then later attacked Ed Moulton, a sawmill owner and friend of the Antrim family’s, who came to Catherine’s defense.24
“Billie [sic] the Kid never did kill anyone in Silver City,” Jim Blair, Moulton’s son-in-law, told a researcher in the late 1930s.25 “That story is all false. The story of him killing a man over Ed Moulton is positively not true. Mr. Moulton never would read an article about Billie [sic] because he would become angry for he said ‘They write so many lies about that boy, and I know the ones are false about his killings in Grant County.’”
Several of Henry Antrim’s boyhood friends backed up Moulton’s denial of Henry’s supposed revenge killing. They insisted on the record that he never killed anyone in the town. Wayne Whitehill branded such stories “poppycock,” and Louis Abraham and Chauncey Truesdell agreed. “The story about him killing a man here in Silver City is all foolishness,” said Anthony Connor, recalling the days Antrim and his stepsons boarded at the Knight home. “We were just boys together. I never remember him doing anything out of the way, any more than the rest of us. We had our chores to do, like washing the dishes and other duties about the house.” Connor believed that Henry’s problems with the law came from his choice of reading material. “Billy got to be quite a reader. He would scarcely have the dishes washed, until he would be sprawled out somewhere reading a book. It was the same down at the butcher shop, if he was helping around there. The first thing you know, he would be reading. Finally, he took to reading the Police Gazette and dime novels.”26 Given the vast number of boys and men who faithfully devoured the pulps and dime novels of that time and did not end up criminals, it is unlikely that reading such lurid stories was a major contributor to Henry Antrim’s youthful behavioral problems.
Antrim’s earliest biographers sought excuses for the youngster’s descent into the world of crime and placed much of the blame on his reading the Police Gazette and dime novels. A more likely factor, however, was Henry’s slight physique, which placed him in precarious situations with bigger and stronger boys.
Whatever caused Henry’s decent into a life of crime, he was fifteen years old when a transgression finally brought him to the attention of the law. Larceny of fresh butter from an unattended buckboard may not have been cold-blooded murder, but it was enough to earn the young man a stern scolding and a spanking from the sheriff himself. “I believe I was the first officer who ever arrested him,” remembered Harvey Whitehill twenty-seven years later. “The lad early developed a proclivity for breaking the eighth commandment. His first offense was the theft of several pounds of butter from a ranchman by the name of [Abel] Webb, living near Silver City, and which he disposed of to one of the local merchants. His guilt was easily established, but upon promise of good behavior, he was released.”27
Henry wasted no time in getting into more trouble. By July 1875, because of what have been described as domestic problems in the Truesdell home, Henry was forced to seek other lodging and moved into a boardinghouse maintained by Sarah Brown.28 With school out of session, Henry worked at various odd jobs and hung out with his “opium-smoking” brother, Joe, at the Orleans Club. This experience convinced Henry that gambling might be more profitable than peddling stolen butter.
Gambling was looked upon as a legitimate way to make a living in most frontier settlements. Silver City was no exception, where it was said folks gambled on everything from dogfights to the weather. Taking a cue from his brother and stepfather, Billy became a diligent cardplayer. At the Orleans Club and the other saloons around town the youngster soon realized that his youthful appearance made older men think of him as an easy mark as he dealt monte and poker.
Meanwhile Henry had mistakenly placed his trust in a rascal named George Schaefer, a young stonemason and fellow boarder at Mrs. Brown’s. Nicknamed Sombrero Jack because of his love of the distinctive Mexican headwear, Schaefer had a penchant for strong drink and property theft.29 He was not the ideal companion for a youngster susceptible to recklessness like Henry Antrim. “Every Saturday night, George would get drunk,” said Sheriff Whitehill. “But he thought a lot of Billy and Billy used to follow him around. The fellow George liked to steal. He had a mania to steal and he was always stealing.”30
On Saturday, September 4, 1875, his usual night for binge drinking, Sombrero Jack broke into the residence of Charlie Sun, the Chinese laundry operator often besieged by the village arabs. He made off with a pair of revolvers and a large bundle of blankets and clothing that belonged to several customers. The total worth of the loot came to between $150 and $200.31 The thief stashed the booty in a pit at Crawford’s Mill in nearby Georgetown and offered Henry a share if he would smuggle the bundle back to Silver City. Henry jumped at the chance to get some fresh clothing and accepted.
