Infamous America - BILLY THE KID Ep. 1 | "Henry Antrim alias Kid"

Episode Date: November 6, 2019

A mischievous boy becomes a petty thief. The petty thief becomes a drifter. The drifter becomes a killer. The mysterious and scattered life of Henry McCarty begins in the American West. For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and enjoyed a joke. He liked to gamble, but ignored tobacco and rarely drank whiskey. He loved to sing and dance, and his abilities came from his mother. He spoke fluent, Spanish and charmed young ladies on the dance floor in two languages. He could read and write, and he preferred moccasins to boots and a sombrero to a cowboy hat. He never knew his father, and even his name has been debated. But one thing that is known, in 1877, Henry McCarty, also called Henry Antrim, otherwise known as the Kid, was around 17 years old. That summer, he killed his first man. It was a hot August evening in the town of Benita. The speck of a settlement sat outside Fort Grant, a small military outpost about 60 miles from

Tucson in southern Arizona territory. On this night, the blacksmith from Fort Grant, an Irishman named Frank Cahill, was playing cards at George Atkins Cantina. And, as always, he was talking. Kayhill earned the nickname Windy because he told stories non-stop, stringing them together one after another. At his table, said Henry Antrim, whom everyone called Kid Antrim. He was no more than 17 years old, and his baby face and slender frame made him look younger. The kid had endured torments from the loudmouthed Windy Cahill on several occasions. The blustery Irishmen like to knock the kid around and tussle his hair and not make fun of him at every opportunity. But on this night, the kid reached his breaking point.

As they sat at the table, Wendy Cahill continued his loud talk, and the situation grew heated as the blacksmith and the kid traded insults. Cahill called the kid a pimp. The kid called Cahill a son of a bitch. Cahill dove at the kid. They crashed to the floor and wrestled all the way outside and into the dusty street. Cahill pinned their kid to the ground, but the kid wrenched an arm free and grabbed the 45 caliber pistol that was stuffed into his pants. The kid jammed the gun into Cahill's side and pulled the trigger. A slug tore through the Irishman's abdomen. As windy Cahill collapsed into the dust, the kid realized the severity of his actions. He leapt to his feet and ran down the street.

He jumped onto a horse that wasn't his and galloped out of Benita. He didn't stand to his. He didn't stopped writing until he was all the way out of Arizona territory. The kid had committed other crimes in the last three years, but none as serious as murder. If Cahill died and gutshot men almost always did, then the 17-year-old drifter would be a murderer, and that label stuck with a person forever. Cahill lingered for several agonizing hours, during which he dictated his last will and testament. In it, he said he was born in Galway, Ireland, and died in Arizona territory, killed by a young man called Henry Antrim. After Cahill succumbed to his wound, a coroner's jury of six men declared that the death of

Frank Cahill was criminal and unjustifiable, and they found a single young man guilty of the act. Henry Antrim, alias kid. Henry never set foot in Arizona again, and by the time he resurfaced in New Mexico, he had adopted a new name, but the alias stayed with him. Now he called himself William H. Bonnie, which was eventually shortened to Billy the Kid. From Black Barrel Media, welcome to a new season of infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer.

In this season, we're telling the story of the most notorious outlaw in the history of the American West, Billy the Kid. This is Chapter 1, Henry Antrim, alias Kid. New York City was burning. It had been burning for four days and nights in the sweltering mid-July heat. Mobs of men in the hundreds rampaged through the streets. They torched homes and businesses. They beat, stabbed, stoned, hanged, and even burned African Americans who were unlucky

enough to fall into their hands. These were the New York City draft riots that engulfed a portion of Manhattan in the summer of 1863. The Civil War was in its second year, and no one thought it would last this long. Some said it would be a 90-day war that would feature very little bloodshed. But the first Battle of Bull Run, or Manassas, as the Confederates called it, proved otherwise. And then one battle after another showed the country that this would be a war of attrition. Two massive armies would mall each other across a thousand miles of American territory

until one side or the other could not continue. But that outcome was still two years in the future. Now, in 1863, the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, instituted the first military draft in American history. It took effect in April, and it said that any able-bodied man between the ages of 20 and 35 was eligible, and any man from 35 to 45, who was not married, was also eligible. But there were two loopholes.

