There are two Billy the Kids in legend. The first is a tough little thug, a coward, a thief, and a cold-blooded murderer. The second is a romantic and sentimental hero, the brave and likeable leader of an outnumbered band fighting for justice.1
—KENT STECKMESSER
FROM EARLY 1878 until his death in the summer of 1881, William Bonney’s activities can be documented week by week and sometimes daily.2 Nevertheless, little reliable information about the Kid during this time is known. Incidents in those years, such as the slayings of Tunstall and McSween or the Kid’s nefarious activities leading up to his death, are the ones frequently explored by grassroots historians and authors and portrayed by Hollywood’s most imaginative minds.
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This memorable line from John Ford’s 1962 western film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance best describes the approach most writers and filmmakers have taken when interpreting the life and times of the Kid.3 It was not, however, just circumstances and timing that created the myth of Billy the Kid. The young man may have been used and abused by the many duplicitous people that he encountered in the final years of his life, but he himself also played a critical role in establishing his own identity. A virtual orphan and an opportunist who out of necessity lived by his wits, the Kid had developed a keen survival instinct and was fully capable of seizing the moment. He skillfully improvised his own destiny until finally his Irish luck ran out. “Henry McCarty left the dark history of his family’s Ireland, the shame of their famine and exile, and became Billy the Kid,” writes Fintan O’Toole in his profile of the Kid for The New Yorker.4 “He invented a new Identity, and, when the [Lincoln County] war broke out around him, he got the opportunity to live up to it.”
The Kid may have lived up to that new identity, but he did not live very long. The duality of his remade persona was blurred and distorted at the end of his own lifetime and long after. He would not be referred to as Billy the Kid in print until just seven months before he died.5 Yet it is by that colorful epithet and what it represents—whether truthful or not—that he will always be remembered.
With Tunstall and McSween out of the way, he became, as the notorious Billy the Kid, a convenient target for the Santa Fe Ring and the Dolan faction. The simple fact is they deliberately used him as a target bad boy in order to divert the adverse public attention coming to them. The Kid was cast in the role of avenger. He was out to get retribution for the execution deaths of Tunstall and McSween. He also was labeled an outlaw and became the most wanted man in the Southwest.
This focused legend building all started just weeks after the McSween house was burned. The Kid and several of his fellow Regulators were on the scout, looking for horses to replace those lost during the fighting in Lincoln. Along the way this band of Regulators sometimes gambled in one of the scattered villages or camps and carried on as usual, but something had changed, something new fouling the air. They began drawing a lot more notice wherever they went. Charlie Bowdre and Jim French were accused of threatening to burn the home of Captain Saturnino Baca for supporting the Dolan faction. Lieutenant Colonel Dudley called out the troops to protect the civilian, but Baca’s home was never torched. A short time later the shooting death of Morris Bernstein, the clerk at the Mescalero Agency, was pinned on the Regulators despite proof to the contrary.6
The Kid and a few other Regulators next showed up with some purloined stock at Bosque Grande, Chisum’s original ranch headquarters on the Pecos, about thirty miles south of Fort Sumner. Old John Chisum was in St. Louis at the time, and two of his brothers, Jim and Pitzer, were moving their herds out of turbulent New Mexico Territory to the grazing grounds of the Texas Panhandle. Sallie Chisum, Jim’s pretty daughter, was traveling with them. She had met the Kid before at the South Spring ranch, where they rode together and enjoyed a few front porch visits. In the past the Kid had sent letters to the Texas beauty, including one he wrote during the siege of the McSween house. At Bosque Grande, and later when the Chisum herd rested along the trail at Fort Sumner, the Kid presented her with an Indian tobacco sack and some candy hearts.7
Miss Sallie was winsome, but Fort Sumner appealed to the Kid more. When the Chisums moved on with their cattle, he stayed and waited for the arrival of some of the other “iron clads,” including the Coes. “When we got there,” remembered Frank Coe, “Kid and others had a baile for us…. House was full, whiskey free, not a white girl in the house, all Mexican, and all good dancers. Danced all night. Boys swinging them high.”8
Using Fort Sumner as their base of operations, the Regulators rode to Puerto de Luna, a settlement on the Pecos that had got its name when Coronado camped there. According to legend, when the full moon rose through a mountain gap, the Spaniard had exclaimed, “Puerto de Luna! [Gateway to the moon].”9 Coronado and the bridge his men built across the Pecos were long gone, but the Kid found that the many dances held there were memorable, as were those the Regulators attended just upriver to the north at Anton Chico, “the best of the towns this side of Las Vegas,” according to Frank Coe.
