New Mexico was sparsely populated in the 1870’s, but it is doubtful whether there has ever been another place in the United States where so many men were indicted for murder and so few convicted.1
—W. EUGENE HOLLON
ANY DIRECT TIE that Kid Antrim had with the outlaw band known as the Boys may not have lasted very long, yet such a connection certainly had a significant influence on the “career” that lay ahead of him. During the 1870s and early 1880s the Boys were a key link in a chain of thieves that was the equivalent of organized crime in the Southwest. During their rampage of terror these marauders accounted for an abundance of transgressions, including armed robbery, livestock rustling, and murder. Yet beyond a crash course in felony crime, the Kid’s passing association with the Boys also helped propel him further into the public eye, whether he liked it or not.
The mastermind behind the gang was John Kinney, a Massachusetts native and former cavalry sergeant who had joined the army in Chicago in 1867 and been mustered out in Nebraska in 1873. He chose not to stay in Nebraska but instead went south to New Mexico Territory and took up residence in Dona Ana County. Kinney’s ranch, just west of Mesilla on the Rio Grande, was known as the “headquarters and rendezvous for all the evildoers in the country.”2 There Kinney planned the forays and called the shots for the Boys, who brought him all the cattle and horses they could steal. Kinney sold the horses to other cattlemen. Hoteliers, army suppliers, and anyone else who did not ask questions or require a bill of sale purchased the slaughtered cattle.
Within months of Kid Antrim and the gang meeting, the Kinney men became hired guns in a conflict that kept Lincoln County in turmoil for several years. In a twist of fate, the Kid ended up on the opposing side in that conflict. Even more ironic, in 1881 Kinney was one of the deputies, albeit a corrupt one, who escorted the Kid from La Mesilla to the jail in Lincoln following his murder conviction.
Although Kinney was the head of the gang, there was no question that the man who rode as undisputed leader of the pack was Jesse Evans, a Missouri-bred cowboy turned man-killer, thief, and scruffy barroom brawler. Evans had come to New Mexico Territory in 1872 and, before going outlaw, worked as a hand for various ranchers, including the powerful John Chisum, the Texan who created a cattle empire in the Pecos River Valley.3 Chisum’s vast herds became one of the Boys’ favorite targets.
The Jesse Evans Gang, as some people called the Boys, fluctuated in size but at times numbered as many as thirty misfits and drifters. They were labeled Texas cowboys by one army officer who pursued them even though some were Hispanic or Indian.4 Among the more notorious gang members were Charles Ray, alias Pony Diehl, or Pony Deal, who later tangled with the Earp brothers in Arizona, and Bob Martin, a bold thief and ruthless killer, reputed to be one of the most wanted bandits in northern Mexico. Frank Baker acted as Evans’s right hand man and helped him boss such other hard cases as George “Buffalo Bill” Spawn, Jim McDaniels, Bill Allen, Nicholas Provencio, Dolly Graham, Tom Hill, Serafin Aragón, William “Buck” Morton, Manuel “Indian” Segovia, Dick Lloyd, Roscoe Burrell, Ponciano Domingues, and others known only by a surname or an alias.5
Now that he was on the scout once more, Kid Antrim found hooking up with this wild tribe appealing since they offered employment of a sort and appeared to be impervious to the law. For his part, the young man would have made a promising recruit for the gang. When he fled New Mexico Territory as a petty thief, he was a fifteen-year-old boy, but during the time he spent in Arizona the Kid had come of age. Reputation on the outlaw level traveled fast, and the fact that the Kid had killed a man in Arizona Territory was a mark in his favor. In only two years before returning to New Mexico Territory, the Kid had picked up enough survival skills and frontier savvy to make him a competent stock thief. His association with hardbitten cowboys and rustlers in Arizona Territory initiated him in a lawless culture that stressed that every man must ride and shoot well and above all abide by the Code of the West.6
Kid Antrim could hold his own. Windy Cahill, moldering in an Arizona grave, was not the last man to learn that young Antrim was more than willing to stand his ground, especially when his temper was aroused. Despite some reports that he was a scrawny runt, firsthand accounts from the Kid’s associates generally agreed that he had a lean but muscular physique. Many described him as wiry. Others recalled him as being as lithe as a cat, especially on the dance floor.7 Full grown, he stood at least five feet seven inches tall and weighed about 135 pounds, meaning he was about the same height as many of his compañeros, such as Jesse Evans, who was just five feet five and three-fourths inches tall.8 The Kid had wavy brown hair, a light beard, clear blue eyes, and two slightly protruding front teeth. He kept himself as neat as possible and took to wearing an unadorned Mexican sombrero, in the style of his boyhood criminal mentor Sombrero Jack Schaefer.9
