Henry McCarty, also known as William Henry Bonney was born on November 23, 1859, most likely in New York City. History then traces Billy to Indiana in the late 1860s and Wichita, Kansas, in 1870. His father died around the end of the Civil War and at about the same time Billy's mother contracted tuberculosis and was told to move to a drier climate. On March 1, 1873, she married a man named William Antrim, who moved the family to Silver City, New Mexico. His stepfather worked as a bartender and carpenter but soon got the prospecting bug and virtually ignored his wife and stepsons. Faced with an indigent husband, McCarty's mother took in boarders in order to provide for her sons. Despite the better climate, Billy's mother continued to worsen and on September 16, 1874, she died of her condition. After her death, Antrim placed Billy and his younger brother Joseph in separate foster homes and left Silver City for Arizona. At age 14, the smooth-cheeked, blue-eyed McCarty was forced to find work in a hotel, washing dishes and waiting tables at the restaurant. The manager was impressed by the young boy, boasting that he was the only kid who ever worked for him that didn't steal anything. His school teachers thought that the young orphan was "no more of a problem than any other boy, always quite willing to help with chores around the schoolhouse". However, on September 23, 1875, McCarty was arrested for hiding a bundle of stolen clothes for a man playing a prank on a Chinese laundryman. Two days after Billy was thrown in jail, the scrawny teen escaped by worming his way up the jailhouse chimney. From that point onward McCarty would be a fugitive. He eventually found work as an itinerant ranch hand and sheepherder in southeastern Arizona. In 1877 he became a civilian teamster at Camp Grant Army Post with the duty of hauling logs from a timber camp to a sawmill. The civilian blacksmith at the camp, Frank "Windy" Cahill, took pleasure in bullying young Billy. On August 17 Cahill attacked McCarty after a verbal exchange and threw him to the ground. Billy retaliated by drawing his gun and shooting Cahill, who died the next day. Once again McCarty was in custody, this time in the Camp's guardhouse awaiting the arrival of the local marshal. Before the marshal could arrive, however, Billy escaped. Again on the run, Billy next turned up in the house of Heiskell Jones in Pecos Valley, New Mexico. Apaches had stolen McCarty's horse which forced him to walk many miles to the nearest settlement, which was Mrs. Jones' house. She nursed the young man, who was near death, back to health. The Jones family developed a strong attachment to Billy and gave him one of their horses. Now an outlaw and unable to find honest work, he met up with another bandit named Jesse Evans, who was the leader of a gang of rustlers called "The Boys.” Billy didn't have anywhere else to go and since it was unwise to be alone in the hostile and lawless territory, he reluctantly joined the gang. Billy later became embroiled in the infamous Lincoln County War in which his newest friend and employer, John Tunstall, was killed on February 18, 1878. Billy was deeply affected by the murder, claiming that Tunstall was one of the only men that treated him like he was "free-born and white." Billy would enact revenge by gunning-down the deputy who killed his friend, as well as another deputy and the County Sheriff, William Brady. Now an even more wanted man than before, Billy went into hiding but soon started to steal livestock from white ranchers and Apaches on the Mescalero reservation. In the fall of 1878, retired Union General Lew Wallace became the new territorial governor of New Mexico. In order to restore peace to Lincoln County, Wallace proclaimed an amnesty for any man involved in the Lincoln County War that was not already under indictment. Billy was, of course, under several indictments (some of which unrelated to the Lincoln County War) but Wallace was intrigued by rumors that Billy was willing to surrender himself and testify against other combatants if amnesty could be extended to him. In March 1879 Wallace and Billy met to discuss the possibility of a deal. True to form, Billy greeted the governor with a revolver in one hand and a Winchester rifle in the other. After several days to think the issue over, Billy agreed to testify in return for amnesty. Part of the agreement was for Billy to submit to a show arrest and a short stay in jail until the conclusion of his courtroom testimony. Even though his testimony helped to indict one of the powerful House faction leaders, John Dolan, the district attorney defied Wallace's order to set Billy free after testifying. However, Billy was a skilled escape artist and slipped out of his handcuffs and fled. For the next year he hung around Fort Sumner on the Pecos River and developed a fateful friendship with a local bartender named Pat Garrett who was later elected sheriff of Lincoln County. As sheriff, Garrett was charged with arresting his friend Henry McCarty, who by now was almost exclusively known as "Billy the Kid". At about the same time, Billy had formed a gang, referred to as the "Rustlers" or simply Billy the Kid's Gang, who he survived by stealing and rustling as he did before. Soon, the determined Garrett and his posse tracked the outlaws down to Stinking Springs and surrounded their hideout. The siege continued until the next day, when the bandits surrendered. Billy the Kid and his gang of "Rustlers" were captured on December 23, 1880, and taken to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Billy was jailed in the town of Mesilla while waiting for his April 1881 trial. Deliberation took exactly one day and Billy was convicted of murdering Sheriff William Brady and sentenced to hang by Judge Warren Bristol. His execution was scheduled for May 13th and he was sent to Lincoln to await this date. He was under guard by James Bell and Robert Ollinger on the top floor of the building formerly known as the House before and during the Lincoln County War. On April 28 Billy somehow escaped and killed both of his guards while Garrett was out of town. It is not known how Billy was able to do this, but it is widely believed that a friend or Regulator sympathizer left a pistol in the privy that one of the guards escorted Billy to daily. After shooting Deputy Bell with the pistol, Billy stole Ollinger's 10-gauge double barrel shotgun and waited for Ollinger by the window in the room he was being held in. Ollinger obliged by running immediately from the hotel upon hearing the shots. When he was directly under the window of the courthouse, he heard his prisoner say, "Hello, Bob." Ollinger then looked up and saw the Kid gun in hand. It was the last thing he ever saw as Billy blasted him with his own shotgun killing him instantly. This would be, however, Billy's last escape. When Pat Garrett was questioning Billy's friend Peter Maxwell on July 14, 1881, in Maxwell's darkened bedroom in Old Fort Sumner, Billy unexpectedly entered the room. The Kid didn't recognize Garrett in the poor lighting conditions and asked "¿Quien es? ¿Quien es?" (Spanish for "Who is it? Who is it?), to which Garrett responded with two shots from his revolver, the first striking Billy's heart. Henry McCarty, the infamous "Billy the Kid", was buried in a plot the next day at Fort Sumner's cemetery.
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