In Anton Chico the Regulators held what George Coe called a “war pow-wow” to talk over their future.10 The Coe cousins announced that they had had enough of New Mexico Territory and were heading up to Colorado for a fresh start. They tried to convince the Kid to join them, but he would have none of it. They shook hands and rode off in different directions. It was the last time either of the Coes ever saw the Kid.11 Two more of the Kid’s buddies, Doc Scurlock and Charlie Bowdre, also decided to quit riding as Regulators.12 They moved their families to Fort Sumner and took jobs with Pete Maxwell, the eldest son of Lucien Maxwell of Maxwell Land Grant fame. When his father died in 1875, Pete had taken over the ranch, headquartered at the old army post.
The Kid was the undisputed chief of the Regulators when he returned to Lincoln County with Tom O’Folliard and some others. They boldly swooped down on the Charles Fritz ranch, where Frank McNab had been bushwhacked, and made off with 15 horses from the remuda and 150 head of cattle.13 In late September 1878, the Kid, accompanied by O’Folliard, Fred Waite, Henry Brown, and John Middleton, set off with the stolen stock. Acquiring plenty more horses along the way, they were bound for the Texas Panhandle and the town of Tascosa on the sandy north bank of the Canadian River.14
The settlement in a cottonwood grove had been called Atascosa, “boggy creek,” for a nearby tributary that was notorious for quicksand, but eventually the A was dropped.15 This part of the Llano Estacado (Staked Plain) had been the hunting grounds of Kiowas and Comanches. Then came buffalo hunters as well as ganaderos, Hispanic sheep ranchers from New Mexico Territory with their pastores, herders, and great flocks of sheep. Eventually Anglo cattlemen appeared and looked at the free grass plains as one gigantic cow pasture.16 When the Kid and his crew turned up, Tascosa was becoming a roundup and trade center and a popular cattle trail stop.
In Upper Tascosa, the Exchange Hotel boasted the first wood floors in town and served as the social gathering place for the more respectable folks. Drovers and brush poppers, a common name for cowboys in Texas and New Mexico Territory, fancied Lower Tascosa, or hogtown, and its array of gambling houses, rooster fighting pits, brothels, cribs, and other carnal enticements.17 Drinking establishments, such as the Jim East Saloon, Equity Bar, and Captain Jinks’ Saloon, flourished by catering to thirsty men. Dance hall girls and fancy ladies sported colorful names like Boxcar Jane, Slippery Sue, Mustang Mae, Gizzard Lip, and Midnight Rose.18 Life in Tascosa was cheap, as were the drinks and the harlots.
The Kid and his mates had heard that Tascosa was split-lipped and black-eyed, but they also had been told that anyone looking to trade off or sell stolen horses was welcome. There were plenty of buyers who asked very few questions.
The time that the Kid spent in Tascosa provides yet another revealing portrait of him and offers glimpses into his personal life. The best of those memories of the Kid came from Henry Hoyt, a young doctor seeking adventure before settling down to a distinguished medical career.19 A native Minnesotan, Hoyt had completed his medical studies and before coming to Texas had doctored miners and gold hunters for a short time in Deadwood, the rough-and-tumble mining camp in Dakota Territory.20 After moving to the Panhandle, Hoyt supplemented his doctor wages by working as a cowhand. He was twenty-four years old when he came across the Kid and his four companions riding into Tascosa for the first time. “Billy Bonney was eighteen years old, a handsome youth with smooth face, wavy brown hair, an athletic and symmetrical figure, and clear blue eyes that could look one through and through,” Hoyt recounted forty-two years later. “Unless angry, he always seemed to have a pleasant expression with a ready smile. His head was well shaped, his features regular, his nose aquiline, his most noticeable characteristic a slight protrusion of his two upper front teeth.”21
Hoyt and Bonney became instant friends. Hoyt’s accounts of the Kid and their experiences are generally considered highly reliable. “Bonney’s party mingled freely, sold and traded horses with anyone so inclined, varying their business dealings with drinking, gambling, horseracing, and target shooting. Billy was an expert at most Western sports, with the exception of drinking,”22 Hoyt recalled. He shared this aversion to whiskey drinking although, he pointed out, the Kid frequented places where alcohol was served so he could play his share of three-card monte and poker.
