There was no one part of the remoter west which could claim the monopoly in the product of hard citizens, but there can be small challenge to the assertion that southeastern New Mexico, for twenty years after the Civil War was without doubt, as dangerous a country as ever lay out of doors.1
—EMERSON HOUGH
THROUGHOUT THE SHORT time that Kid Antrim rode with the Jesse Evans Gang in the autumn of 1877, violence and bloodshed were widespread across southern New Mexico Territory.2 The same was true in western Texas.
Records reveal that outlaws killed more than ninety law officers in Texas from 1868 through 1878. Disputes and feuds during the commission of crimes led to massive numbers of civilians being massacred. Most of the violence went unrecorded and unpunished. The worst shootists and killers of the day were either born or raised in Texas. Some of them were embittered ex-Confederates, who had poured into the state after the war and directed much of their racist hostility against Indians, blacks, and Mexicans, although northern soldiers were hardly unprejudiced. Vicious crimes saturated the Mexican border, creating a precarious future for Hispanic citizens already discriminated against by most Anglos, who not only failed to comprehend that the Mexican War had ended thirty years before, in 1848, but also perpetuated discrimination against Mexicans and Mexican-Americans that continues to this day.3
No small amount of the violence that seared the Texas countryside came from gang members known as the banditti. Throughout September and October 1877, as the banditti committed a slew of felonies, an ongoing dispute known as the Salt War erupted in bloodshed at the sleepy little town of San Elizario, an old settlement near El Paso. Several participants in future clashes involving Kid Antrim earned their stripes in this conflict. The violence was the culmination of a long disagreement caused by Anglos’ persistent attempts to take over and control salt-mining rights at the foot of Guadalupe Peak, east of El Paso. The extensive and ultradry salt flats were considered communal property, available as a salt source to all comers particularly the many Hispanics who had enjoyed free harvest of the life-sustaining staple since the mid-1700s. Some of the pilgrims pushing hand-carts traveled up to a hundred miles across arroyos and sandhills just to collect the salt. Several villages near El Paso depended on the salt trade for sustenance. They were outraged when the self-styled Salt Ring, a collection of contemptible Anglo politicians and lawyers, tried to acquire title to the salt deposits for their own profit.4
That autumn of 1877, when mobs of angry Hispanic residents rebelled and responded with firepower, retaliation from the Anglos was swift. The feud eventually resulted in the looting of San Elizario and death and destruction on both sides. One outspoken Confederate veteran, Thomas Coke Bass, went so far as to request formally that Texas Governor Richard B. Hubbard grant him the authority to organize a regiment of soldiers to take on the insurgents.5 “From latest indications it seems that our country has to give the Mexicans another thrashing and of course we old Texans will take particular pride in doing that work,” Bass wrote to Governor Hubbard on October 9, 1877.6 Hubbard chose not to grant the bellicose request, and the cantankerous Bass died less than a year later during a yellow fever epidemic in Memphis, Tennessee.
Others, however, did take up arms and join the fight. A small force of freshly recruited Texas Rangers led by Lieutenant J. B. Tays headed to San Elizario, and later an all-black troop of the Ninth Cavalry arrived on the scene. These troopers from Fort Bayard were popularly called buffalo soldiers, the appellation given them by Indians who perceived a similarity between the hair of the black soldiers and the buffalo.7
Citizen posses, little more than vigilantes, also entered the melee in the days before Christmas 1877 and besieged the Texas Rangers, forcing them to surrender. El Paso Sheriff Charles Kerber put out the call to New Mexico Territory for help, and criminal mastermind John Kinney responded, although some historians question the extent of his participation in the conflict.8 At the time Kinney, a recurring figure in Kid Antrim’s life, was on the dodge after being indicted for murder in Dona Ana County in the shooting death of one Ysabel Barela in Mesilla on November 2, 1877. The timing was right for Kinney and some of his followers to form a force of hired killers and head to Texas.9
“Capt. John Kinney now has an independent command of about 70 men and has issued a call for 30 more well armed and mounted to join him at or near El Paso,” reported the Grant County Herald in early 1878. “Pay $40 per month and forage, by state of Texas. With 100 well armed and mounted men Capt. Kinney is liable soon to have a world wide reputation and lay Lieut. Bullis in the shade.”10
The newspaper’s comparison of Kinney with Lieutenant John Lapham Bullis appeared entirely unwarranted, given that Bullis was a hero highly decorated for his “gallant service” while commanding the Black Seminole Scouts in several campaigns against renegade Indians.11 Needless to say, Kinney and his gang did not live up to the accolades. At San Elizario in late December 1877 and early January 1878, the deputized Kinney men murdered and terrorized “greasers” and “gringos” alike. The Kinney riders were so cruel that even the Texas Rangers, hardly an outfit known for compassion when it came to enforcing the law, stayed clear of the mercenaries.
