3

The Outlaw

As Tony Connor stated, his friend Henry Antrim had left Silver City never to return. His destination: Lincoln County. Thus the boy headed for eastern New Mexico and the country that would provide the scene for his wanderings for the four years remaining to him.

Lincoln County sprawled across thirty thousand square miles of southeastern New Mexico, a vast jurisdiction the size of South Carolina claiming less than two thousand citizens. Geographically, economically, and socially, it fell into two distinct worlds: a mountain world and a plains world.

The mountain world consisted of the Capitan, Sacramento, and Guadalupe mountains and the Sierra Blanca. Little pockets of white settlement dotted the northern ranges, leaving the Guadalupes, to the south, as the undisputed domain of Apache Indians.

The county seat was Lincoln. It lay in the upland valley of the Rio Bonito, with the flat hump of the Capitan Mountains looming to the north and the Sierra Blanca peaks soaring to the southwest. With primitive tools, Hispanics tilled the fertile soils of the Bonito. Most of the Anglos, also farmers owning a few cattle as well, concentrated along the Ruidoso, the next stream south of the Bonito. The Ruidoso and the Bonito united to form the Hondo, which flowed out of the mountains to empty into the Pecos River.

An adobe village of four hundred people, largely Hispanic, Lincoln extended for a mile on both sides of a single tree-shaded street, crowded on the north by the Bonito and on the south by a steep mountainside dappled with piñon and juniper. At the western edge of town stood the “big store” of L. G. Murphy & Co., the only two-story building in town. In the center of town rose the round tower, or torreon, a bastion of stone and adobe erected in 1862 for defense against Indians. Lincoln boasted no county courthouse, only a roomy adobe owned by “Squire” John B. Wilson that doubled as dance hall and, twice a year, courtroom for the itinerant district court based in Mesilla.1

Nine miles upstream from Lincoln, Fort Stanton perched on the banks of the Bonito. Like most frontier posts, it consisted of officers’ quarters, barracks, and storehouses fronting on a rectangular parade ground. The mission of the fort’s garrison was to watch over the Mescalero Apache Indians, whose reservation and agency lay across the divide to the southwest at the forks of the Tularosa River. With the agency, the fort provided virtually the only market for the farmers and stockmen of the area.

Although sparsely populated and remote from the territory’s main cities and travel routes, Lincoln and its environs excelled in habits of violence. The combination of whiskey and guns so prevalent throughout the West seemed particularly volatile in Lincoln County. Adding to the mix were ethnic tensions of Anglos and Hispanics, intensified by a racism that pitted Texans against “Mexicans,” whites against the “nigger soldiers” at Fort Stanton, and everyone against the Indians of the Apache reservation. Casual law enforcement and ineffective courts imposed the weakest of formal restraints on the drunken killings and maimings that had grown routine.2

Few offenders paid for their crimes, whether murder, assault, or theft of stock. In fact, not until 1877 did Lincoln County even have a jail, and then only a hole in the ground topped by a log guardroom near the east end of town.

The little cluster of mountain dwellers on the Bonito and the Ruidoso depended on the Mesilla Valley for supply. The road to Mesilla, 140 miles to the southwest, climbed from Fort Stanton to the pass between the Sierra Blanca and the Sacramento Mountains, then descended the Tularosa River by way of the Mescalero Apache Indian agency and Blazer’s Mills. Another little community had taken root here, where an Iowa dentist, Dr. Joseph H. Blazer, had established a sawmill and gristmill at the close of the Civil War. The road descended the Tularosa to the foot of the mountains, site of the Hispanic village of Tularosa. Just beyond, the river sank in the desert sand. Across a flat, barren desert strewn with black lava, along the edge of the glittering White Sands, and up through San Augustín Pass dividing the Organ and San Andres mountains, the traveler made his tortuous way in a journey that from Lincoln usually consumed three days.