Another popular pastime was to take part in the many bailes held on the small plazas or in the haciendas of such prominent families as Don Casimero Romero, a Castilian by birth and chief of the pastores.23 His nephew Don Pedro Romero also hosted weekly dances attended by Hispanic belles in festive dresses as well as by cowboys, hunters, and other hombres scrubbed reasonably clean for the festivities.
An unwritten law made it clear that anyone attending the dances at Don Pedro’s place fronting the east side of the Tascosa plaza had to leave his weapons checked at a nearby store. “One beautiful moonlight night a Romero baile was in full swing,” remembered Hoyt. “The Kid and I stepped out to enjoy [the evening].”24 They had strolled about a hundred yards away when Hoyt challenged the Kid to a race back to the dance. The Kid was fast, but Hoyt led all the way until they reached the door, when he “slacked up” and the Kid, running full speed, tripped on the doorsill and tumbled full length in the middle of the dance floor.
“Quicker than a flash,” wrote Hoyt, “his prostrate body was surrounded by his four pals, back to back, with a Colt’s [sic] forty-five in each hand, cocked and ready for business.” When the Kid crashed inside, they immediately thought something was amiss and sprang into action. How they had hidden their guns was never explained, and although they were repentant, the Kid and his boys were barred from future dances at that home.25
One evening Hoyt won a gold watch in a draw poker game. For some reason, the Kid wanted that watch, and it was through his “wanting” that Hoyt figured out that the “little New Mexican beauty” the Kid constantly talked about had to be Paulita Maxwell, Pete Maxwell’s young sister back in Fort Sumner. As the story goes, Hoyt too had been somewhat smitten by the fourteen-year-old when he stopped at Fort Sumner in 1877 to aid William Maxwell, Paulita and Pete’s adopted brother, who was dying of smallpox. When the Kid admired the watch with its long chain of braided hair, Hoyt suspected he wanted to present it to Paulita, so he gave it to the Kid.26
In late October 1878, Hoyt decided to leave the Panhandle, and on the day he departed the Kid rode into Tascosa leading Dandy Dick, an Arabian sorrel branded BB on the left hip. He handed the reins of the racehorse to a surprised Hoyt. No money changed hands, but the Kid wrote out a bill of sale for seventy-five dollars to make it look like an actual purchase. He signed the paper W. H. Bonney and had it witnessed so there would be no question about ownership. It was more than forty years later before Hoyt learned that Dandy Dick was the same horse Sheriff William Brady had ridden into Lincoln on April 1, 1878, the day he was gunned down and died. The horse had been a gift to Brady from none other than Major L. G. Murphy, the old political boss of Lincoln County.27
As he had many times, Hoyt again advised the Kid to quit his outlaw ways. “I often urged him, while he was free and the going good, to leave the country, settle in Mexico or South America, and begin all over again. He spoke Spanish like a native, and although only a beardless boy, he was nevertheless a natural leader of men. With his poise, iron nerve, and all-round efficiency properly applied, the Kid could have been a success anywhere.”28
The Kid nonetheless did not heed Hoyt’s good advice, nor did he agree with Waite, Middleton, and Brown when they urged him and O’Folliard to follow their suit and never return to New Mexico Territory. When the Kid refused, the last of the hard-core Regulators went their separate ways.
Fred Waite, who at one time had dreamed of ranching with the Kid, returned to Indian Territory, became a tax collector, and held many prestigious offices in the Chickasaw Nation. John Middleton went on to punch cows in Kansas, wed a wealthy woman, and died in 1885 from the effects of the gunshot wound at Blazer’s Mill. Henry Brown served as a deputy sheriff in Texas and in 1884, while marshal at Caldwell, Kansas, was gunned down by a lynch mob after he killed a bank president during an aborted robbery.29
The Kid and the ever-loyal Tom O’Folliard headed right back to New Mexico, where, except for more jaunts either to steal or to sell stock in Texas, they stayed. At Fort Sumner, the Kid and Tom resumed their social life. They attended bailes, gambled at Beaver Smith’s saloon, and visited with Charlie Bowdre, Doc Scurlock, and their families and friends.