“We didn’t stay with them or camp with them, but tried to keep separate from them, and I ordered my men not to mix with them, or have anything to do with them, because I knew that a great many of them were bad men, that they were acting badly, and didn’t appear to have any restraint,” Lieutenant Tays testified during a subsequent congressional investigation of the matter.12 However, the Rangers did not manage to escape criticism from some historians for their role in the war. “When the fighting was over, Ranger reinforcements arrived after the nick of time,” according to David J. Weber, editor of Foreigners in Their Native Land, a collection of essays examining Hispanic roots in America. “They killed some ‘escaping’ Mexicans, raped a woman, and committed other atrocities in revenge. Curiously, no Mexicans were ever brought to trial for their role in the Salt War, but in the long run they lost the war. All, eventually, had to pay for salt.”13
The experience at San Elizario proved useful to Kinney and the hired gunmen and helped prepare them for their role as mercenary fighters in the upcoming Lincoln County War. That dark chapter in New Mexico history and its aftermath catapulted Kid Antrim into the public eye, but in October 1877 he was still merely a minor player struggling to survive.
Conjecture abounds about the Kid’s exact whereabouts at this juncture in his life. As usual, any precise dates and details regarding his movements in late 1877 vary greatly even among credible eyewitnesses who encountered him at the time.
One of those sources was Eugene Van Patten, an ex-Confederate and Mesilla Valley rancher who in the late 1870s built a resort called the Dripping Springs Hotel near Ice Canyon in the Organ Mountains, east of Las Cruces. In his later years Van Patten told Gustave Dore Griggs, a member of a prominent Mesilla family, of meeting Kid Antrim sometime in the fall of 1877, when the young man sought work at his ranch. Van Patten explained to Griggs that he was greatly surprised that the boy named Antrim turned out to be a notorious outlaw.14
At this time, when Kid visited Van Patten’s ranch, it remains unclear if he was traveling on his own or still riding with the Boys. What is known is that sometime in October 1877, Kid Antrim entered Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory, his turf for the rest of his life.
About the middle of that month Jesse Evans and some of the Boys made their way to the Lincoln County settlement of Seven Rivers, named after the seven springs that fed into the Pecos River. Dick Reed founded the community in 1867, when he realized it was a good stopover place for the many cattle drivers passing through the Pecos River valley. Reed built a trading post, which he named Dogtown because of the abundance of prairie dogs, but by 1878 the name had been officially changed to Seven Rivers.15
A favorite gathering spot for ranchers and drovers, Seven Rivers also had a reputation as a hangout for cattle rustlers, rowdies, and gamblers. According to local legend, there were so many shootings in the town that all the saloon doors had removable hinges so they could be easily removed and used as stretchers for the wounded.
Seven Rivers proved to be an especially good haven for anyone who preyed on the herds of Texan John Chisum. Unquestionably the principal cattle owner in the region, Chisum, along with his brother, Pitzer, and their cowboys, muscled their way into New Mexico Territory in the late 1860s and began selling beef to the army. Like other cattle kings, John Chisum was known to steal livestock from the smaller ranchers as he claimed squatter and homestead rights along the Pecos. “In the time-honored New Mexico tradition, Chisum dominated lush grasslands that were not his own; these public domain lands were free for the claiming, but Chisum’s men treated anyone who tried as an interloper,”16 writes environmental historian Hal K. Rothman.