According to several of the Kid’s acquaintances, he was gregarious and affable with most folks he met, relished a good joke, and had plenty of charisma. His mind was agile, and unlike some of the crowd he ran with, he could read and write a decent hand. Although he shunned tobacco and seldom, if ever, drank spirits, he enjoyed the company of pals at a gambling table or saloon. The Kid also took pleasure in the festive music at lively bailes, where on the dance floor a flash of his fetching smile invariably charmed the women, especially the señoritas.10 Of course, it helped that he spoke Spanish as fluently as a native, a proficiency that served him well with Hispanics for the rest of his life.
This, then, was the Kid Antrim who took up with what was one of the most notorious gangs in New Mexico Territory and beyond. In September 1877, when the Boys, led by the bullet-scarred Evans, rode into Apache Tejo with a herd of horses and mules stolen from Lincoln County ranchers and Mescalero Apaches, it would have been an impressive sight to a promising teenage brigand watching from the shadows.
“He [Kid Antrim] got in with a band of rustlers at Apache Tejo in the part of the country where he was made a hardened character,” his boyhood friend Louis Abraham said in 1937.11 Abraham, by then an elderly man remembering bygone days, further stated there was no justification for his friend’s further descent into lawlessness. “Billie [sic] had no reason, only fear, for he hung around Apache Tejo quite a while, and Sheriff Whitehill could have gotten him if he wanted him punished for there was law and order in Silver City and even if sometimes the gun did speak too soon, the killer was tried.”
On October 1, 1877, Kid Antrim purportedly was one of nine foot soldiers riding with Evans when the Boys swooped down on the L. F. Pass coal camp in the Burro Mountains, only sixteen miles southwest of Silver City.12 The Kid knew this country well since it was near the Richard Knight ranch he often visited.
At the coal camp the gang promptly stole three horses and hastily departed. Two of the horse owners, Colonel A. G. Ledbetter, a customs inspector, and John Swisshelm, a rancher and one of the earliest prospectors in the area, decided to track the thieves but soon lost their trail on the road to Apache Tejo.13
The following day, however, C. A. Carpenter, of Silver City, encountered the outlaws with the stolen horses on the road, which snaked its way through Cooke’s Canyon, to Mesilla. Named for nearby Cooke’s Peak to the north, this rugged canyon had been the site of several Apache ambushes and was known as the Journey of Death by soldiers. As Carpenter passed near the gang, he was able to get a good look at some of the riders. He recognized the Kid as one of them, as area newspapers soon reported. One news item describing the horse theft at the coal camp read in part: “Sometime on Tuesday, the party of thieves, among whom was Henry Antrim, were met in Cook’s [sic] canon [sic] by Mr. Carpenter.”14
After passing Carpenter, the Boys continued on the road to Mesilla, acquiring more horses along the way. Seven miles east of old Fort Cummings, an abandoned army post and water hole near the mouth of Cooke’s Canyon, they halted a westbound stage and demanded money from the driver. The frightened man assured them that he carried no bullion and had nothing of great value other than his life. They reluctantly let him continue his journey, but not before Evans made him take a pull from a bottle with the gang.15
Stagecoaches were the preferred transportation of the land, carrying passengers, mail, and many times large deposits of money. In retrospect the stagecoach era is often depicted as romantic and exciting, but that was not the case. Road conditions were poor, and the coaches uncomfortable. As the going got rougher, passengers and mail were often hauled in Celerity wagons, also known as mud wagons. Boxlike with open sides, these wagons were lighter than the Concord stagecoaches and were designed for the worst road conditions and mountain routes. A real danger for stagecoach drivers and travelers was the threat of robbery by mounted bandits. This was especially true since stages regularly carried cash payrolls and bank transfers were regularly made by scheduled stage lines that operated far away from any telegraph service.