During the Kid’s absence from Lincoln County, there had been a dramatic increase in lawlessness, mostly perpetrated by former elements of the Dolan faction. By far the worst of the lot was Selman’s Scouts, sometimes called the Rustlers or the Wrestlers. They were led by John Henry Selman, a Texas deputy turned desperado. True to their name, the Rustlers raided cattle herds and horse remudas across the county. They also committed murder and rape, burned down ranches, and pillaged homes and businesses in Lincoln and elsewhere. One of Selman’s gang members told a bystander, “We are devils come from Hell!”30 Of that there was no doubt.
The high crimes committed by Selman and his gang in Lincoln County did not go unnoticed. Even before most of those outrages took place, federal investigator Frank Angel’s final report blasting Governor Samuel Axtell and his administration prompted President Rutherford Hayes to take action.31 Heads rolled throughout the territory. Although he retained much of his power as head of the Santa Fe Ring, Tom Catron was forced to resign as U.S. attorney, while Axtell was removed from the office of governor.32 His replacement was Lew Wallace, the noted Civil War general who had served on the court-martial of Lincoln’s assassins and presided at the proceedings that convicted Henry Wirtz, the commander of the infamous Andersonville prison camp. Back in Indiana, Wallace had pursued a legal and literary career and in 1873 published Fair God, his first novel.33 President Hayes figured Wallace was just the man to tame the renegades in New Mexico Territory.
After sizing up the situation, Wallace called for an immediate halt to the violence. To back this up, he issued a proclamation of amnesty for all parties that had taken took part in the Lincoln County War, except for those already under criminal indictment.34 The Kid predictably failed the amnesty test. He had previously been indicted by the territory for the murder of Sheriff Brady and faced a federal indictment in the killing of Buckshot Roberts. Still, like others from the old McSween faction, the Kid remained hopeful about his future. His spirits were further buoyed when George Kimbrell, a former government scout, replaced George Peppin as sheriff.35 It was that optimism and a desire to clear the air once and for all that perhaps prompted the Kid to offer an olive branch to his enemies.
On February 18, 1879, exactly one year after the murder of Tunstall, the Kid rode into Lincoln to meet with his nemesis, Jimmy Dolan. With the Kid standing behind a low adobe wall on one side of the road were O’Folliard, Doc Scurlock, Joe Bowers, and Jose Salazar. Across the road behind another wall, Jesse Evans, Billy Mathews, Edgar Walz, and Billy Campbell backed Dolan.36 The parley nearly turned into a gunfight when Evans suggested killing the Kid where he stood, but cooler minds prevailed. In due course both sides gathered in the center of the road to shake hands and sign an agreement that called for them to stop killing or testifying against each other. Furthermore, if anyone failed to comply with the compact, “he should be killed on sight.”37
To seal the treaty properly, the signatories, except for the Kid, downed large quantities of whiskey. At one point, as they were making the rounds, the intoxicated mob encountered Huston Chapman, an outspoken and highly strung one-armed lawyer who was representing Susan McSween in her fight to find justice for her dead husband. The drunks demanded that Chapman do a jig for them, and when he refused, Dolan and Campbell fired their guns at the same time. “My God, I am killed,” yelped Chapman as he fell, his clothing on fire from the powder flash.38
The Kid now became anxious to put some distance between himself and the drunken killers. He found his chance at the next saloon stop. Dolan tried to get Walz, Catron’s brother-in-law, to return to the smoldering body and plant a gun in the unarmed Chapman’s hand so it would appear to be a case of self-defense. When Walz balked, the Kid volunteered. He grabbed the gun but instead of going to Chapman, the Kid hooked up with O’Folliard, who had managed to slip away from the others. They quickly saddled their mounts and skinned out for San Patricio.39 Not only had the peace been extremely short-lived, but now the Kid was implicated in yet another killing. The words of the Irish proverb rang true: “Those who shake hands with the devil often have trouble getting their hand back.”
The Chapman murder outraged the citizens of Lincoln, and in response Sheriff Kimbrell and the troops went back on the hunt. The killing also convinced Governor Wallace to go to Lincoln County and investigate the unrest there for himself. In truth, Wallace had been putting off the journey. He was content to stay in El Palacio, the Palace of the Governors on the Santa Fe Plaza and complete his next novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.40 Set in the New Testament, it told the classic story of betrayal, revenge, and redemption involving a young man whose life combined both good and bad fortune.