Some days later, when cleaning his room, Mrs. Brown discovered the contraband stashed in a trunk. She hurried straight to Sheriff Whitehill and told him that Henry was wearing stolen clothing and hiding more of the ill-gotten property at her boardinghouse. The sheriff, not knowing anything about Sombrero Jack’s role in the crime, collared Henry on September 23. By then the real culprit was long gone. Ironically, in his later years George Schaefer rehabilitated himself enough to become a justice of the peace in Georgetown.32
“I did all I could for the orphaned boy,” Whitehill later said of Henry Antrim. “After all, he was somebody’s son and a boy who didn’t need to go wrong.”33 Despite Whitehill’s sentiment, Henry was hauled before Justice of the Peace Isaac Givens, who listened to Whitehill’s recital of the known facts of the case. Even after learning that Sombrero Jack was the actual perpetrator of the burglary, both Givens and Whitehill could not ignore Henry’s involvement. To teach the delinquent a lesson, Henry was charged with larceny and ordered bound over to the county jail to await the next session of the grand jury.34
For the first time in his life Henry Antrim found himself incarcerated. The sheriff placed him in a cell in the new jailhouse, which was highly touted as the best prison in the area with the possible exception of the Fort Bayard guardhouse.35 The sheriff later admitted that he had not intended to keep Henry jailed too long, just long enough to give the youngster a jolt as well as a taste of life as an inmate. At home the sheriff faced what was described as a “storm of protest” from the rest of the Whitehill family for jailing Henry. Even the sheriff’s wife, Harriet, beseeched him to bring Henry home for a proper breakfast.36
“It [Henry’s crime] did not amount to anything, and Mr. Whitehill only wished to scare him,” said Anthony Connor. “I think he planned on releasing him after allowing him to think it over for a short time. He did not pay much attention to him. I believe the sheriff merely wanted to leave him there alone for awhile so that Billy [Henry] could realize what such acts could lead to.”37 Sheriff Whitehill did not get the opportunity to offer the youngster the hospitality of his family’s home. On September 25, after only two days in jail, Henry, as anxious as a whore in church, made his escape. Whitehill later described it:
One day the “Kid” complained to me that the jailer was treating him roughly and kept him in solitary confinement in his cell without any exercise. So I ordered that he be allowed to remain in the corridor for a limited time each morning. He was only a boy, you must remember, scarcely over 15 years of age. Yet we made the mistake of leaving him alone in the corridor for a short half hour. When we returned and unlocked the heavy oaken [sic] doors of the jail, the “Kid” was nowhere to be seen. 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 hands had clawed into the thick layer of soot which lined the side 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. Then commenced his career of lawlessness in earnest.38
The next morning the story of Henry’s daring escape appeared in the Silver City Herald: “Henry McCarty, who was arrested on Thursday and committed to jail to await the action of the grand jury, upon charge of stealing clothes from Charley [sic] Sun and Sam Chung, celestials sans cue [queue], sans joss sticks, escaped from prison yesterday through the chimney. It is believed that Henry was simply the tool of ‘Sombrero Jack,’ who done the stealing whilst Henry done the hiding. Jack has skinned out.”39 It was the first story ever published about Henry (McCarty) Antrim. It was far from being the last.
Like his criminal mentor Sombrero Jack, Henry had dodged the consequences. He was now a fugitive running from the law, or in the lingo of that time and place, he was “among the willows, on the dodge, gone on the scout.”40 Henry had danced well over that thin line separating the lawful and lawless, and he never quite found his way back to the other side.