A man could hire a substitute to, to take his place, or he could pay $300 to the government to avoid enlistment. In July, the draft came to New York City. The wealthy bought their way out of service, so the burden of being forced into a war fell on the lower classes, many of whom were Irish immigrants who had fled their home country after it had been devastated by famine. They had come to America just simply to survive, and now they could be drafted and sent to war, and they increasingly saw the war as a fight to liberate slaves, which was the last thing

they cared about. In cities like New York, immigrants competed with African Americans for the lowest paying jobs. Now, immigrants were eligible for the draft, and African Americans were not, because they weren't citizens. Anger and resentment exploded into five days of riots as mobs tore through the streets, destroying property and killing those they blamed for their troubles. The violence finally stopped when Union soldiers rushed into the city. Those soldiers were fresh off the battlefield at Gettysburg. The largest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere had taken place just 10 days earlier. When the New York City draft riots finally died down, Billy the Kid was around four years old, and he might have witnessed the entire thing.

The most common theory is that Billy was born in the slums of New York in 1859, possibly in the squalid and crime-ridden district known as the Five Points. If you read the book Gangs of New York or saw the movie, that's the neighborhood we're talking about. His mother's name was Catherine, and she was a refugee from Ireland. She probably settled somewhere in lower Manhattan, which was home to scores of Irish immigrants. History records her last name as McCarty, but she told a census taker in Indianapolis that the name had come from her husband, Michael McCarty, who was also an Irish immigrant, and who had died in the Civil War. If that was true, then we don't know her maiden name.

Sometime between the New York draft riots of 1863 and the end of the war in 1865, she escaped New York and turned up in Indianapolis. By that time, she had two boys, Henry and Joseph. Henry was small and slight. Joseph was bigger, which caused most people at the time to believe he was the older of the two brothers, but no one knows for sure. During the few years that Catherine and her two boys spent in Indianapolis, she met a new suitor, William Antrim. Catherine was 13 years older than William, but they grew close and developed some sort of relationship

because by 1870, the informal family unit had moved to Wichita, Kansas. Wichita was a raw frontier town that seemed to sprout out of the Kansas prairie like a weed. William Antrim bought land outside of town and began farming while Catherine and the boys lived in town. Catherine began a laundry business that quickly gained respect in the community. When the first issue of the Wichita Tribune newspaper rolled off the presses, March 15th, 1871, the publisher listed her laundry on the roster of businesses in town. It was called City Laundry, and the paper said it was a good place to get your linens cleaned. With the arrival of the first herds of Texas cattle that were driven north along the Chisholm Trail,

the dusty little village of Wichita exploded into a full-blown boomtown. The population surged, new buildings rose in record time, and rowdiness increased expert. exponentially as Texas cowboys blew off steam after weeks on the trail with nothing for company but dirty, stinking cows. 15 to 20,000 cattle passed through Wichita every week in the spring and summer, and they brought with them hordes of flies beyond counting. Around that time, Catherine decided the bustling city center was no place for two young boys who were somewhere between the ages of 10 and 15. She and the boys moved several miles outside of town to a cabin that William built on a plot of land.

She and William had been frequent and successful investors in land in the area. They bought and sold plots almost constantly during their time in Wichita. But living outside the chaos of town was no picnic. The prairie was unforgiving. Settlers contended with droughts, floods, blizzards, wind, rain, hail, snows. snakes and plagues of frogs and grasshoppers, and worst of all, fire. Prairie fires scorched the earth black and ate everything in sight at seemingly impossible speeds. So it may have been for all of these things, or none of them, that Catherine, her two boys, and William Mantrum,

abandoned Wichita less than three years after arriving. She probably didn't like Wichita's transformation into a hell-raising cow town that would need the services of a young lawman named Wyatt Earp two years from now, but she also had a more serious need for change. She had developed tuberculosis. The disease was a slow killer, but it always won. In the 1800s, it was a death sentence. Doctors simply said, go west.