The stage driver near Cooke’s Canyon later told a newspaper reporter that when he was stopped, there were only nine men in the gang, including Evans, and that each one was armed with two revolvers and a Winchester rifle and carried two gun belts with cartridges. The news story went on to report that shortly after the stage incident the nine gang members took some potshots at rancher George Williams, “but as George promptly returned their fire, they left without unnecessary delay.”16
Within days, however, the gang’s numbers increased to at least twenty-six as other heavily armed members showed up with more stolen horses. This gave the Boys enough firepower to drive off easily an approaching six-man posse carrying only pistols. The steady barrage of gunshots forced the posse to seek refuge in a canyon and wait for reinforcements. Intent on delivering their herd of horses to one of the ranches that was a clearinghouse for stolen stock, the gang rode off and yelled a “shout of derision.”17
The Boys’ escapades throughout the autumn of 1877 did not go unnoticed. Nor did the series of their criminal acts go unreported, thanks to Albert Jennings Fountain, the editor of the Mesilla Valley Independent. Unafraid of retribution from the outlaw network, the plucky Fountain relentlessly pressured local authorities to arrest the outlaws. He also published story after story about the widespread crime spree and called for swift justice, even if that meant vigilante action. “This gang is constantly on the road, and it is time that the citizens turned out and strung them up,” wrote Fountain in one of his blistering editorials.18
As much as Fountain despised the lawless elements running rampant at the time, one day he would become an advocate for Kid Antrim and even represented him during a trial in which the Kid’s life was on the line. In the autumn of 1877, however, he and his future client had not met, and it is doubtful if the newspaper publisher knew who Henry Antrim was since the young outlaw’s name appeared only once in the Mesilla newspaper. Fountain was more concerned about exposing the leaders of the network of outlaw gangs. And expose them he did, much to the consternation of Jesse Evans and John Kinney.
Fountain’s courage came from the fact that he was a genuine maverick. Born in 1838 on Staten Island, New York, to a sea captain father and French Huguenot mother, Fountain traveled the world as a young soldier of fortune and had an exotic background, even for the Old West. He had been a prisoner in Canton, China, panned for gold in California, and in 1860 narrowly escaped execution in Nicaragua while reporting on the slave trade for a Sacramento newspaper. He managed to escape a firing squad only by disguising himself as a woman and slipping aboard a ship bound for San Francisco.19
Back in California, Fountain studied the law, and he had just been admitted to the bar when the Civil War broke out. He was commissioned a lieutenant in what became known as the California Column, under the command of General James H. Carleton. After marching into New Mexico Territory to regain control of the Rio Grande Valley from the Confederacy, Fountain and his troops fought in skirmishes against Cochise and his Apache warriors. Wounded in what was described as a “desperate encounter” with Apaches, Fountain decided to stay in the area after his mustering out.20
He married a young woman from a prominent Hispanic family and started a law practice in El Paso. Later he served a term in the Texas Senate as a crusading Republican. He held several other public offices and soon became a political force to be reckoned with. Fountain firmly believed that although the Civil War was over, any of the root causes of rebellion lingering among unreconstructed Confederates and southern sympathizers had to be eradicated. That became evident early in his career, when as a customhouse officer in El Paso Fountain examined the land titles of former Confederates and often confiscated their properties and sold them at auction.21
In 1873, when Texas Democrats regained control of both houses of the state legislature after having shaken off the rigors of Reconstruction and punishment for having been part of the Confederacy, Fountain, under constant attack and accused of being a carpetbagger, knew it was time for him to leave the Lone Star State. He served the rest of his term in the senate battling trumped-up charges leveled at him by Democrats and conservative Republicans. When his term ended, Fountain moved his family back to Mesilla, New Mexico Territory, where the Republican Party was in control.22
Fountain quickly earned a reputation as a skilled bilingual orator in the courtroom and often addressed the mostly Hispanic juries in Spanish. From 1876 to 1878 he served as probate judge and county court clerk and became the editor of the Mesilla Valley Independent, his short-lived bilingual newspaper.23 “Fountain knew nothing about the practical side of newspaper work, but he was fearless and at times wrote editorials with a pen dripping blue vitriol instead of ink,”24 writes William A. Keleher.