East of Lincoln the dark mountain wall fell away to the shimmering Pecos Plains. This was cattle country, carpeted with grama grass as far as the eye could see—“knee high on every hill and mesa,” marveled a traveler.3

Here John Simpson Chisum reigned as the “cattle king of New Mexico.” Plain and unpretentious, with an angular, leathery face, Chisum was an affable extrovert and shrewd businessman who, at fifty-four, knew cows as few others did. He had arrived in 1867, trailing a herd of longhorns up the Goodnight-Loving Trail from Texas. By 1876 the Chisum herds had multiplied to eighty thousand head and ranged from old Fort Sumner down the Pecos 150 miles almost to the Texas line. The rich grasslands were public domain, free for the taking, but the swollen Chisum herds discouraged interlopers.

They came anyway. Along the southern edges of Chisum country, a handful of small cowmen crept up the Pecos from Texas to contest “Uncle John’s” domination. They founded the community of Seven Rivers and began to build their own herds, mostly from Chisum “strays.” Chisum fought back, and in the spring of 1877 the feud escalated into a shooting war.4

At the heart of the plains world stood Roswell and, nearby, Chisum’s South Spring ranch. Roswell took root in 1869, the enterprise of Van C. Smith. A colorful, convivial character, Smith had sought refuge in this remote location in an effort to conquer his addiction to gambling. He erected two large adobe buildings and named the little community Roswell, for his father.

Roswell formed a pleasant green oasis amid the sweep of yellow plains, for no less than three streams united here to flow into the Pecos. Deep, crystal-clear, and swarming with all manner of fish, the North and South Spring rivers and the Hondo sent water coursing through a network of acequias to nourish cornfields, fruit orchards, and shady cottonwood trees. Chisum’s South Spring ranch, another oasis, lay four miles to the southeast.

Van Smith failed to vanquish his compulsion and returned to Santa Fe to open a gambling house. He thus lost his chance to be remembered as the “Father of Roswell.” That title went instead to Joseph C. Lea. A Confederate veteran full of shrewd ambition, “Captain” Lea bought the Smith property in 1877.

Lea’s store clerk, and also Roswell’s postmaster, was Marshall Ashmun Upson. “Intellectual handyman” for the surrounding area, Ash Upson was a restless journalist who loved words, people, and the bottle, in reverse order. He would meet Henry Antrim for the first time in October 1877 and ultimately decisively influence the world’s image of the young outlaw.5

As Lincoln looked to Mesilla for its window on the outside world, Roswell and Seven Rivers looked northward, 160 miles up the Pecos River, to Las Vegas.

Las Vegas rested on a scenic fault, with the Great Plains rolling off to the east and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rising in rugged splendor on the west. The remnant of the Santa Fe Trail linked Las Vegas with the advancing end of track of the Santa Fe Railroad in Colorado, and lumbering freight wagons pulled by oxen drew up in a plaza barren of vegetation and fronted on four sides by nondescript adobes. From the storehouses of the great mercantile firms such as the Ilfield Company, merchants from down the Pecos loaded their wagons with hardware, dry goods, firearms and ammunition, and groceries. Judging from appearances, an eastern reporter concluded, Las Vegas “certainly must date back to the birth of Christ.” The town boasted “the identical ass on which Jesus rode into Jerusalem,” he added. “We saw it grazing just outside the city.”6

Roughly midway between Las Vegas and Roswell, Fort Sumner stood on the east bank of the Pecos. Adobe barracks, residences, and storehouses arranged around a parade ground, the fort had been established during the Civil War to watch over the Navajo Indians colonized at the Bosque Redondo (Round Grove of Trees) after their conquest by the army. Government beef contracts for the Navajos and their guardian bluecoats had first drawn John Chisum and other Texas cowmen into New Mexico. After the Navajos went back to their homeland in 1868, Fort Sumner lost its mission and was abandoned.

