Cahill was not killed on the [military] reservation. His murderer, Antrim alias Kid, was allowed to escape and I believe is still at large.1
—MAJOR CHARLES COMPTON, AUGUST 23, 1877
RIDING THE SPEEDY Cashaw, Kid Antrim made few stops that August night after leaving Windy Cahill gut-shot and dying. His new store-bought duds soaked with sweat, the fugitive rode long and hard through high desert country that had been refreshed from seasonal monsoons. He dared rein in the panting pony only when they were many miles from the scene of the crime. About a week after the fatal shooting of Cahill, a mounted traveler leading Cashaw, minus saddle and bridle, showed up at McDowell’s store. The stranger explained that the Kid had asked him to return the horse to its owner, John Murphey.2
By then Henry Antrim was out of Arizona Territory. He had crossed the border back into New Mexico Territory by hedge hopping, the unorthodox practice of “borrowing” a horse, riding it a short ways, releasing it to return to its owner, then riding off on a freshly acquired steed. Gone on the scout once again, Henry made his way to familiar ground where he would feel safe. He showed up at the foot of the thorny Burro Mountains, southwest of Silver City just at the edge of the desert, where there was a ranch and a stage operated by his old friends Richard and Sara Connor Knight.3 Henry’s boyhood pal and Sara’s little brother Anthony Connor, also was there at the time, delivering mail on horseback to small settlements and camps in the area. “He told folks what he had done,” recalled Anthony. “He remained there about two weeks, but fearing that officers from Arizona might show up any time he left.”4 The Knights gave Henry plenty of food and some of Anthony’s clothing to replace what he had worn since the night of the Cahill shooting. When Sara told Henry to pick any horse he wanted from the ranch corral, he supposedly choose the “scrubbiest” of the lot and rode off.5
In some ways Henry may have resembled the countless other rootless young men known as Kid who populated the western frontier at that time. Author J. Cabell Brown’s depiction of the young ruffians given the generic name Kid comes close to describing at least a few of Kid Antrim’s physical attributes:
The genus “Kid” wore his hair long, and in curls upon his shoulder in cow-boy or scout fashion; had an incipient moustache, and sported a costume made of buckskin ornamented with fringe, tassels, and strings of the same material—the dirtier the better. His head was covered with a cow-boy’s hat of phenomenal width of brim, having many metal stars, half moons, etc., around the crown. Upon his feet he wore either moccasins or very high heeled, stub toed boots, and an enormous pair of spurs, with little steel balls that jingled at each step. Buckled around his waist would be a cartridge belt holding two carefully sighted revolvers, and a bone handled bowie knife in his boot leg, completed his dress. He was the proud owner of a “cayuse” horse and Mexican saddle, a bridle with reins of plaited hair, and a “riata”[lariat] tied behind the saddle. The “cayuse” was never far from his master, for when that gentleman wanted a horse he wanted him badly; either to escape from a worst man than himself, or to escape the consequences of having killed one.6
In those waning days of August 1877 Henry Antrim had no time to ponder the consequences of fleeing Arizona as a wanted killer. Many people through the years have wondered what would have happened if he had stayed and not run away. Maybe he would have been able to clear himself with a self-defense plea, though an uneducated young man like Henry might not have been a credible witness. Then, again, he might have ended up hanged by either a court of law or vigilantes. Like so many other questions in his life, this one remains unanswered. The reality was that Henry was no longer just a horse thief but had turned man-killer.
Henry did not know that a new code of behavior governing the ideology of violence and honor had become acceptable in parts of the nation, especially the American West. The code included the new doctrine of no duty to retreat, a clear departure from the tradition of medieval British common law that required a person under threat to retreat until his back was to the wall before using deadly force.7
In 1876 an Ohio court held that a “true man” if attacked was “not obligated to fly.” The following year the Indiana Supreme Court, upholding the legality of no duty to retreat, stated: “The tendency of the American mind seems to be very strongly against the enforcement of any rule which requires a person to flee when assailed.”8
Soon this code of behavior to settle disputes became known as the Code of the West across the cattle ranges of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and beyond. This was not the saccharine unwritten commandments governing behavior and ethics contrived by those who romanticized the West. That simplistic code, chronicled by Zane Grey, the popular pulp writer of melodramatic and improbable Old West tales, stressed self-reliance, accountability, and integrity while it celebrated the frontier values of the people. Instead, the Code of the West dictated that a man did not have to back away from a fight. It also meant a man could not only fight but also pursue an adversary until the threat was over, even if that resulted in death. “Stand your ground” was a popular battle cry for many years.
“Central to the Code of the West were the doctrine of no duty to retreat, the imperative of personal self-redress, and an ultrahigh value on courage, which often became, in the phrase of one historian, ‘reckless bravado’—a bravado that, however, was praised for its courage and not derided for its recklessness,” writes Richard Maxwell Brown, a historian who suggests America’s high homicide rates could be traced back to this concept.9
In the Cahill shooting, the Kid had stood his ground, even if he ended up lying on his back with his opponent on top of him. However, not only did he choose to make an escape, but he broke another important rule when he shot an unarmed man even if he did not shoot him in the back. Still, given Cahill’s brute strength superiority, perhaps Gus Gildea’s argument in Henry’s defense that Kid Antrim had no choice but “to use his ‘equalizer’” might have worked.