Find a dry climate with clear air at high altitudes. That'll buy you some time, but that's all it would do. So that's what Catherine did. She and her two sons and William Antrim left Wichita and headed west. But for two years, they disappeared from the record. Little Henry McCarty's brother Joseph said later in life that they went to Denver, but his memory was notoriously bad and there are no accounts of the clan in the Mile High City. Wherever they spent their missing years, when they popped back up on the grid again,

it was cause for celebration. Billy Antrim and Catherine McCarty were getting married. It was March 1st, 1873 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Henry and Joseph were witnesses to their mother's marriage, and at that time, their names changed from McCarty to Antrim. Not long after the ceremony, the family moved to its final destination, Silver City, in the southwest corner of New Mexico Territory. This is where Henry McCarty,

now called Henry Antrim, would spend his formative years. He would learn to read and write. He would make friends and play with other boys and get into mischief. He would be drawn to Hispanic culture and tradition. But he would also lose his mother. His stepfather would drift away, and without their guidance, he was easily influenced by the criminal element in Silver City. It wouldn't be long before he felt the bite of shackles on his wrists for the first time, and escaped from jail from the first time, and ran away from the law for the first time. Silver City was a classic boomtown of the American West, and its name was literal. A wealthy silver deposit had been found in the area, and as always, miners flocked to the site

and began ripping the ore out of the ground as fast as possible. Silver City didn't so much grow as it erupted along the banks of a creek that would eventually run through the center of town. By the time the Antrim family arrived in the summer of 1873, it would have looked eerily familiar, at least to some extent. Silver City and Wichita would have felt like two sides of the same coin. Wichita was a hell-raising boomtown built on the cattle industry, and Silver City was a hell-raising boomtown built on the mining industry. In Silver City, the saloons were open 24 hours a day and were packed with dirty men straight-finding. from the mines. But unlike many boom towns, Silver City had staying power. Businesses of every kind lined the dusty streets, and William Antrim worked odd jobs around town after the family's

arrival. He did some carpentry and worked in a butcher shop while he learned the mining business. The Antrims moved into a cabin on the corner of Maine and Broadway, and Catherine quickly took up some of her old labors. She ran an informal laundry service, and baked cakes for sale. During the last year of her life, Catherine made an impression on the town of Silver City. She was known as a lively woman who loved to sing and dance,

and she passed these talents to her son Henry. Henry and his brother Joseph made friends with the local boys, and they ran the streets looking for entertainment when they weren't doing chores or getting an education in Silver City's first public school. Henry must have been a natural student because there are numerous accounts of him being an avid reader. He seemed to enjoy books of all kinds, including dime novels and the Police Gazette.

And it was said he had another quality that set him apart from his friends. He could write with both hands. In a couple years, his compatriots known as the regulators would also comment on this quality, but they referred to his ability to shoot with both hands. Henry Antrim's routine of school, chores, and playing with his friends in the streets of Silver City didn't last long. His mother's health was failing. She probably tried everything to delay the effects of tuberculosis, including an extended stay at a Hot Springs hotel, but nothing worked. By the summer of 1874, a little over a year after the family's arrival in Silver City, Catherine was bedridden.

She was dying, and there was nothing anyone could do but wait. To make matters worse for Henry and Joseph, their stepfather William Antrim had been spending more and more time out of town at his mining claims. William was determined to strike it rich, and it seemed to be the only priority in his life. On Wednesday, September 14, 1874, Catherine died in her bed. She was 45 years old. Henry, Joseph, and a neighbor Clara Truesdale were there. William Antrim was not.

The next year of Henry's life was a slow, downward spiral. He didn't sink into a deep depression as might be expected, but he gradually fell under the influence of petty criminals that would change his life forever. After Catherine's death, Henry moved in with the Truesdale family. Gerald and Clara Truesdale were pillars of the community. Their son Chauncey was good friends with Henry, and Clara had been a friend to Catherine in the final year of her life. Henry worked in the hotel that Gerald had recently bought and generally helped out where he could in exchange for his room and board.