Lucien Maxwell, who had recently sold the vast Maxwell Land Grant, bought Fort Sumner from the government in 1871. Some twenty-five or thirty Hispanic families accompanied him from his previous headquarters at Cimarron and settled in the buildings of the fort or built little adobes nearby. They farmed the irrigated fields abandoned by the Indians and ran sheep and cattle. Anglo cattlemen began to drift into the area in the middle 1870s, mingling their herds with the sheep pastured by Hispanics. Lucien died in 1875, but his son Pete—Pedro—carried on the Maxwell interest. Although a family enterprise, the fort served settlers and travelers as a town, complete with residences, stores, and saloons.7

Such was eastern New Mexico in 1877, when Kid Antrim first forded the Rio Grande to put his Arizona past behind him. In Lincoln County it was a volatile land, even then verging on explosion. To the north, in San Miguel County, it was a land of lively commerce verging on dramatic transformation as the railroad drew closer. Henry Antrim would come to know this land and its people intimately, and he would leave a lasting mark on both.

On October 1, 1877, a band of nine outlaws slipped into the Pass Coal Camp in the Burro Mountains, not far from Richard Knight’s ranch, and made off with three horses. Included in the group were several of New Mexico’s foremost desperadoes: Jesse Evans, Frank Baker, Bob Martin, George “Buffalo Bill” Spawn, Nicholas Provencio, and one Ponciano. The next day, making their way through Cooke’s Canyon on the road from Silver City to Mesilla, the thieves met a traveler named Carpenter. He recognized one of the horsemen and later named him: Henry Antrim.8

Thus the Kid had teamed up with the most notorious gang of outlaws in southern New Mexico. Evans and his men formed a loose coalition of bandits whose numbers varied between ten and thirty and whose depredations, aimed chiefly at horses and cattle, ranged from Silver City on the west to the Pecos River on the east. Sometimes they operated as one band, more often as several. They called themselves “The Boys.” Albert J. Fountain, editor of the Mesilla Valley Independent, labeled them “The Banditti,” and he waged a strident crusade against them that provoked first their ire and later their retribution.

The most prominent and professionally talented of The Boys was their leader, Jesse Evans—“Captain” Evans, as Editor Fountain scornfully branded him. Of medium stature and slight build, with gray eyes and light hair and complexion, Evans was about twenty-five in 1877. He pursued his calling with boldness, arrogance, rapacity, callousness toward his victims, and contempt for anyone who interfered or even protested, including the law. Yet he also projected an air of relaxed insolence and wry wit that some thought charming.

Evans had come to New Mexico from Texas in 1872 and gone to work for John Chisum on the Pecos. The cattle baron’s horse remudas had suffered grievously from raids of the Mescalero Apache Indians, based on their reservation high in the mountains to the west. Determined to retaliate in kind, Chisum sent his cowboys on systematic plundering forays against the Indian herds. Evans participated.

Thus versed in the art of rustling, in 1875 Evans drifted westward to the Rio Grande and landed in the Mesilla Valley, where he found work on the ranch of John Kinney, three miles north of Mesilla. In Kinney, he found also a kindred soul, destined for a stature in the gallery of southwestern outlaws even greater than his own. A ruddy-faced New Englander, with brown hair and mustache, Kinney was about Evans’s size, but five years older. During a stint in the U.S. cavalry, he had served at Fort Selden, fifteen miles north of Las Cruces, and on his discharge as a first sergeant in 1873 he had returned to go into the cattle business. For Kinney, the cattle business meant the same as it did for Evans, and by 1877 the Kinney ranch had acquired a reputation, as Fountain declared in the Independent, as “the headquarters and rendezvous for all the evil doers in the county.”9

The offenses of both Evans and Kinney went beyond mere rustling. On New Year’s Eve of 1876, Kinney, Evans, and several friends got into a brawl with some soldiers at a dance hall near Las Cruces, and Kinney was badly beaten. The vanquished withdrew, only to reappear at the doors and windows with blazing six-shooters. A soldier and an unlucky civilian who happened to be in the line of fire died instantly, and three soldiers were severely wounded, one mortally. No charges were brought against the murderers. As the victims’ commanding officer reported, “It is much safer to kill a soldier in New Mexico than to be caught gambling, or defrauding the revenue.”10

