Billy the New Yorker

THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

“The Overlook” appears every Wednesday at tomclavin.substack.com. If you enjoy the column, please “like” it and let me know what you think by commenting. All support is appreciated. Don’t forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!

[Next Tuesday, July 14, is the 145^th anniversary of the killing of Billy the Kid by Sheriff Pat Garrett. Rather than dwell on death, though, let’s focus on the fact that one of the most famous figures of the 19th-century American West was born in the most famous of East Coast cities, New York. Here is an excerpt from a work in progress:]

It can safely be stated that few people – if any – have delved into the background of Billy the Kid more extensively than Frederick Nolan, author of The Billy the Kid Reader, and James B. Mills, author of the comprehensive Billy the Kid: El Bandido Simpatico. Both detail the various histories that have survived through the decades, including that Billy was born in Utica, New York, or in Indiana, and in 1859 or 1860. There have also been competing claims that he was born in November or another month.

Rather than spend pages listing the origin scenarios – especially the more outlandish ones, such as Billy being born in Missouri in 1855 -- let’s look at the consensus that Billy’s story, as far as we do know, began in Ireland.

Catherine Devine was born somewhere in Ireland, in 1828. With her twin sister, Bridget, she emigrated to the United States in 1850. The previous decade had seen the population of Ireland decrease from 8.1 million to 6.5 million. With famine raging through the country, literally starving entire families to death, surely America had to be infinitely better.

Most likely, Bridget and Catherine traveled in steerage. This was the lowest-class, cheapest accommodation on 19th and early 20th-century steamships, characterized by extreme overcrowding, filth, and disease. Immigrants were packed into dark, poorly ventilated cargo holds with stacked bunk beds, often enduring unbearable stench, lack of privacy, and poor food for weeks.

Like thousands of other young Irish immigrants in New York, the Devine twins lived in crowded, squalid housing. They may or may not have married. Some researchers contend that a man named McCarty was another Irish immigrant who married Catherine and sired her children. He either served in the Union Army and was killed during the war or was one of the victims of the violent draft riots in New York City.

Some research indicates that there were four McCarty children, and that the first one was named Bridget. The girl’s fate is unknown. A grave in the Calvary Cemetery in Queens, New York, lists a Mary Ann McCarty who was born on August 15, 1855, and died on August 13, 1856. Also unknown is when the sisters Catherine and Bridget went their separate ways.

There are many claims as to where and when her next two children, boys, were born. However, as Michael Wallis states in Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride: “The largest number of reliable authors and scholars of western history contend that Henry McCarty was born on the eve of the Civil War [November 1859] in the bowels of an Irish neighborhood in New York City. If, indeed, his birthplace was New York, no records that can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he ever lived there have ever been uncovered.”

And one more mention about various claims: Was Henry the older of Catherine’s two sons? Most scholars have settled on Joseph McCarty – known as “Josie” – as being the younger, born in 1863. Not that he helped researchers much over the years. In 1930, when Josie died, the death certificate listed his age as 76, which meant a birth year of 1854. But in an 1880 census and one five years later, he had given his age as 17 and 21, respectively, with arithmetic telling us the birth year was 1863 or 1864.

Wisely moving on in his biography Billy the Kid: A Short & Violent Life, Robert Utley writes, “Except as an irritatingly elusive question, it makes little difference which. Henry came out of New York’s Irish slums, but he made his name and fame in New Mexico.”

Conditions in the lower Manhattan Irish neighborhoods did not improve between the time the Devine sisters arrived and when Catherine McCarty was trying to raise two sons, for one reason or another, without a husband. In the 1860s, according to Michael Wallis, the three of them “experienced a place that was later branded the ‘modern Gomorrah.’ This most Irish of American cities, where in 1860 almost one-quarter of the city’s 813,669 residents were Irish, was a veritable breeding ground for the criminal classes and wholesale corruption on all levels.”

A typical Irish neighborhood at the time contained thousands of people who “dwelled in rat-infested houses” and tried to survive “crime, alcoholism, opium addiction, and of course grinding poverty.”

Catherine McCarty concluded that such a violent and destitute environment – certainly not what she envisioned when she escaped Ireland -- was sooner or later going to envelop her sons. No doubt many mothers came to the same conclusion, but Catherine did something about it. Packing up her boys and meager savings, she headed west. The McCartys would wind up in Indiana, where they would meet her next – or possibly first – husband.

His full name was William Henry Harrison Antrim, but he was called simply Bill. He was an Indiana native, having been born in Huntsville on December 1, 1842, one of eight children whose parents were Levi and Ada Antrim. They owned a hotel named the Railroad House and their children grew up on a steady diet of menial chores, including washing dishes and waiting on tables.

Bill Antrim was named in honor of William Henry Harrison who continues to have the dubious distinction of the shortest American presidency, though not by choice. The day of Harrison’s inauguration—March 4, 1841—was wet and cold. The 68-year-old new president, however, opted to forego an overcoat or top hat. His inaugural address totaled 8445 words and took nearly two hours to deliver. What Harrison received in return in addition to unenthusiastic applause was pneumonia and, later, severe diarrhea. He died April 4, after just 31 days in office and just less than a year before Bill Antrim was conceived. More recent scholarship suggests that the White House’s drinking water was contaminated by public sewage and that Harrison may have died from septic shock.

