The Hunting of Billy the Kid
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While we was there Billy the Kid come in town one night and stole 3 good horses from Mexacans. He then rote a letter to Frank Stuart telling us to not come no further, that he did not want to fite us. But if we came to come a shootin. This was strate goods but we had it to face. As you will see later we had all went deeply in debt while we was there and expected Charley to come with a picket full of monnie from Las Vagas. But when he come we was broke. He got to gambling up there and lost all the monnie the LX firm started him with and he had to give a check on them for the corn, so we had to give checks here they same way.
Cal Polk’s hairy tales of what the posse was up to in Anton Chico have been published elsewhere. Whether they are true or not, we will probably never know, although an unpublished memoir, Deep Trails in the West, dictated to a friend in 1942 by Frank Clifford, the man known to his fellow possemen as “Big Foot Wallace,” suggests that even if Polk was stretching the truth, he wasn’t stretching it very far:
The morning we left Anton Chico, it was snowing. There was already about five inches of snow on the ground. By the time we stopped at noon, snow was from eight to ten inches deep. We made a dry camp, and melted snow to water our horses. Before we could get started again, Pat Garrett, sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico, and Frank Stewart, cattle detective for the Canadian Cattle Association, and another man [Barney Mason] rode into camp. Pat told us that the “Kid” was down by Fort Sumner, and had a large bunch of Canadian River cattle that he was aiming to start for Old Mexico with in the morning. This couldn’t be true, as nobody could go any distance through a snowstorm like that with a big bunch of cattle. There would be nothing for them to eat. Bob Boberson and Charley Siringo immediately told Pat so. They demeaned him, and didn’t mince words either.
Pat insisted he was telling it straight, and after a long argument, Bob and Charley agreed to leave it to their men personally to decide who would go with Pat. We split up exactly even, seven went, and seven wouldn’t go. I was one who didn’t. We took the wagons and went on to White Oaks, reaching there on the day before Christmas. I remember the date, because just at midnight Christmas Eve, a lot of us slipped out of the saloon and turned loose our artillery, firing two or three salvos in to the air by way of saluting the new Christmas morning. When we went back into the saloon the first thing we saw there was Pinto Tom (Longworth), the lanky, red-headed Marshall of White Oaks, crawling out from under a billiard table, which cost Pinto Tom several rounds of drinks before morning. He thought the “Kid” and his gang had come in and were shooting up the town, as he dived under the table for safety. I never heard of the “Kid’s” shooting up a town just for fun, but folks always seemed to be afraid he was going to!
The hunt for Billy the Kid would get results in December 1880, culminating in his capture by a Sheriff Garrett-led posse on the 23rd at a rock house (once used as a forage station) at Stinking Springs (Ojo Hediendo) east of Fort Sumner near Taliban. Among those who set down their versions of the pursuit and capture of the Kid were Siringo, Polk and another Kid chaser, Louis “The Animal” Bousman. All stick pretty close to Garrett’s account. Jim East, however, adds telling detail that appears in none of the others. Although one or two writers have cited it, this is the first time his account of the hunting of the Kid has been published in its entirety.
We crossed to the Piedrenal Springs where we struck the breaks of the Pecos. We left our camp at daylight, rode all day without anything to eat, rode that night and next day about five o’clock we got to Puerta [Puerto] de Luna on the Pecos…. I remember how good chuck tasted there…after we had been without for so long. We spent the night there, and as our horses were played out we stayed there the next day…. We slept in a house that night, as it was very cold. Our party was made up of James East, Lee Hall and Lon Chambers from the LX; and Emory, Bausman and Williams from the LIT.
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One Comment to “The Hunting of Billy the Kid”
Where can I get information on Pinto Tom Longworth?
By Shirley Grammer on Aug 5, 2008 at 4:37 pm