The enormous Chisum ranch was known as the Jinglebob (later the Jinglebob Land and Cattle Company), after the distinctive earmark on Chisum cattle, made by cutting two-thirds of each ear so the lower part dropped down in a dewlap.17 In the late 1870s Chisum was running a herd of one hundred thousand longhorns on open range that spanned more than two hundred miles, from Fort Sumner in the north all the way to the Mexican border.
This area, the Trans-Pecos, was wide-open, unfenced territory. Scattered among the high plains were mountains that had springs and canyons, perfect places for outlaws to hide out, and very little law enforcement. Some said it was a rustler’s dream, with few, if any, roads (mostly trails along arroyos and dried-up riverbeds) and 365 days of sunshine every year. Cattle roamed free, and to the thieves and rustlers, they were there for the taking. No questions asked.
The Jinglebob herds were a tempting target for thieves. Around Seven Rivers people said that “no man could live there who did not steal from Chisum.”18 With that in mind, Evans and his gang headed straight to Hugh Mercer Beckwith’s ranch, only a few miles north of Seven Rivers.
A Virginian by birth, Beckwith had come to New Mexico Territory over the Santa Fe Trail in 1849. Later that year he wed Refugia Rascón y Piño, a sixteen-year-old beauty from a well-connected New Mexico family.19 Beckwith began acquiring farm and ranchland throughout the territory and started a cattle operation. In the early 1870s the Beckwith family, by now including three sons and two daughters, established the cattle ranch near Seven Rivers. Beckwith, with help from his older boys, Robert and John, built a fortresslike adobe house and put out herds of cattle to graze on free-range blue gamma grass.20 Before very long Beckwith had become the acknowledged patriarch of Seven Rivers and Chisum’s most outspoken competitor.
After arriving in the Seven Rivers region, Evans and those gang members still with him went directly to the security of Beckwith’s ranch for some rest and recuperation. It remains debatable, but most historians believe that by then Kid Antrim was no longer with the Boys. According to solid testimonial evidence, it is almost certain that when he first came to the lower Pecos country, the Kid stayed with the Heiskell Jones family.21
In 1877, after a stint running a freight business in Texas and Arizona Territory, Jones returned to New Mexico Territory and took over the trading post and ranch owned by Dick Reed, the Seven Rivers pioneer who the previous year succumbed to dropsy, also known as edema.22
The Kid, who was on the run again, turned up in the Pecos Valley. Apaches had stolen his horse, forcing him to walk many miles to the nearest settlement, the Heiskell Jones house. Barbara Culp Jones, called Ma’am Jones by all who knew her, nursed the Kid, who was near death, back to health. The Jones family, which included nine sons and one daughter, developed a strong attachment to Billy and gave him one of their horses.
To her dying day in 1905, Ma’am Jones firmly maintained that she was the first person to encounter Kid Antrim in Lincoln County. Oral historian Eve Ball compiled and eventually published her vivid recollections of that meeting and Jones’s memories of other events in late-nineteenth-century Lincoln County.23 According to the Ball account, when in the predawn darkness the fearless Ma’am Jones, whose husband, Heiskell, was away on business, heard rustling in the mesquite outside the cabin, she reached for her Winchester and peered through a slit in the wall. She saw movement and ordered whoever was there to come forward. Kid Antrim obliged.24 Ball writes:
A slender boy arose and stumbled unsteadily toward the house. Ma’am dropped her rifle, unbolted the door, and ran to meet the boy. She half-carried him to the kitchen and eased him into her big chair before the fire. When she had a good blaze she put the kettle over it and turned to find the boy tugging at his boot. She knelt, took it in her hands—a very small boot—and pulled it off. Then she removed the other. He wore no socks and his feet were raw and swollen. How foolish to wear boots too small! Those blisters! He’d never got them riding a horse. He’d walked, and he’d walked a long distance.25
Recognized throughout the Pecos Valley for her generosity and nursing ability, Ma’am Jones tended to the young man’s bleeding feet and, despite some protests, made him drink a cup of warm goat’s milk, before tucking him into a feather bed with her own boys. The next morning the Kid told Ma’am Jones that he had reached her place after walking many miles from the Guadalupe Mountains. He said that he had been traveling with a companion named Tom O’Keefe when a band of Mescalero Apaches attacked them.