Henry's brother Joe went to live with Joseph Dyer, the man who owned a popular saloon called the Orleans Club. Joe Antrim became an errand boy for Mr. Dyer and spent much of his time around the saloon. As the winner of 1874 passed into the spring of 1875, Henry Antrim began to have problems. He was 15 or 16 years old and started to become an independent young man. In the summer of 1875, he was forced to move out of the Truesdale home for a reason that has never been fully explained, but it probably wasn't good. He moved in with a Mrs. Brown, who was probably the wife of a local bartender, Henry worked in a butcher shop and attended school, and when he wasn't at either of those places, he was in the Orleans club with his brother receiving an education of a different type.

He quickly learned to play poker, and he was good at it. He was a smart young man, bright and alert. And at this time in his life, another physical characteristic brought him attention. He was said to have dancing eyes, and that trait was explained by a man who was about to have an unintentional. but profound impact on Henry's life. Harvey Whitehill said, His eyes never were at rest, but continually shifted and roved, much like his own rebellious nature.

Henry's rebellious nature was about to be put to use by a petty thief, which would put the teenager on a collision course with Mr. Whitehill, who had just been named Sheriff of Silver City. The previous sheriff, Charles McIntosh, had disappeared, likely running off to Mexico. And when he did, he stole maybe as much as $3,000 from the county. In the spring of 1875, voters elected Harvey Whitehill to take McIntosh's place. Over the course of the summer, Henry's life at the Truesdale home deteriorated and he moved

into Mrs. Brown's home. Also boarding at Mrs. Brown's home was a stone mason named George Schaefer, who wore a sombrero and love to get drunk and steal things. Henry quickly fell under the spell of the hard-drinking thief. In early September, George Schaefer, nicknamed Sombrero Jack because of his hat, broke into the home of the owner of a Chinese laundry. He stole about $200 worth of goods that included clothing, guns, and blankets. He hid the loot outside of town and then offered Henry a cut of the profits to be made

by selling the stolen merchandise if Henry would smuggle some of it into town. Henry agreed, and he naively kept the stolen goods in his room where Mrs. Brown promptly found them. Mrs. Brown told Sheriff Harvey Whitehill that she had discovered stolen stuff in Henry's room, and Sheriff Whitehill arrested Henry. It was actually the second time the sheriff arrested the young man. Henry had stolen several pounds of butter earlier in the summer, and sold it to local merchants. His guilt was clearly established, but he seemed to be genuinely apologetic for the crime.

Sheriff Whitehill let him go when Henry promised to stay on his best behavior. He did, for a few weeks, until Sombrero Jack robbed the home of the laundry owner. Now Henry had been caught red-handed again, and this time the sheriff had to punish him. White Hill took Henry to the town jail and locked him up. White Hill only meant to scare the boy into staying out of trouble, but of course, Henry didn't know that.

All he knew was that the next court session in Silver City wasn't until mid-December, three months from now, and he was not going to sit in jail that long. After a couple days in jail, Henry complained that he needed exercise. Sheriff Whitehill and his jailer led Henry out of his cell and allowed him to walk up and down the corridor. Then the two men left the jail and locked the doors behind them. When they returned a little while later, Henry was gone. He could not have escaped by using the door, so the two men were baffled. The sheriff ran outside and saw a man standing on a ridge behind the jail.

He asked the man if he had seen anyone running away from the jail. The man said, yes, a young man crawled out of the chimney and ran away. Sheriff Whitehill hurried back to the jail. He went to the old fireplace against the wall and peered up the chimney. He saw handprints and footprints smeared into the dark soot that covered the inside of the chimney. Henry Antrim, a small, skinny teenager, had squeezed up the chimney and scaled down the outside to freedom. After his jail break, Henry fled to Arizona, but there were conflicting stories about how he got there. Several people said they helped him after his escape.