The crusading editor doggedly chronicled the escapades of Jesse Evans’s gang members, whom he branded the banditti, a name for rogues of any kind, especially outlaws who lived by plunder. “Banditti” appeared as a heading in one of Fountain’s October 1877 editorials that described the gang’s nefarious activities during the brief time that Kid Antrim rode with them.25
Fountain wrote of how the Boys crossed into Lincoln County, where they were able to obtain fresh horses and the “choicest viands” from the larders of ranchers friendly to their cause. He described their terrorizing Tularosa, where they drank all the liquor they could find and rode off after firing “a hundred or more shots promiscuously about the town as a parting salute.”26 From there the gang proceeded to the home of a man who had once testified against one of them. The frightened man pleaded for them to spare his wife’s and sick children’s lives, and the outlaws did, but only after shooting the man’s dog and riddling the house with bullets.
During their ride the Boys stopped at various roadhouses and trading posts for food and drink. Whenever the bills were presented, the gang smugly told the proprietors to “chalk it up” on credit. At one such stop, they spied a copy of the Independent containing one of Fountain’s denunciations of the banditti. Angered by what he read, Evans told the others that he would reward Fountain with “a free pass to hell.”27
On the afternoon of October 9, 1877, the Boys stopped for provisions at the trading post run by John Ryan near the Mescalero Apache Indian Agency. Ryan worked for J. J. Dolan & Co., a mercantile establishment in the town of Lincoln, the seat of Lincoln County.28 Formerly named L. G. Murphy & Co., the name had changed in April when Murphy severed his ties with the business. The two remaining partners, James J. Dolan and John H. Riley, took over the operation, which included the branch store at the Mescalero agency managed by Ryan.29
By that evening the gang had made its way to near the summit of the Sacramento Mountains and stopped to make camp beneath the pines. Fires were built for cooking and warmth, and Evans posted sentinels to guard against surprise visitors. Around eight o’clock a buggy appeared on the rocky trail, and one of the lookouts hooted like an owl to warn the others drinking back at camp.30 When the buggy drew closer, the sentry recognized the two men inside as John Riley, partner in the mercantile firm, and James Longwell, one of his employees. Both men were well known to the Boys, who put on a humorous show on horseback to welcome their guests’ arrival. Perhaps such antics even allowed Kid Antrim to recall his boyhood experiences onstage in Silver City.
“Riley and Longwell passed within a few feet of the guard, an American, who responded to their greeting in Spanish, and on passing, the entire party, numbering seventeen well armed and mounted men, paraded on the roadside,”31 wrote Fountain. The cordial greeting that Evans and his men gave the pair of Lincoln County merchants was to be expected. After all, one of the gang’s best customers when it came to purchasing stolen livestock was J. J. Dolan & Co. The cattle were then sold to fulfill the Murphy firm’s beef contracts with the army and reservation Apaches.32
Dolan & Co. owned and ran a cattle-clearing business in the Pecos country near Seven Rivers and was known to have dabbled in rustling. “It was understood that Jesse Evans and his associates, the most formidable and consistent band of cattle thieves then operating in Lincoln County, were on a secret payroll of the Murphy firm and were to earn their income by steadily stealing from the [John] Chisum herds,”33 writes Maurice G. Fulton.