“They warned us at Mesilla to come through the reservation, but we wanted to see the country,” the Kid allegedly told Ma’am Jones. “When we got to the top of the ridge and saw the stream below, I left O’Keefe with the horses and went down to fill the canteens. Just as I started back, the Indians struck. I waved O’Keefe to ride out of it, and I hid. I stayed under cover till dark and then worked my way downstream till it began to get light. For three days I lay out in the daytime and walked at night.”26
According to the Ma’am Jones narrative, while Kid Antrim spent several days recuperating at the Jones home, he helped with the chores and engaged in some friendly target practice with John Jones, one of the nine Jones boys. Later it was learned that O’Keefe had safely made his way back to Mesilla.
Although there is surely some truth in the Ma’am Jones story as told in the Ball book, other historians, including those who used some of the material in their own books about the Kid, have expressed skepticism. Robert Utley was one of those who wrote about this dilemma. He said: “On one hand, Eve Ball obtained the story from the Jones boys (mostly Sam) in the 1940s and 1950s, and their recollections must be taken seriously. On the other hand, the story is presented in grossly romanticized fashion replete with contrived conversation. Separating the Jones boys and Eve Ball is impossible.”27
Utley and other historians appear to have put more stock in My Girlhood among Outlaws, another of Eve Ball’s contributions to the body of work chronicling the New Mexico frontier during the brief years when the Kid made his mark. This book by Lily Casey Klasner was published only after Ball discovered the manuscript, lost after Klasner’s death in 1946, inside a trunk in an old adobe hut and then undertook the editing and annotation of the work.
Lily was the daughter of Robert Casey, who in 1867 brought his family from Texas to a ranch near the village of Picacho on the Rio Hondo, where he ran cattle and operated a gristmill. Casey was a close friend of John Chisum’s, putting Casey at odds with the cattle king’s enemies, Lawrence Gustave (L.G.) Murphy and James J. (J. J., Jimmy) Dolan, owners of the largest mercantile store in Lincoln County.28 William Wilson shot and mortally wounded Casey on the streets of Lincoln in 1875 just hours after a convention staged by Murphy-Dolan opponents came up with a slate of candidates that seemed likely to remove the grip of the powerful political machine that controlled the county.29
Wilson was apprehended, quickly convicted of first-degree murder, and sentenced to hang. “Almost no one took seriously Wilson’s claim that he killed Casey because the latter owed him eight or nine dollars in wages,” wrote Maurice Fulton. “Casey had consistently opposed the Murphy machine, and Casey’s friends imputed his killing to the antagonism he had aroused by his verbal attack on the Murphy organization at the convention earlier that day.”30
Ironically, given the amount of pure anarchy that had reigned there for so many years, Wilson had the dubious honor of being the first person legally hanged in Lincoln County. A huge crowd of gawkers and invited guests turned out for the occasion on December 10, 1875. The proceeding, however, turned into a macabre event when it turned out that the condemned man actually had to be hanged twice.31 “After hanging nine and a half minutes, the body was cut down and placed in the coffin, when it was discovered that life was not yet extinct,” reported “A Rolling Stone,” the pen name used by a special correspondent for the Santa Fe New Mexican. “A rope was fastened around the neck, and the crowd drew the inanimate body from the coffin and suspended it from the gallows where it hanged twenty minutes longer. It was then cut down and placed in the coffin and buried.”32
Justice had been served, but Casey’s murder left his widow, Ellen, to fend for her five children. She began to dispose of property, and early in 1877 most of her cattle was sold at a sheriff’s auction to satisfy mounting debts. Soon the widow decided it would be best for her family if they returned to Texas.
