Henry McCarty (1859 – 1881), better known as Billy the Kid, but also known by the aliases Henry Antrim and William H. Bonney, was a 19th-century American boundary crook and gunman who participated in the so-called Lincoln County War. According to legend, he killed 21 men, one for each year of his life, but he most participated in the slaughter of less than half that number.
While statement and myth are often tough to distinct, it seems Billy the Kid earned his reputation as one of the Desert Southwest’s most teeming killers. History records that in an epoch of just 4 existence, he fought in at slightest 16 shootouts, killed at slightest 4 men himself, and helped in the murder of at slightest 5 others.
When he was youthful, in Silver City, Kid Antrim, as he was then called, was arrested for theft but escaped jail and began wandering the desert southwest and northern Mexico. In Arizona, he took up mount rustling, and on August 17, 1877, shot and killed his first man — blacksmith, F.P. Cahill — in a Camp Grant Saloon.
Billy fled Arizona and an indictment for murder, eventually inward in Lincoln County, New Mexico where he became known as Billy Bonney, an immature horse thief fluent in Spanish and common with Mexican women.
McCarty (or Bonney) was 5 ft 8 in-5 ft 9 in tall with dejected eyes, a shiny complexion and prominent front teeth. He was said to be gracious and personable at time, and many recalled that he was as “supple as a cat.” Contemporaries described him as a “neat” dresser who superior an “plain Mexican sombrero.” These qualities, along with his cunning and celebrated dexterity with firearms, contributed to his paradoxical look, as, both a notorious desperado and beloved folk hero.
A qualified anonymous during his own life, he was catapulted into legend the year after his decease when his killer, Sheriff Patrick Garrett, along with co-novelist M.A. “Ash” Upson, published a sensationalistic biography posh The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid. Beginning with Garrett’s account, Billy the Kid grew into a symbolic picture of the American Old West.
Historians speculate that his likeness was twisted deliberately to distract the public’s notice from the immoral activities of the Dolan faction and their influential supporters in Santa Fe, notably regional following principal Thomas Benton Catron.