Within days of the New Year’s Eve massacre, Evans got into another shooting affray. Accused, with two others, of putting six bullets into Quirino Fletcher on the main street of Las Cruces, he stood trial for murder. In that land of lax frontier justice, however, juries rarely convicted, and the defendants went free.11

By this time, Evans had his own gang. He undoubtedly continued his association with Kinney, who occasionally participated in the exploits of The Boys. They in turn used the Kinney ranch as a refuge, as Fountain charged. Evans’s field of operations, however, extended all the way across southern New Mexico, whereas Kinney seems rarely to have strayed very far from his Mesilla Valley ranch.

Into this heady environment, in late September 1877, ventured Henry Antrim. Accused of murder in Arizona, he doubtless felt that he had found a suitable milieu and a congenial set of associates for the next stage of his life. Even if Arizona had taught him more about life than came to most teenagers, he must have been an impressionable adolescent, susceptible to the influences of the older men with whom he had cast his lot.

Typically, they and their kindred sported several aliases. Henry Antrim still went by his stepfather’s name, and he brought with him from Arizona the nickname of “Kid.” With his youth, his appearance, and his behavior, Kid Antrim fit the part. Increasingly, however, he adopted an alias of his own: William H. Bonney. Where that name came from remains a mystery, despite diligent efforts to find a Bonney family connection. At least one boyhood friend remembered his schoolmates using it in Silver City.12 Within a matter of weeks, Henry Antrim became Billy Bonney, with Antrim regarded as an alias. People still called him the Kid, but not for another three years would anyone know him as Billy the Kid.

The escapades of the Evans gang in the two weeks following the theft of the horses at the Pass Coal Camp reveal the influences now playing on Billy Bonney and dramatize the values of his new world. Arizona had given him a taste of this world. In October 1877 he swallowed a heavy dose.13

After meeting Carpenter in Cooke’s Canyon, Evans and his eight followers, including the Kid, continued on the road toward Mesilla. Seven miles east of old Fort Cummings, they stopped a westbound stagecoach. Assured by the driver that he carried no bullion, Evans replied, “Well, we’ll let you pass this time,” though he insisted that they have a drink together before the gang rode on. There were still nine men, according to the driver, each armed with two six-shooters and a Winchester rifle and draped with two belts full of cartridges.

At each of the three roadhouses along the way to Mesilla, The Boys partook of food and liquid refreshments, then told the proprietor to “chalk it up.” “They desired to have it distinctly understood,” reported the Independent, “that they were ‘gentlemen,’ and did not propose to be insulted by having beggarly tavern keepers thrust bills under their noses.” At one of the stops, they found a copy of the Independent, containing one of Fountain’s tirades against the “banditti.” Irritated, Evans announced that he intended to present Fountain with “a free pass to hell.”14

On October 5, at Mule Springs, three more of Evans’s men joined the group. They had stolen two horses at Santa Barbara, thirty-three miles up the valley from Mesilla, and had a six-man posse on their trail. When the possemen closed in, however, they found themselves outnumbered and outgunned. They carried only pistols, whereas the fugitives had rifles. The outlaws fired about forty shots, then attacked, drove the posse into a canyon, and rode off with “a shout of derision.”15

Their number still further augmented, to seventeen, The Boys crossed the Rio Grande and took the road to the east, into Lincoln County. At Tularosa on October 9, they staged a big drunk, shot up the town and terrorized the residents, then proceeded up the road to the home of a man named Sylvester. He had once testified against one of The Boys, so they shot his dog and riddled the house with bullets. As Sylvester frantically shouted for his tormentors to spare his wife and children, they replied with more shots and shouts of drunken laughter, but apparently hurt no one.