Later that year she packed her children and their few belongings in a wagon, rounded up what remained of the cattle, as well as some that had already been sold, and headed in October down the Pecos. Toward the end of that month the Caseys paused at Seven Rivers and stayed with Heiskell and Ma’am Jones for about three weeks. While at the Jones place Lily Casey and her family first met Kid Antrim.33 The fourteen-year-old girl clearly was impressed with the Kid’s antics: “The Kid was active and graceful as a cat. At Seven Rivers he practiced continually with pistol or rifle, riding at a run and dodging behind the side of his mount to fire, as the Apaches did. He was very proud of his ability to pick up a handkerchief or other object from the ground while riding at a run.”34 Lily’s older brother, Robert, who usually went by the nickname Add, was not as impressed with the Kid as his kid sister was. “When I knowed him at Seven Rivers, you might call him a bum,” Add recalled many years later. “He was nothing but a kid and a bum when I knowed him back then.”35
The Kid tried to swap his horse for one of Ellen Casey’s mares, but the widow turned down the trade when she learned that his horse had been stolen from John Chisum. Then the Kid and Ellen’s sons Add and William tried in vain to convince Ellen to let him accompany the family to Texas. “Both of my brothers urged Mother to take him to Texas with us but she refused,” recalled Lily. “Then he left for the Murphy-Blake Spring [the Murphy-Dolan cow camp] where Billy [Buck] Morton was in charge. Upon returning he told Will that Morton had given him a terrible ‘bawling out’ for some trivial offense and that he intended to get even with him. Again he broached the subject of accompanying us, and again Mother courteously refused.”36
In other memories she left behind, Lily provided more details concerning the Kid’s run-in with Buck Morton, foreman for Jimmy Dolan and the “cow boss of all the Murphy-Nolan [sic] Co. cow camps.” The “trivial offense” she had alluded to turned out to have been a disagreement over a female.37
“Morton had a girl,” Lily explained. “She was a beauty in every way; she was called the ‘Bell’ [sic] of the Pecos Valley. And the Kid he got to meddling in, and Morton, although a fine man in many ways, yet he was very jealous hearted, he just could not take good naturedly the Kid’s trying to cut in on him, the Kid then was only considered a little outlaw tramp just hanging around any where he could get to stay.”38
The fact that Ellen Casey had not wanted the Kid to go with her family to Texas and this squabble over the Belle of the Pecos Valley kept him from joining back up with the Jesse Evans Boys again.
On October 17, 1877, a posse out of Lincoln County working on a tip it had gotten from an undisclosed source, surrounded a choza (adobe hut) near Hugh Beckwith’s Seven Rivers ranch house. Following a brief exchange of gunfire, the men took into custody Jesse Evans, Frank Baker, Tom Hill, and George Davis. Dick Brewer, the deputized foreman of the Lincoln County grand jury and a foreman for John Tunstall, the Englishman whose horse and cattle herds had been raided by the Evans Gang, led the posse. The prisoners were hauled back to Lincoln and placed in a new cellar jail with six round-the-clock guards posted.39
The posse immediately hit the road again and caught up with the Casey family just before they reached the Texas border. It demanded the return of the 209 head of stolen Tunstall cattle. Ellen Casey quickly and wisely complied. She then turned her caravan around and returned to Seven Rivers and soon after to the Casey ranch on the Hondo. Later the posse came to the family’s place and took Will and Add Casey to the Lincoln jail, where they lingered for a short time until John Chisum saw to it that they were released.40
During all this, Kid Antrim was on his own and avoided capture. He remained in what historian Robert Utley calls “a shadow world along the fringes of the law.”41 Although Lily Casey Klasner conspicuously avoids any mention of the posse in her book, she does repeat something Kid Antrim told her. “Once I heard him say, ‘He who fights and runs away will live to fight another day.’”42
Did he really utter these words of eighteenth-century Irish poet and dramatist Oliver Goldsmith to Lily Klasner or was this something she imposed on him to heighten the romance and mystery of the Kid? He might have heard the words from his mother, who was, for all practical purpose, a learned woman. Or it may have been from his schooling days back in Silver City or something he picked up along the trail.
The completion of the stanza of Goldsmith poetry, by the way, is: “But he who is in battle slain can never rise and fight again.”