After reaching Lincoln in early March, Wallace at once engineered the suspension of the incompetent Lieutenant Colonel Dudley as commander of Fort Stanton and his eventual transfer to Fort Union. Next he ordered the arrest of anyone involved in Chapman’s death. Posses and troopers crisscrossed the county in search of culprits, sometimes even making arrests without warrants.41
On March 13, 1879, Wallace received the first of several letters from the Kid. Delivered by one of Billy’s San Patricio friends, it was an explanation of the events surrounding Chapman’s murder. The Kid expressed his willingness to testify against those responsible in exchange for a pardon. He explained that he was afraid to surrender because of his enemies and asked to meet with Wallace. He concluded by saying: “I have no wish to fight any more. Indeed I have not raised an arm since your proclamation, As to my character, I refer to any of the citizens, for the majority of them are my friends and have been helping me all they could. I am called Kid Antrim but Antrim is my stepfather’s name. Waiting for an answer I remain your obedient servant.”42
Two days later Wallace replied. He told the Kid to appear at Squire Wilson’s house in Lincoln at a prescribed date and time. The governor then wrote: “I have the authority to exempt you from prosecution, if you will testify to what you know. The object of the meeting at Squire Wilson’s is to arrange the matter in a way to make your life safe. To do that the utmost secrecy is to be used. So come alone. Don’t tell anybody—not a living soul—where you are coming or the object. If you could trust Jesse Evans, you can trust me.”43
On the evening of March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, Wallace and Squire Wilson waited for the Kid to appear. Several years later Wallace described the meeting to a newspaper reporter. “At the time designated, I heard a knock at the door, and I called out, ‘Come in.’ The door opened somewhat slowly and carefully, and there stood the young fellow generally known as the Kid, his Winchester in his right hand, his revolver in his left.”44
The meeting was brief and to the point. Wallace, a former army general who had led troops at bloody Shiloh and faced off with the killers of Lincoln, was not particularly concerned about negotiating with a teenage boy. The plan Wallace unfolded that night called for a “fake arrest” of the Kid, a sort of protective custody, followed by a court appearance at which time he would testify to all he knew about the murder of Chapman. “In return for you doing this,” Wallace told the Kid, “I will let you go scot free with a pardon in your pockets for all your misdeeds.”45 The Kid liked what he heard. After making sure his friend O’Folliard was included in the deal, the Kid said he would give the governor a decision in a few days and slipped, as was his want, into the dark night.
A few days later the governor received another note penned by the Kid from his San Patricio digs. Bonney agreed to Wallace’s scheme but had an additional request: “I will keep the appointment I made but be sure and have men come [to make the “fake arrest”] that you can depend on. I am not afraid to die like a man fighting but I would not like to be killed like a dog unarmed.”46
Sheriff Kimbrell and a posse rode into San Patricio the next afternoon and took the Kid and O’Folliard into custody. They were brought back to Lincoln and placed under house arrest in the home of Juan Patrón. While waiting to testify, the Kid and O’Folliard played cards with their guards and were furnished with ample food and comforts by their many friends. Wallace, who stayed next door at the Montaño store, was mystified by the Kid’s popularity. “A precious specimen named ‘The Kid’ whom the sheriff is holding here in the Plaza, as it is called, is the object of tender regard,” Wallace wrote to Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz. “I heard singing and music the other night; going to the door I found the minstrels of the village actually serenading the fellow in his prison.”47
As he had promised, the Kid appeared as a witness before the April term of the grand jury and testified that Jimmy Dolan and Billy Campbell had killed Chapman with help from Jesse Evans. Tom O’Folliard took the stand and told the grand jurors the same thing. As a result, Dolan and Campbell were indicted for murder, and Evans named an accessory. In all, more than two hundred criminal indictments were returned against fifty men, the largest number for the murders of Alex McSween and Frank McNab, the burning of McSween’s house, and the various offenses committed by Selman and his Rustlers.48
Only a very few of those indicted ever came close to going to trial. Many of them took advantage of the governor’s generous amnesty or were released on writs of habeas corpus. Others just disappeared and were never heard of again. Some with strong ties to the Santa Fe Ring, such as Dolan, Peppin, and Dudley, won acquittals in friendly courts or had the charges dropped altogether.49
The Kid was not so fortunate. District Attorney William Rynerson, a ruthless prosecutor remembered for his own acquittal in the killing of a New Mexico chief justice back in 1867, wanted him punished to the full extent of the law.50 A solid member of the Santa Fe Ring and Dolan’s close friend, Rynerson had no intention of honoring Governor Wallace’s promise of immunity for Billy Bonney.
