…he shot me in the belly.1 •
—DYING WORDS OF FRANCIS (FRANK) P. “WINDY” CAHILL, AUGUST 18, 1877
IN ARIZONA TERRITORY, and throughout the West, no crime posed a greater risk than horse stealing. Those who depended on trusty mounts for their livelihood knew that the loss of a good horse could be devastating. Vigilante groups formed in some areas just to deal with the problem. A horse thief was an abomination, and anyone caught in the act or even suspected of such activity might end up “decorating a cottonwood,” a popular expression for hanging. Sometimes it was easier to get away with cold-blooded murder than to make off with another man’s horse.
Many people believed that citizen justice without due process of law was warranted because of inadequate courts, corrupt law officers and judges, lack of suitable jails, and the frontier’s geographical remoteness. The summary punishment of culprits or suspects by hanging without a proper court trial gained currency throughout the American West. This practice became known as lynch law, a term dating back, in fact, to the American Revolution.2
It is worth observing that some late-nineteenth-century historians surreptitiously condoned or even whitewashed vigilantism through their criticisms of the formal justice system. “Courts of law are in bad repute these days,” wrote the publisher and historian Hubert Howe Bancroft.3 “Venality and corruption sit upon the bench in the form of dueling, drinking, fist fighting, and licentious judges. Where the people look for justice, they find too often jokes and jeers. It is not uncommon to see a judge appear upon the bench in a state of intoxication, and make no scruple to attack with fist, cane, or revolver any who offend him.”
The threat of being the guest of honor at a lynching bee, as some called an illegal hanging, did not deter the individuals and gangs stealing livestock and horses. Several famous Old West figures, in fact, were said to have been horse thieves at one time or another. They included Belle Starr, John Wesley Hardin, and Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, who earned his nickname, Sundance Kid, when jailed for horse theft in Sundance, Wyoming. His partner at crime, Robert Leroy Parker, better known as Butch Cassidy, also served time in a Wyoming prison for stealing a horse. In 1871 even the vastly mythologized Wyatt Earp was indicted in Van Buren, Arkansas, for stealing two horses in nearby Indian Territory, just one of his dubious activities that were downplayed by countless admirers.4
While horse stealing was always a chancy business, Henry Antrim and his cohort John Mackie, like so many others, found it very profitable. The thought of easy money erased any memory Henry had of being a twelve-year-old in Kansas and hearing of a vigilante gang’s shooting and hanging eight horse thieves not far from where his family lived. For Mackie and Kid Antrim the gain from stealing horses and saddles outweighed all the risks.
“Soldiers would come from Fort Grant and visit the saloons and dance halls here,” explained Miles Wood, owner of the Hotel de Luna and Henry’s former employer. “Billy [Henry] and his chum Mackie would steal the saddles and saddle blankets from the horses and occasionally they would take the horses and hide them out until they got a chance to dispose of them.”5
By late 1876 the clientele at the hog ranch and surrounding establishments had grown weary of finding themselves horseless. Many years later Miles Wood remembered the day a lieutenant and a doctor from Camp Grant were outsmarted by the pair of brazen thieves. “They [the army officers] said they would fix it so no one would steal their horses,” said Wood. “They had long picket ropes on the horses and when they went into the bar carried the end of the ropes with them. Macky [sic] followed the officers into the saloon and talked to them while Billy cut the ropes from the horses and run off, leaving the officers holding the pieces of rope.”6
When he learned of the latest escapade, Major Charles E. Compton, commanding officer at Camp Grant, made the hog ranch off-limits to all troopers. Compton then ordered the post quartermaster, Captain Gilbert C. Smith, to swear out a formal compliant against Mackie and Henry before Justice of the Peace Wood at the Hotel de Luna. Three times Wood sent out an elderly constable to arrest the thieves, and each time he returned to the hotel claiming he could not locate the pair, causing Wood to remark, “I knew he did not want to find them.”7
Despite their commander’s order that all soldiers keep away from the hog ranch and environs, some men yielded to temptation. On November 17, First Sergeant Louis C. Hartman, Company G, Sixth Cavalry, tied up his horse near McDowell’s store. When Hartman came out, he found his horse gone, along with the army-issue saddle, blanket, and bridle. Within days of reporting the loss to Major Compton, the embarrassed Hartman and four other enlisted men were ordered to scour the territory “in pursuit of horse thieves.”8 One of the other posse members was Private Charles Smith, the soldier who had had his mount stolen by Kid Antrim the previous March.