The next morning the Boys, including Kid Antrim, bade Riley and Longwell so long, and the two parties continued their separate paths. The revelry of the night before at the mountain campsite, however, was published for all to see. This brazen contribution written by an anonymous source named Fence Rail, appeared in the same issue of the Independent as Fountain’s column describing how the Evans gang and their guests had carried on.34 The unsolicited story from “Fence Rail” was entitled “Grand Reunion Of ‘The Boys.’”
I am requested to furnish you with a copy of the proceedings of a reunion held “at rendezvous in the Sacramento Mountains” on this day, which are as follows: “At a reunion of ‘prominent citizens’ of Southern New Mexico held at one of their numerous rendezvous on this 9th day of October A.D. 1877, Captain Jesse Evans took the stump (which served as a chair) and after having congratulated the gentlemen of the road present on the brilliant record they had recently made in the line of their profession, announced that the object of the present reunion was to compare notes, perfect their organization, and prepare a plan for the upcoming campaign. Nor was this all; they had received valuable assistance in their labors from citizens who were not so prominent as they, and it was but justice (here a murmur was heard, Captain Evans begged pardon for having made use of that unpalatable word, and proceeded) it was but right that they should award honor where honor was due. The first thing to be done was to perfect their organization.
No doubt that “Fence Rail” was mimicking this gathering of outlaws in the most civilized way. The justice he alludes to is probably the law of the land and the man—and in this case the men—with the most guns. The article continues:
This business was concluded with the following result. Captain Jesse Evans was promoted to the colonel. Nick Provencio and Frank Baker, on account of their proficiency in horse stealing, etc., were elected captains, and all the balance of the band were made captain by brevet. The following resolutions were then adopted:
“Resolved: That those who have so generously and continually warned us of every effort being made by the despotic, tyrannical and arbitrary authorities of Southern New Mexico to deprive us of our liberties and incarcerate us in their vile dungeons, we return thanks, and add that in the opinion of this band, an occasional beef steer is inadequate compensation for the invaluable information furnished us by there faithful friends.”
Fountain’s sword was sharp and he had no fear in outright accusing these men of being renegades and cow thieves.
“Resolved: That that portion of the press of New Mexico which notwithstanding our many open and notorious robbers and murderers has persistently denied that organized lawlessness exists in South New Mexico and which has held us to the public as paragons of virtue and honesty, is entitled to favorable mention. Having no further use for the services of such champions, however, (we having reached the conclusion that even murder and horse stealing can be made respectable by our friendly newspaper correspondents and editors) we hereby reconsider our intention to present each one of our said champion editors and correspondents with one of the next bunch of horses that we shall appropriate.”
In conclusion, “Fence Rail” took some swipes at the pesky Fountain and his newspaper.
“Resolved: That we shall take the first opportunity of getting even with the ‘Independent clan’ and regret that an unwillingness to experience the disagreeable sensation of ‘pulling hemp’ [hanging] has operated as an obstruction to carrying into execution heretofore our intentions in this regard. In the meantime we applaud those newspapers who abuse the Independent in our interest.
“Resolved: That the public is our oyster, and that having the power, we claim the right to appropriate any property we may take a fancy to, and that we exercise that right regardless of consequences.”
These resolutions having been adopted Captain Nicholas Provencio produced a copy of the Independent, a huge fire was built, and the obnoxious paper was thrown into the flames. The gang, headed by Colonel Evans, now marched around the pyre to the inspiring strains of the “Rogues’ March” performed by Captain Baker on a fine tooth comb.
Although the satirical account of the so-called reunion of the banditti was published with just the pen name Fence Rail, there was little doubt that the actual author was John Riley.35 Fountain, who must have known who penned the story, but who had guts enough to run it, must also have been aware that Riley’s arrogant and sarcastic ramblings were only a hint of the chaos to come. The stage for pure mobocracy and bedlam was now set in Lincoln County. It was now only a matter of who the actors were going to be.