Farther up the road, The Boys paused for provisions at the store of John Ryan near the Mescalero Apache Indian agency. Here, Evans gallantly entrusted to Ryan a horse previously stolen from Kate Godfroy, daughter of the Indian agent. He had heard that Kate was brokenhearted over the loss of her horse, Evans said, and he wanted Ryan to return it with an affectionate kiss. (It had been so badly used that it was no longer serviceable, commented the Independent.)

That night, near the mountain summit, The Boys continued their partying. For two travelers who chanced by in a buggy, the group turned out in mounted formation to parade along the road in mock honor. The two men were John H. Riley and James Longwell.

“A smart devil and a regular confidence man,” according to one who knew him,16 Riley was a partner in the mercantile firm of James J. Dolan & Co., formerly L. G. Murphy & Co. As both customer and client, he was an important personage for Evans and The Boys. Headquartered at Lincoln, across the mountains to the east, the Dolan firm dominated the economy of Lincoln County. Dolan and Riley supplied much of the contract beef used by the Apaches at the Indian agency and by the soldiers at Fort Stanton. Federal beef contracts had become so competitive, however, that no supplier could make a profit legitimately. One solution was to buy rustled stock at five dollars a head and turn it in on government contracts at fifteen. Evans and The Boys regularly furnished Dolan and Riley with stolen cattle while also occasionally performing other shady chores to which they preferred to have no visible link.

As friends and business associates of Evans’s, therefore, Riley and Longwell, a company employee, probably stayed for the night’s festivities. It is an easy guess that Riley penned the literate, satirical account that later appeared in the Independent under the pseudonym of “Fence Rail.”17

The night’s activities disclose much about The Boys and the examples they set for Billy Bonney. Evans mounted a stump to congratulate his men for their brilliant attainments and to suggest the need for “perfecting the organization.” This took the form of electing Evans to the rank of colonel and Baker, Provencio, and Ponciano, “on account of their proficiency in horse lifting,” to the rank of captain. All others, presumably including recruit Billy, received promotions to the grade of captain by brevet (an honorary military rank).

The revelers next adopted a series of resolutions. One thanked all who had aided or harbored them. Another thanked a friendly press (the Mesilla News) that had ridiculed the Independent’s claims of organized lawlessness in southern New Mexico. Still another castigated the Independent. And a final one proclaimed “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.”

The ceremony ended around a huge bonfire. Nick Provencio produced a copy of the Independent and consigned it to the flames. While Frank Baker rendered the “Rogues March” on a comb, “Colonel” Evans led his band in a raucous procession around the “funeral pyre.” The group then divided, one turning up the south fork of the Tularosa, the other taking the main road up the north fork, over the mountains to the Ruidoso, and on down to the Pecos.

Sometime in the middle of October, Evans and at least part of his gang reached the lower Pecos at Seven Rivers, where they put up at the ranch of crusty old Hugh Beckwith, patriarch of an extended family and the leader of the Chisum opposition.18 For unknown reasons, Billy Bonney bunked with the neighboring Heiskell Jones family. The Joneses had eight sons ranging in age from one to twenty-two, and a twelve-year-old daughter besides. Barbara—“Ma’am Jones”—enjoyed a far-flung reputation for hospitality and hearty cooking.19

Whatever Billy’s reasons for staying with the Joneses, they proved fortunate, for at the Beckwith ranch some of Jesse Evans’s past sins caught up with him. On September 18 he and Frank Baker had stolen some horses and mules from the ranch of Richard Brewer, on the Ruidoso southeast of Lincoln. They belonged not only to Brewer but also to John H. Tunstall, a young Englishman who had come to New Mexico to make his fortune in stock raising. With some friends, Brewer gave chase, all the way to Mesilla, but had to return empty-handed. When district court convened in Lincoln early in October, Brewer served as foreman of the grand jury and made certain that indictments for larceny were returned against Evans and his friends. Brewer then enlisted a posse of fifteen men and persuaded Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady to lead it down to the Pecos, where Evans was known to be. On October 17 Brady’s men closed in on the Beckwith ranch and, after a brief exchange of gunfire, arrested Evans, Baker, Tom Hill, and George Davis. Three days later, the four found themselves locked in the Lincoln jail.20