By talking to ranchers, herdsmen, and Indians along the way, Sergeant Hartman and the four privates followed the tracks of his stolen horse through the Aravaipa Valley and into the mountainous country surrounding the fast-developing mining boomtown of Globe City on Pinal Creek. On November 25, the soldiers caught up with Kid Antrim riding the stolen horse along the trail to McMillen’s Camp, an illegal mining settlement that had sprung up just inside the San Carlos Apache Reservation. It is believed that at the time William Antrim was residing in one of the miners’ tents at McMillen’s Camp and that Henry was on his way there to see his estranged stepfather.9
Brandishing guns but lacking an arrest warrant, the soldiers simply ordered Henry to dismount, took the reins of the stolen horse, and rode off on their five-day return journey to Camp Grant. Undoubtedly grateful that he was not shot, lynched, or physically harmed, Henry nevertheless was afoot, a not insignificant situation when one was all alone in Apache country.
Eventually he made his way to Globe City. Founded in 1876, the town supposedly got its name (changed to just Globe in 1878) from the discovery of a large spherical-shaped nugget of almost pure silver that resembled the planet Earth.10 Because of rich silver and copper strikes in the nearby Pinal Mountains, Globe City was growing rapidly when Henry arrived. He made the rounds of at least a dozen saloons crowded with prospectors and miners itching to part with their money in games of chance.
In Globe City, Henry was reunited with Mackie and other fellow horse thieves. This meant that whenever Henry tired of dealing monte and playing poker and faro, he could always earn some illicit funds by filching horses. In fact, late on the night of February 10, 1877, Kid Antrim, as Henry now was generally called, and Mackie stole three horses from Cottonwood Spring, a rest stop known for its cool, sweet water. Again the horses they made off with belonged to soldiers. These were from Company F stationed at Camp Thomas, established in 1876 on the Gila River.11
This time the army definitely had had enough. On February 16, officers from both Camp Thomas and Camp Grant confronted Miles Wood at the Hotel de Luna, where he held civilian court, and lambasted him for not corralling the horse thieves. On the basis of Sergeant Hartman’s complaint the previous November, an arrest warrant was sworn out charging “Henry Antrim alias Kid” with horse theft.12
Aware that Henry had been last known to be in the Globe area, Wood provided authorities there with a copy of the warrant and some hand-drawn wanted posters. “I sent the warrant to a constable in Globe but the Kid had slipped away from him,” Wood recounted. “The next day the constable arrested him and brought him down as far as Cedar Springs, when he got away again.”13
The same month William Antrim, perhaps embarrassed by his stepson’s antics, beat a hasty retreat from McMillen’s Camp and returned to Silver City. “Mr. Antrim has returned from Pinal,” concisely reported the Grant County Herald of February 24, 1877.14
After his two narrow escapes from the law, Henry decided to lower his profile and perhaps make a peace offering by returning five stolen army horses to Camp Thomas. For some reason Henry and Mackie must have felt the heat was off them, for they soon appeared at their old stamping grounds around McDowell’s store south of Camp Grant. They were totally unaware that hotelier/Justice of the Peace Miles Wood still held arrest warrants for them.
“The next morning, I saw two men coming in to breakfast so I told the waiter I would wait on them myself,” recalled Wood about the morning of March 25, when he spied Henry and Mackie approaching the Hotel de Luna. “I had the breakfast for the two placed on a large platter and I carried it in to them. I shoved the platter on the table in front of them and pulled a sixgun [sic] from under it and told them to put their hands up and go straight out the door.”15
Wood called for help from Caleb Martin, the hotel cook, and together they marched Henry and Mackie at gunpoint the two and three-quarter miles up the road to Camp Grant, where the sergeant of the guard locked up both culprits.16 With Henry and Mackie safely confined to the guardhouse, Wood proceeded to the post hospital, where he was conducting an inquest into the killing of James W. Lockhart, one of cattleman John Chisum’s cowhands, who had been shot out of his saddle during a drunken melee with some Sixth Cavalry soldiers.17 His business completed, Wood returned to his hotel.