The Truesdale family claimed he ran to their house and spent the night with them before Clara put him on a stage the next day. Mrs. Brown said Henry had come to her house and she had put him on a stage coach. Other people who knew Henry told similar stories. Whomever he stayed with, and however he made it out of Silver City, two things were certain. He was a criminal on the run for the first time in his life,

and he was headed for Arizona. No one knows the location of Henry's first stop in Arizona, but it was most likely the small mining town of Clifton. That was the end of the line for the stagecoach, and that was where Henry's stepfather William was prospecting for riches. Sheriff Whitehill always thought that Henry found his stepfather and asked for help, but William refused. History might have been completely different if William Antrim had been willing to assist his runaway stepfather,

son, but he wasn't. So Henry found himself alone, homeless, and penniless in a land he didn't know. Just like the span of time between Wichita and Santa Fe, Henry Antrim virtually disappeared from the record. For about two years, he was just another one of the uncountable young men who drifted through the American West after the Civil War. He would have looked for any kind of work wherever he could find it. One account says he briefly found a job at Henry Hooker's Sierra Benita Ranch. The foreman said he hired Henry, but the teenager didn't last very long because he was too small and slender to handle the physical work of a ranch hand. If Henry stopped at Hooker's ranch, it would have been just a handful of years before Hooker became a friend and ally of Wyatt Earp

and Doc Holliday as they tracked the killers who had attacked Wyatt's family after the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. None of the jobs that Henry tried lasted very long, and soon enough, he teamed up with a horse thief named John Mackey. Mackie was a former soldier who was 10 years older than Henry, and once the pair joined forces, they started stealing horses from the army. Soldiers were often easy targets. When they left their forts, they rode down to the rough and rowdy saloons and dance halls that inevitably sprang up near army camps. While the soldiers occupied themselves inside, they tied their horses outside. Henry and John unhitched the horses and slipped away into the night.

But they weren't the greatest horse thieves in the world. They were caught numerous times, and each time they were allowed to go free, or in Henry's case, escaped custody. Henry proved to be a much better escape artist than a thief, and it was his final jailbreak in Arizona that put him on a collision. collision course with a long-winded Irishman named Frank Cahill. At some point while Henry was locked in the guardhouse at Fort Grant, an officer requested a set of shackles to be made to prevent the kid from escaping. The blacksmith who made those shackles was Frank Cahill. Cahill had delighted in messing with the slender young man since his arrival in the Fort Grant area, and he no doubt took great pleasure in slamming a set of leg irons around Henry's

ankles. But the ankle bracelets didn't stop Henry, who at this point was known as Kid Antrim. Somehow, Henry escaped from the Fort Grant Guard House, shackles and all. But as was his habit, which would get him killed a few years from now, the kids stayed in an area where he was comfortable, despite his troubles. That's how he found himself at George Atkins' canteena on Friday, August 17th, 1877. sitting across a card table from Frank Cahill. As always, Cahill spat verbal abuses at the kid. But this time, the kids spat them right back. Cahill wasn't a tall man, but he was thick and burly.

After they traded insults, Cahill bull rushed the kid outside. He pinned Henry to the ground and was about to start pummeling him when the kid grabbed a pistol out of his pants and shot Cahill in the side. Cahill toppled off the kid clutching his bleeding wound. The kid jumped to his feet and sprinted away from the scene. He stole a horse and galloped out of the Fort Grant area and clear out of Arizona territory. The next day, Frank Cahill used his final words to swear a statement that listed,

among other things, the name of his killer. Henry Antrim, alias Kid. Next time on Infamous America, rival forces align themselves in southeastern New Mexico with a town called Lincoln at the center of a pattern of violence and lawlessness. A group of ruthless Irishmen form a corrupt organization that rules Lincoln with an iron fist. Then a Scotsman and an Englishman team up to compete with the Irishmen and their actions set in motion a new wave of destruction that won't stop for three years.

That's next week on Season 3, Billy the Kid. Research assistance for this season was provided by Aaron Ailsworth. Original music by Rob Valier. Editing and sound design by Dave Harrison. I'm your writer and host, Chris Wimmer. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. Please visit our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, for more details, and join us on social media. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram

and B-Barrel Media on Twitter. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.