At the nearby Jones ranch, meantime, Billy Bonney made the acquaintance of the Casey family. Ex-soldier Robert Casey had come up from Texas in 1867 and established his growing family on the upper Hondo River east of Lincoln. For years his mill and store had served the sparse population of the area. In 1875, however, Bob Casey had been shot dead in Lincoln, leaving his widow, Ellen, to care for four children and the property. In May 1877 financial reverses cost her most of her cattle, which were sold at a sheriff’s auction to satisfy debt. On behalf of John Tunstall, Lincoln lawyer Alexander McSween bought the cattle. Richard Brewer, who served as Tunstall’s foreman in addition to tending his own ranch, drove them to the Englishman’s recently acquired spread on the Rio Feliz, thirty miles south of Lincoln.21

Discouraged by her mounting troubles, the widow Casey decided to return to Texas. Early in October 1877 she packed her children and possessions in a wagon, rounded up her cattle, and struck down the Hondo. Late in October she paused at the Jones ranch and met Billy Bonney. He asked the widow if he could go to Texas with her. But he also coveted one of her horses and offered in trade his own, which she knew to be stolen.22 Despite the urgings of her elder children, Robert A., sixteen, known as Add, and Lily, fifteen, Mrs. Casey firmly refused Billy’s appeal.23

The impression that Billy projected at this time, after a month or more of exposure to Jesse Evans and his gangsters, is revealing. As Lily remembered, “The Kid was as active and graceful as a cat. At Seven Rivers he practiced continually with pistol or rifle, often 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.” Brother Add Casey supplied another dimension. “When I knowed him at Seven Rivers, you might call him a bum,” he recalled years later. “He was nothing but a kid and a bum when I knowed him back there.”24

In rejecting Billy’s horse trade, the widow Casey had yielded less to probity than to a pragmatic qualm over getting caught with someone else’s horse, as she intimated to Billy. Her own caravan, in fact, was burdened with more than a little stolen property, for it included the two hundred head of cattle that had once belonged to her but now, by virtue of the sheriff’s sale of the previous May, belonged to John Henry Tunstall. Before abandoning her home, she had sent her hands to sweep Tunstall’s range and run his animals into her own herd. When Tunstall learned of his loss, the elation prompted by the recovery of his stolen horses by the Brady-Brewer posse quickly dissolved. Undaunted, the worn-out Dick Brewer assembled six men and headed back down to the Pecos. Ten miles short of the Texas line, the pursuers came up with the Casey procession, faced down the Casey cowboys, and returned with all the stolen stock.25

Jesse Evans’s coerced journey to Lincoln brought Billy Bonney for the first time to the county seat, for early in November about thirty of The Boys, together with some others interested in the liberation of the prisoners, gathered on the Ruidoso to plot an escape. Among these men was Billy Bonney.26

Besides The Boys, some of Lincoln’s business and political elite also wanted Evans freed. In fact, he had become one of the players in the factional maneuvers that were leading inexorably to the Lincoln County War. Tunstall and his ally, lawyer Alexander McSween, had launched not only a cattle ranch on the Feliz but also a mercantile institution in Lincoln itself aimed at toppling the monopoly long enjoyed by Dolan & Co. and its predecessor, L. G. Murphy & Co.

Ambitious, smart, and ruthless, Jimmy Dolan fought back with unscrupulous cunning. He had learned well from his mentor, Lawrence Murphy, founder of “The House” and still a power in the county despite a losing bout with the bottle. Among the weapons in The House’s arsenal was The Boys, who were skilled at intimidation. Indeed, the theft of the Brewer-Tunstall stock that had landed Evans in jail had been part of the program of intimidation. Dolan and his friends, therefore, wanted Evans back in business.