Luckily for Henry, there were other distractions to keep law officers occupied besides pursuing a two-bit boy gun toter. On September 2, 1877, the tenacious Apache warrior Victorio and large numbers of his Chiricahua and Warm Spring followers had slipped away from the San Carlos Reservation, sparking three years of mayhem and violence in the territories. Besides army patrols riding from camps and forts, law officers, such as Sheriff Harvey Whitehill from Silver City, formed civilian posses to search the mountains for Apaches.
Beyond the constant Apache threat, lawmen, themselves bound by masculine honor, faced other dangers. There were growing numbers of people from all levels of society ready and willing to use violence, including those who justified their acts as defending their properties and persons.
In the late nineteenth century, violence between a broad range of interest groups and factions was rampant across the nation. Cattlemen and farmers throughout the frontier fought over land and water. In some instances, local militias and even federal troops took sides in these wars, usually assisting the most powerful land and cattle barons. Much of the violence could be attributed to cultural feuds and outright racism. Self-appointed vigilantes attacked Indians for no reason other than that they were Indians. There also were frequent acts of terror against blacks and Hispanics.10
Debate has long raged about just how violent life on the American frontier really was in the decades immediately following the Civil War. Some historians have always maintained that much of the violence associated with the so-called Wild West was exaggerated, the stuff of legends. They contend this is especially true when it comes to the actual number of deaths attributable to guns, and they point to statistical data to back up their claims. Other historians challenge this argument with statistics of their own. They insist that the violent nature of the frontier was not only encouraged but also widespread. Sheriffs and outlaws often were made over into heroes as an essential part of American mythologizing.
“The world of the Wild West is an odd world, internally consistent in its own cockeyed way, and complete with a history, an ethic, a language, wars, a geography, a code, and a costume,” writes Peter Lyon.11 “The history is compounded of lies, the ethic was based on evil, the language was composed largely of argot and cant, the wars were fought by gangs of greedy gunmen, the geography was elastic, and the code and costume were both designed to accommodate violence. Yet this sinful world is, by any test, the most popular ever to be described to an American audience.”
The Wild West that Lyon writes of was already a way of life when Henry was a lad in Kansas. In Wichita and the other cattle towns he and his family witnessed the ongoing struggle between those who wished to settle and civilize the West and those who wanted nothing to change. It was the phenomenon that came to be called the Western Civil War of Incorporation by some twentieth-century historians.12 And at the forefront of this struggle were the gun sharks, man-killers, and shootists scattered throughout the West. They were the shock troops.
On one side of the battle were the corporate gunmen employed by big business, cattle barons, and mining syndicates and cheered on by merchants who wanted law and order. These hired guns, such as “Wild Bill” Hickok and Wyatt Earp and his brothers, were usually Republicans, ex-Union soldiers, or from northern states. On the other side were those who opposed corporate encroachment on their lands and vehemently fought against the incorporation of the West. They had the support of gamblers, saloon owners, and prostitutes concerned about earning a living. The populist gunslingers this faction hired were mostly Democrats, and many of them hailed from Texas. They included a large number of unreconstructed Confederates akin to the Missouri outlaws Jesse and Frank James.13 This is not to say that the gunmen protecting corporate or establishment interests wished to do away with brothels and gambling dens. They simply wanted to control and regulate them.
Was Kid Antrim aware of these factions? He was educated to a degree, and he had been subjected to situations in which big business was ruling the land in Arizona Territory for example. He had seen the other side as well, the libertarians of the day who resented any organization or incorporation. At this point it is safe to say that he aligned himself with those that opposed organization.
“The cattle towns were run by a business elite, since the towns formed a nexus between large-capital investments in herds and in the government-supported railroads,” writes Garry Wills. “They needed a controlled climate in which gambling and prostitution were regulated (secretly taxed but protected, to keep the cowboys coming up from Texas) while safety was guaranteed (to keep buyers and agents in town for the large cash or banking transactions involved in shipping such huge amounts of property).”14
Besides the cattle and mining boomtowns, other major theaters of war for these glorified gunfighters were the immense cattle ranges, especially those in Arizona and New Mexico Territories. This was precisely the dangerous and volatile land where Henry Antrim found himself in the autumn of 1877. It was also where he spent the rest of his days.
According to the best available evidence, having departed Knight’s ranch and stage stop, Kid Antrim next showed up at Apache Tejo (often misspelled as Tejoe), a settlement and watering stop on the ruins of old Fort McLane, yet another abandoned army post south of Silver City.15 The hot springs where Catherine Antrim had tried to regain her health shortly before her death were not too far from this site. Apache Tejo also had been infamous among the Apaches since the years when it was an army fort. It was there that U.S. soldiers had murdered the revered chief Mangus Colorado in 1863 when he was brought to what he was told would be a peace parley. After being shot down, he was scalped by a soldier wielding the camp cook’s bowie knife. Later an army surgeon exhumed the corpse, severed the slain leader’s head, and shipped it to Washington, D.C., for display in the Smithsonian Institution.16
At Apache Tejo Henry would have had no worries of being deceived like the old Indian warrior. The soldiers were long gone, and the closest law officer was Sheriff Whitehill in Silver City. Most folks who passed through only wanted grub and water and asked no questions, especially of an apparently rootless boy who did not appear to pose any real threat.
Still, the short time he was at Apache Tejo proved eventful for Henry. For while he was there, he likely took up with a bunch of hard-riding thieves and rustlers who were part of an outlaw network with tentacles throughout the territories of Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of northern Mexico. Made up of ex-soldiers, rogue cowboys, and pistoleros, the brazen band stole horses and cattle and whatever else it wanted and killed anyone who dared get in its way. They were best known as the Boys, and in a heartbeat Kid Antrim became one of them.17