Billy the Kid was a famous Old West outlaw. How his Indiana ties shaped his roots and fate
In the mid-1860s, as Indianapolis swelled with throngs of Civil War soldiers and newcomers, an Irish immigrant guided her two young sons home down graveled streets.
One of the boys would become a gambler and dealer who mingled with high-rollers at tables around the country. The other would become a Wild West legend.
He would amass a group of loyal friends, steal cattle and horses, escape jail in astounding fashion and aggravate powerful men whose names would never be as well-known as his.
He would be Billy the Kid.
While the outlaw became famous in the New Mexico Territory, the Kid’s lesser-known connections to Indiana played a large, if under-acknowledged, role in his upbringing and fate. Billy spent some of his childhood years in post-Civil War Indianapolis, where the addresses of his mother and the Hoosier who became his stepfather offer insight into the family's dynamics and westward migration.
And toward the end of his short life, Billy would strike a deal to clear his slate of violence with New Mexico Territory Gov. Lew Wallace, a fellow Hoosier who in the long run would not grant him amnesty.
What he looked like: Rare photo shows Billy the Kid and the man who shot him, experts say
More than 140 years after his death at about age 21, Billy still can't shake the halo — or horns — formed by often exaggerated claims of his misdeeds and adventures. He's the iconic “good bad boy," as True West Magazine co-owner and editor Bob Boze Bell puts it. While dramas like "Young Guns" and the current "Billy the Kid" MGM+ series have offered their own takes, historians have long worked to remove the shroud of mystery that cloaks the real man.
And Indianapolis might hold more clues.
A $1,000 reward and two Hoosiers' secret meeting
On a March night in 1879, Billy stood in the doorway of an old squire's home in the town of Lincoln in the New Mexico Territory — a threshold he hoped would provide a fresh start.
Billy wasn't yet the infamous outlaw who'd be falsely accused of decapitating a kitten or stabbing a man who insulted his mother. Instead, the Kid, whose alias was William H. Bonney, was a charismatic young gunslinger with fierce loyalty to his friends, a habit of stealing and a way with women.
In front of Billy stood Brookville, Indiana, native Wallace, then-territory governor and the Kid's chance to clear his violent record. When he heard of Wallace's appointment, Billy was said to have remarked that he and the new governor "ought to get along real cozy" since they hailed from the same state, as historian Robert N. Mullin detailed in a monograph about the Kid’s boyhood.
The previous year had seen the beginning of the Lincoln County War — a fight ignited between a group called the House, who controlled lucrative supply contracts in the area, and John Tunstall, a rival English rancher and merchant looking to make a fortune. Each faction hired hands who engaged in shootouts as the competition escalated.
"They were violent, and they had no problem with going in, starting a gunfight and killing people — either side," said Gail Stephens, author of "Shadow of Shiloh: Major General Lew Wallace in the Civil War."
Billy worked for Tunstall, who was shot dead by a House-affiliated posse. To avenge his death, the Kid and a posse of Tunstall associates killed some of the men who'd been involved.
Wallace, a veteran Civil War general, was tasked with calming the turmoil in the region, and he issued an arrest list of about 35 people. The Kid was on it with indictments for his part in the killings.
Looking to be absolved, an about 19-year-old Billy wrote the 51-year-old governor. Just one month prior, he said, he’d witnessed a House ally fire a revolver into the chest of a rival unarmed lawyer. Billy offered his account as leverage for a deal.
“Dear Sir, I have heard that You will give one thousand $ dollars for my body which as I can understand it means alive as a witness,” he began his March 13, 1879, letter.
Two days later, Wallace invited Billy to the secret night meeting.
The lively Mass Ave that became Billy's home
People have passed down the same tale for generations in Anderson: Billy the Kid was born in a log home on Central Avenue between 10th and 11th streets before his family moved to Indianapolis when he was a young boy.
Madison County Historian Stephen Jackson hasn’t found proof. He can only point to a 1902 interview, in which a former Silver City sheriff who knew Billy from the New Mexico Territory said the Kid had been born in Anderson.
Historians contest the old sheriff’s recollection. Researchers today generally think Billy was born about 1859 in New York, though some remain unconvinced.