Meanwhile, Henry, emboldened by his former successful flight up a chimney, wasted no time in trying to escape. When he was being escorted to the privy, Henry somehow got hold of some salt, threw a handful into the guard’s eyes, and made a break. He dashed toward Bonito Creek, but some soldiers, responding to cries for help, quickly ran him down and dragged him back to the guardhouse.18
This time, when he was summoned back to the post, Wood had blacksmith Francis Cahill rivet shackles on Kid Antrim’s ankles and wrists. However, even iron restraints could not stop the lithe Henry from breaking free, as Wood learned just hours later, when he and his new bride attended a reception at the home of Major Compton.19
That evening, while officers and their wives danced to the regimental band in Compton’s quarters, Mackie helped his young pal scale the guardhouse wall. Like John Nevil Maskelyne, the famous conjurer of the time, Henry squeezed his small frame through the ventilator and dropped to the ground. From there he skulked through the shadows away from the camp, past the Hotel de Luna, to Atkins’s cantina, where bartender Tom Varley forced open the shackles. In the meantime, the sergeant of the guard learned of the escape and raced to the Compton reception with the news.20
Wood wasn’t surprised by the news. As he later put it, “[Henry] was a small fellow not weighing over ninety pounds and it was almost an impossibility to keep him imprisoned or handcuffed.”21 On the scout once again, Kid Antrim procured a mount and headed toward the country near Camp Thomas. There he blended into the Arizona Territory cultural fabric and found work at a hay camp run by army contractor H. F. “Sorghum” Smith. “[Henry] said he was seventeen, though he didn’t look to be fourteen,” recalled Smith long after he hired the youngster. “I gave him a job helping around the camp.”22
What Henry really wanted was another grubstake to finance his further adventures. According to Smith, “He hadn’t worked very long until he wanted his money. I asked him if he was going to quit. He said, ‘No, I want to buy some things.’ I asked him how much he wanted and tried to get him to take $10 for I thought that was enough for him to spend, but he hesitated and asked for $40. I gave it to him. He went down to the post trader and bought himself a whole outfit: six-shooter, belt, scabbard, and cartridges.”23
Given the hefty pay advance he received, Henry likely worked at Smith’s hay camp through the first cutting and into the summer of 1877. Perhaps believing that for some unknown reason his transgressions would be forgotten and aware that he was fast becoming something of a local hero because of his daring escapes, Henry started showing up yet again with seeming impunity around Camp Grant.
His final appearance came on August 17, 1877, a Friday night, a so-called howling and prowling time at George Atkins’s cantina. A description of what transpired came from Augustus M. Gildea. A tough Texan, who started working cows at the age of twelve, Gus Gildea also had ridden with the Ku Klux Klan and was a foreman for John Chisum’s outfit.24 By some accounts, Gildea, at that time drawing wages from cattle baron Henry Hooker, was one of the patrons taking it all in that night. Others said that Gildea showed up the following day.
Kid Antrim “came to town, dressed like a ‘country jake’ with ‘store pants’ on and shoes instead of boots,” was how Gildea remembered it. “He wore a six-gun stuffed in his trousers.”25 At Atkins’s cantina, Henry, whose appearance alone was a brazen act, joined a poker game in progress and settled in for the night. Before too long trouble started when Henry and Frank Cahill started exchanging words. The two men were hardly strangers. Cahill was the blacksmith who helped put Henry in shackles earlier that year at Camp Grant.