“I tell you[,] governor,” attorney Ira Leonard wrote to Wallace back in Santa Fe, “the District Attorney here is no friend of law enforcement. He is bent on going after the Kid. He proposes to distroy [sic] his evidence and influence and is bent on pushing him to the wall. He is a Dolan man and is defending him in every manner possible.”51
A week after the grand jury adjourned, the military board of inquiry convened at Fort Stanton to look into the conduct of Lieutenant Colonel Dudley during the attack on the McSween residence. More than one hundred witnesses, including Lew Wallace, the Kid, and Susan McSween, testified during the eight-week hearing. Dudley’s formidable legal counsel, Henry Waldo, a former attorney general and member of the Catron and Elkins law firm, discounted the testimony of the prosecution’s witnesses, especially the Kid.52 In his closing argument Waldo attacked the Kid’s veracity and called him “a precocious criminal of the worst type, although hardly up to his majority, murderer by profession, as records of this court connect him with two atrocious murders.”53
The three officers presiding at the hearing took little time in coming back with a decision that surprised no one: Dudley was fully exonerated. When the verdict was announced, the Kid and O’Folliard took their leave from the guards at the Patrón house and quietly rode away on horses supplied by friends.
The Kid realized that his hatred of Dolan and his allies was matched only by their hatred for him. What’s more, he knew that Rynerson would not rest until he was swinging from a hemp rope. Most of all, he was certain that the promises of Lew Wallace were as empty and meaningless as a withered teat. He was dead sure of that.
The Kid did what he knew best. He ran away and lived by his wits. He headed to Las Vegas, the old Santa Fe Trail stop, where it was said there were so many public hangings on the old windmill in the plaza that the little boys all over town started hanging their dogs in imitation.54 The Kid did not go to Las Vegas to witness a hanging but to pick up some income from the busy gaming tables. In 1879 Las Vegas, too often confused today with its Nevada counterpart, had become a big draw ever since the Fourth of July, when the first train of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad chugged into the depot, setting off a wild celebration.55
While the Kid visited the new gambling halls and hotels, he supposedly shared a Sabbath dinner with Jesse James, the Missouri bandit. Henry Hoyt, the itinerant doctor from Tascosa, was working as a bartender at one of the hotels when he by chance came across the Kid at the hot springs resort north of town.56
“We were chatting away of old times in Texas as if we were a couple of cowboy friends,” Hoyt explained many years later, “when the man on Bonney’s left made a comment on something he said. Whereupon Billy said, ‘Hoyt, meet my friend Mr. Howard from Tennessee.’” Later that day the Kid pledged Hoyt to secrecy and admitted “Mr. Howard was no other than the bandit and train robber, Jesse James.”57
Whether Hoyt’s facts and memory were correct or not, the story only adds to the thick veneer of myth surrounding Billy Bonney.58 What is not conjecture is that about the same time as the supposed Jesse James meeting, the Kid turned to John Chisum and requested back pay for his services during the Lincoln County War. When Chisum turned him down, the Kid found another way to get his money: He stole Chisum’s cattle and sold them.59
The Kid spent more and more of his time at Fort Sumner. Although Doc Scurlock had grown tried of cattle rustling and moved his family to Texas, the Kid still had a wide circle of friends at Fort Sumner. Besides Tom O’Folliard and Charlie Bowdre there were some new pals, Dave Rudabaugh, Billy Wilson, and Tom Pickett.
And then there were the Kid’s female companions. As Paulita Maxwell put it, “Billy the Kid, I may tell you, fascinated many women…. Like a sailor he had a sweetheart in every port of call. In every placita [small plaza] in the Pecos some little señorita was proud to be known as his querida [lover].”60
Although she later denied it, there is little doubt that Paulita was one of the Kid’s favorite queridas. The Kid was linked romantically to other young women—Nasaria Yerby, Abrana Garcia, and Celsa Gutierrez, the sister of Pat Garrett’s second wife—and supposedly fathered children with at least two of them. Yet many who knew Billy Bonney believed it was his love for Paulita that kept him in Fort Sumner and ultimately lured him to his death.61