One of Dolan’s friends was Sheriff Brady. He and Murphy had been wartime comrades and pioneer builders of Lincoln County. He tended to view matters the same as Murphy. Brady had gone to much trouble to get Evans in jail, but he probably looked on his eventual escape as fated and did little to head it off.

Even the patrician Tunstall, ambitious to supplant Dolan as economic overlord of Lincoln County, may have toyed with the idea of abetting Evans’s escape. He seems to have hoped that he might win Evans away from Dolan and, if not sign him up in the coming fight, at least neutralize him. Tunstall took the prisoners a bottle of whiskey, jollied with them, and bought two of them new suits. He may also have primed Dick Brewer, his foreman, to act as courier between the jail and The Boys gathered on the Ruidoso and to set up his ranch as a source of food and mounts after the escape.

The break took place before dawn on November 17, 1877. About thirty of The Boys, including Bonney, rode over from the Ruidoso and showed up at the jail. Thanks to Brady, they found only a lone guard. They put a pistol to his head, knocked in the door to the cell with big rocks that had been helpfully assembled in advance, and rode out of town with their leader and his three lieutenants, together with another prisoner held on other charges.

On the way to Brewer’s ranch, the party came on two brothers out hunting deer. They were Juan and Francisco Trujillo. The bandits surrounded Juan, but Francisco broke away. Bonney gave chase and threw down on him with his Winchester. Trujillo dismounted and threw down on Billy with his own rifle. When the others threatened to kill his brother, however, Francisco gave up. The fugitives relieved Juan of his saddle and weapons and rode on.27

The Boys reached Brewer’s ranch after daylight. Brewer was conveniently absent, but his hands cooked breakfast for the visitors, who then saddled eight of Tunstall’s horses in the Brewer corral and rode off. They left apologies for Tunstall and a promise never to steal from him again. Later, they sent back all but one of the animals. Although Tunstall may have drawn hope from this display of gallant generosity, Evans doubtless regarded it as ample return on the Englishman’s investment of a bottle of whiskey and two new suits.28

After leaving Brewer’s ranch, Evans and his men turned south to the Feliz and the Peñasco, then made their way back to the lower Pecos, where they again came to rest at the Beckwith ranch. Billy Bonney did not go with them. He remained on the Ruidoso.

Why? The most plausible answer is that he had made some new friends. In addition, he may have had some second thoughts about the life on which he had embarked. He may have wanted something better, something not so plainly outside the law.

The Ruidoso offered a setting not plainly outside the law, yet not altogether within it either. Most of the valley’s residents were Anglos in their twenties, single or married to Hispanic women, who grew corn and ran a few head of cattle. They skirted the edges of the law, toiling at honest labor but not averse to rustling an occasional cow or otherwise offending the public order. They were open, friendly, and of a distinctly higher type than the ruffians with whom Billy had been consorting.

Thus the autumn of 1877 featured three distinct phases in the young life of Henry Antrim. In Arizona, he was an embryonic cowhand and occasional horse thief and cattle rustler. The Cahill killing, however, ended this life by making him, as he supposed, a fugitive wanted for murder and prompting him to return to New Mexico.

In his childhood haunts around Silver City, Henry threw in with the Jesse Evans gang. Now, Kid Antrim became Billy Bonney. For about a month, he participated in all the iniquities of that iniquitous band of desperadoes and doubtless learned much about their profession.

Finally, in a third phase, he fell back into a shadow world along the fringes of the law. It was peopled by his new friends on the Ruidoso, men who labored at an honest living but stood ready to break the law when opportunity presented or when impulse dictated. Billy Bonney thus substituted a new set of role models for the thugs who followed Jesse Evans. These new friends were soon to come together as one of the opposing armies in the Lincoln County War.