A survivor of the Irish famine, Francis P. Cahill had enlisted in the army at New York in 1868, when he was twenty-two. He served most of his three-year hitch in Arizona at Camp Crittenden, working as a horseshoer. After his discharge as a private in 1871, Cahill continued as a civilian blacksmith for the army at the old Camp Grant and later at the new camp when it was established below Mount Graham.26
Prone to telling tall tales, or “windies,” Cahill answered to the sobriquet Windy since, as Gildea explained, “he was always blowin’ about first one thing then another.” Henry had had difficulties with Cahill long before the blacksmith bully secured him in shackles. “Shortly after the Kid came to Fort Grant, Windy started abusing him,” said Gildea. “He would throw Billy to the floor, ruffle his hair, slap his face and humiliate him before the men in the saloon. Yes, the Kid was rather slender…. The blacksmith was a large man, with a gruff voice and blusteringmanner.”27
If Cahill’s army records are accurate, he was just five feet four and three-quarter inches tall.28 Descriptions of him as a large man may have been references to his powerful torso and girth, hardly to his stature. No matter his size, Cahill was a hothead who did not fear altercations. Indeed, it was on that hot August night in the cantina that all of the physical and verbal abuse Cahill handed out finally pushed Henry to the brink. The argument became heated and then exploded into violence when Cahill called Kid Antrim a pimp and the Kid responded by calling the muscular smithy a son of a bitch. Cahill rushed at Henry and locked his arms around him. The pair wrestled their way out the cantina door and toward a cattle chute.
Miles Wood, one of the many onlookers who spilled outside to watch the fight, later said that “Cahill was larger and stouter than the Kid and threw him down three times which made the Kid mad.”29 In his account of the fight, Gus Gildea said that Cahill “pinned [Henry’s] arms down with his knees and started slapping his face. ‘You are hurting me. Let me up!’ cried the Kid. ‘I want to hurt you. That’s why I got you down,’ was the reply.”30
At that moment Gildea and others in the crowd saw the Kid had freed his right arm. “He started working his hand around and finally managed to grasp his .45,” said Gildea. “The blacksmith evidently felt the pistol against his side, for he straightened slightly. Then there was a deafening roar. Windy slumped to the side as the Kid squirmed free.”31 Before the smoke cleared, Henry jumped to his feet and ran. He dashed to a hitching post and mounted a fleet pony owned by a local man, John Murphey. Named Cashaw, for a desert shrub akin to the mesquite, it was said to be the fastest horse in the valley. In a flash Kid Antrim vanished into the moonlit night.32
Since there was no civilian doctor available, Cahill was taken by wagon to the post hospital just up the road at Camp Grant. Gravely wounded, he was made as comfortable as possible under the care of assistant surgeon Frederick Crayton Ainsworth. In the army since 1874, Ainsworth was a capable officer and physician who much later, in 1904, became a major general and adjutant general of the U.S. Army.33 However, even a highly skilled doctor could do little to repair the damage Cahill had sustained that night. The slug from the Kid’s gun had torn through vital organs, and it was difficult to stem the internal hemorrhaging. Being gut-shot at such close range not only was horrifically painful but usually guaranteed a slow and agonizing death.
By early morning the next day, August 18, Ainsworth knew that Cahill was going quickly. Justice of the Peace/Notary Public Miles Wood was summoned to the post hospital to scribble down a deathbed statement:
I, Frank Cahill, being convinced that I am about to die, do make the following as my final statement. My name is Frank P. Cahill. I was born in the county and town of Galway, Ireland; yesterday, Aug. 17th, 1877, I had some trouble with Henry Antrem [sic], otherwise known as Kid, during which he shot me. I had called him a pimp and he called me a son of a bitch; we then took hold of each other; I did not hit him, I think; saw him go for his pistol and tried to get hold of it, but could not and he shot me in the belly; I have a sister named Margaret Flannigan living at East Cambridge, Mass., and another named Kate Conden, living in San Francisco.34
Soon after dictating this statement, the blacksmith Windy Cahill died. The following day he was laid to rest in the dusty camp cemetery.35
By then Wood had already convened a coroner’s inquest at the Hotel de Luna. The six citizens on the panel were Milton McDowell, Bennett Norton, T. McCleary, James L. “Dobie” Hunt, Delos H. Smith, and George Teague. Their verdict did not take long to reach: “The shooting was criminal and unjustifiable, and Henry Antrim, alias Kid, is guilty thereof.”36
Not everyone who knew Cahill and Henry agreed with the verdict. They thought the Kid was wise to flee the scene, given the large number of Cahill’s friends, especially soldiers, who no doubt would have exacted revenge. Those who sided with Henry believed he had acted in self-defense and that the bully had had it coming. “He had no choice,” said Gildea of Kid Antrim. “He had to use his ‘equalizer.’”37
He had, and it would not be the last time.