Bill Antrim served in the Union Army during the war, but it was little more than a peaceful interlude. In June 1863, age 21, he enlisted as a 90-day volunteer in Company I, 54th Regiment, and sure enough, he was honorably discharged in September. Like the other members of the regiment, Antrim had spent his time on guard duty at Camp Morton. The closest he came to combat was Company I being deployed to engage in a brief skirmish with a Confederate force which had invaded Kentucky. A brother, Levi Columbus Antrim, had a considerably less quiet term of service in the Union Army. The corporal was killed on July 3, 1863, at the Battle of Gettysburg and his grave is in the National Cemetery there.

Antrim lived in Indianapolis while working in a variety of jobs as a laborer, a teamster, and express company clerk. At some point in 1865, he met a newcomer to the city who lived a few blocks away, Catherine McCarty, who claimed that she was a widow raising two boys on her own. It is generally accepted that they met when Bill delivered a package to where Catherine, Henry, and Josie were living.

Though there was an age difference of at least a dozen years, the Civil War “veteran” and the “widow” began a relationship. It may have been platonic at first but it did develop into a more serious one. And in 1870, the four-member family – the boys called Antrim “Uncle Billy” -- hit the road.

Perhaps Catherine thought that Indianapolis was also not a healthy environment for her sons or, like thousands of other people at the dawn of a new decade, they got restless and wanted to head west. Whatever the reason, the family’s next stop was Kansas.

Among the many distinguishing details about Wichita is that this confluence of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas Rivers had served as a trading center and meeting place for nomadic hunting people for at least 11,000 years. Evidence derived from archeological digs indicates actual human habitation going back to 3,000 B.C.

The area was visited by the conquistador Francisco Vasquez de Coronado in 1541 during his search for the mythic City of Gold. While there, he encountered a group of natives whom he called Quiviras, later identified by archaeological and historical studies as the Wichita. By 1719, these people had moved south to present-day Oklahoma. They had returned by 1864, when the first permanent settlement in Wichita, a collection of grass houses inhabited by the tribe, was established. It is believed that the Wichita tribe left Oklahoma because of their unwelcome support for the Union during the Civil War.

There was soon a small expansion when the frontiersman Jesse Chisholm, a half-white, half-Indian who was illiterate but who spoke multiple Native languages, established a trading post at the site which proved popular with the Wichita tribe. His travels took him to points south along a trail into Oklahoma and eventually into Texas that became known as the Chisholm Trail, which soon became legendary in Western lore. Until it became obsolete in the late 1800s thanks to the proliferation of railroad tracks, the 900-mile-plus route was used to drive over five million head of cattle to market, playing a key role in post-Civil War westward expansion. *

[FOOTNOTE *: Alas, Jesse Chisholm did not get to reap any rewards from the trail named after him. In 1868 – in March or April, when he was 62 or 63 -- he went on a camping trip with friend to Left Hand Spring, on a northern bank of the Canadian River in Oklahoma. He died from food poisoning at the camp after eating bear’s grease contaminated by a melted brass pot (as if the bear grease by itself wasn’t enough). His burial processions were led by Comanche chief Ten Bears, who honored Chisholm with a peace medal.]

By 1870, the business leaders in Wichita were the commercial buffalo hunters and traders James R. Mead, from Iowa; William Greiffenstein, from Germany; and William Mathewson, who was “Buffalo Bill” before Buffalo Bill Cody was. These men led the initial commercial development of the area, becoming key landowners.

Hunters, farmers, and Indians in the area all turned to the newborn tiny settlement as a principal trading center. Meanwhile, Wichita’s entrepreneurs began an aggressive sales campaign to lure more settlers -- their future customers and tenants -- to the area, with the “boosterism” typical of successful early prairie settlements. When the city, on the east bank of the Arkansas River, was officially incorporated, among the signatories on the town charter was Catherine McCarty.

That she had been the only woman to sign the incorporation petition and that she was the proprietor of a successful business – the city laundry – indicates that Catherine McCarty had bought into Wichita as a boom town and she could raise her sons there. It was not a city like Indianapolis – in the summer of 1870, all of Sedgwick County in Kansas had only 600 residents – and the frontier offered many possibilities.

According to Richard Utelain in Thunder in the West, “Catherine was a spunky, ambitious widow, not a penniless, desperate woman. She was an American willing to speculate on the future of her family and herself in a raw frontier town.”

Bill Antrim had simply agreed to go along or he too was displaying some ambition – or, it was gold fever. He had gotten the get-rich-quick bug, but for now, his fever was manageable.

And the 11-year-old Henry McCarty, the young man who as Billy the Kid would be one of the most significant figures in the American West, was finally in the American West.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books, the latest being Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, published in May by St. Martin’s Press. Please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com to purchase a copy.