Billy the Kid: The Great Escape

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In Western frontier history, you might call it ‘the Great Escape.’ After all, Davy Crockett didn’t escape the Alamo, George Custer didn’t escape the Little Bighorn, and Nez Perce Chief Joseph didn’t escape the U.S. Army. But Billy the Kid did escape the Lincoln County Courthouse! New Mexico Territory’s Lincoln County War boosted the Kid into the national spotlight in the late 1870s, but it wasn’t until his dramatic escape from the courthouse in April 1881 that he secured his place near the top of the all-time badmen heap. Getting shot down by Pat Garrett at Fort Sumner less than three months later certainly cemented Billy’s legend — which might have suffered had he not died so young — but the Kid didn’t exactly go out in a blaze of glory. And Garrett never would have gotten his chance at the gutsy, if not heroic, gunman had it not been for Billy’s great — well, not so great for two Lincoln County lawmen — escape.

Actually, Garrett had a role — albeit in absentia — in Billy’s April 28, 1881, breakout. Running on a law-and-order platform, Garrett had been elected sheriff of Lincoln County in November 1880 and had captured Billy the Kid at Stinking Springs the next month. Then, in Mesilla on April 13, 1881, Billy had been convicted of the murder of Sheriff William Brady, one of the casualties of the Lincoln County War, and sentenced to hang. The execution was to be carried out in Lincoln on Friday, May 13, and seven guards had transported the prisoner there in the middle of April. So on April 28, the Kid was very much Garrett’s responsibility. And the sheriff did not take his responsibility lightly. Garrett did not keep Billy in Lincoln’s old cellar jail, which he knew would never hold a cunning prisoner whose very life depended on getting out. Instead, Garrett kept the Kid shackled hand and foot and guarded around the clock in the room behind his own office at the county courthouse, which had been the old Murphy-Dolan store (commonly referred to as ‘the House’) during the Lincoln County War.

That bitter feud was fresh in everybody’s mind. Lawrence Murphy had aligned himself with James J. Dolan for economic control of the region, and when an Englishman named John Tunstall came along and proved himself to be competition, trouble followed. Tunstall’s murder on February 18, 1878, and Sheriff Brady’s subsequent refusal to arrest the men responsible led to ‘war.’ Teenager Billy the Kid (born Henry McCarty in 1859, probably in New York) had been employed by Tunstall. After Tunstall’s death, Billy and several other so-called Regulators killed three members of the Dolan faction and then assassinated Brady and Deputy George Hindman. Additional killings followed, but it was the killing of Brady that now had the Kid cooling his heels in the makeshift ‘death row’ at the Lincoln County Courthouse.

On Thursday, April 28, 1881, Sheriff Garrett was collecting taxes in White Oaks — a sheriff still had to carry out his duties even when he had a celebrated outlaw in his custody. Garrett had assigned deputies Bob Olinger and James W. Bell to guard Billy. The Kid’s room was on the second story, across the hall from the room where Garrett kept his more ordinary prisoners. Ironically, the room where Billy the Kid was awaiting his execution day had once been the bedroom of his old enemy, Lawrence Murphy.

If Billy the Kid didn’t have reason enough to free himself, Olinger gave him another reason by continually harassing him. A woman who had seen Olinger guarding Billy was interviewed more than 50 years after the fact (see They ‘Knew’ Billy the Kid: Interviews with Old-time New Mexicans, edited by Robert F. Kadlec). She said of the guard: ‘He was a big burly fellow, and every one that I ever heard speak of him said he was mean and overbearing, and I know that he tantalized Billy while guarding him, for he invited me to the hanging just a few days before he was killed. Even after he was killed I never heard any one say a single nice thing about him.’ Garrett himself said that Olinger and Billy the Kid had a ‘reciprocal hatred.’ Olinger and the Kid had supported opposing factions during the Lincoln County War, and Olinger had killed Billy’s friend John Jones in August 1879.

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