Regardless of Billy's birthplace, his family soon landed in Indianapolis. Catherine McCarty, with her sons Billy — then known as Henry McCarty — and Joseph, became part of the city's largest-ever wave of Irish immigrants who sought jobs in quickly growing urban centers on railroad lines.
City directories place the single mother in the areas of what today are the Center for Inquiry School 2 and near the intersection of East and Vermont Streets in 1867 and 1868 respectively, according to city-county archivist Jordan Ryan.
"He certainly spent at least five years or so there in his adolescence from around the age of four or five to around the age of ten, eleven," said James B. Mills, who wrote the 2022 biography "Billy the Kid: El Bandido Simpático." "So he certainly got to know Indianapolis, Indiana, at the time he was there."
Billy was later described as a fun, skinny, intelligent, artistic boy who possessed a quick wit and temper behind “dancing” blue eyes. He would have cast them over nearby Massachusetts Avenue, a growing corridor traversed by wagons and a mule-pulled passenger car.
Among the shops was a grocery off Delaware Street owned by Mr. Clem, who was known to look the other way when schoolboys sampled prunes, a former resident recalled. Some of the small students might have skated on the impromptu ice rink in a sawmill’s gravel pit near North and St. Clair streets. At sundown, a boy would climb a ladder to light streetlamps.
Nearby lived carpenters, shoemakers, bookkeepers, railroad conductors and laborers, said Jeffrey Stroebel, a historian and member of the Massachusetts Avenue Cultural Arts District.
Catherine told those compiling Indianapolis city directories that she was a widow previously married to “Michael,” but historians have been unable to verify his identity. Additional mysteries include her employment, whether Billy attended school, the reason for the family’s move to Indianapolis.
Still, this much remains clear: Catherine met a Hoosier who would later become her boys' stepfather — and influence Billy's future out west.
The Hoosier stepfather who would kick Billy out
William Henry Harrison Antrim was a frugal man who knew his way around a gambling table and who would eventually develop a penchant for mining.
Antrim was born in Huntsville, served in the 54th Indiana Volunteer Infantry and lost a brother to the Battle of Gettysburg. About 1865, when he was around age 23, he met the about 36-year-old Catherine — who was known for her warm personality, jokes and talent for dancing, which she passed on to Billy, according to friends who knew the family later.
How the couple came to know one another is unknown, but Antrim's Indianapolis residences were near hers. Between 1865 and 1868, city directories place him near North Park Avenue and 10th Street, Ryan said. His addresses in the two subsequent years place him in the area of what today would be off College Avenue near Bottleworks.
As a laborer in a government stable, Antrim drove for the Merchants' Union Express Co., which was headquartered at 42 and 44 E. Washington St.
But Billy's future stepfather aspired to more and so did Catherine. By 1870, they had moved to Kansas, where they each bought land and Billy's mother started a laundry. After continuing westward, the two married on March 1, 1873, in Santa Fe in the New Mexico Territory.
The union was short-lived. Catherine died at about age 45 on Sept. 16, 1874, in Silver City after a long battle with tuberculosis. Antrim, who’d gone out prospecting, was not at her deathbed. Upon his return, he housed Billy and Joseph with other families in town.
Billy fell into petty theft and wound up in jail at the hands of a sheriff who, according to accounts of his family and Billy's friends, likely intended to release the young teen after teaching him a lesson.
But the Kid didn’t know that. After shimmying up the jail’s chimney and back to freedom, he eventually sought refuge with William Antrim. His stepfather threw him out, ending their relationship.
About four years later, Billy wrote in that letter to Lew Wallace: "I am called Kid Antrim but Antrim is my stepfathers (sic) name."
The sought-after pardon and the deadly shot
Wallace responded to the Kid's overture with a letter of his own, telling him he had the authority to exempt him from prosecution in exchange for his testimony and asked the Kid to meet in person.
Billy arrived at that secret meeting with a Winchester in his right hand and a revolver in his left to discuss a deal, according to a newspaper interview the governor later gave.
Six days after they met, on March 23, 1879, the governor sent a sheriff to arrest and confine Billy in Lincoln. The actions were a ruse to protect him from those against whom he was to testify.
The Kid held up his end, providing eye-witness testimony against House allies. While Billy waited in confinement, the governor caught a glimpse of his popularity.
"A precious specimen nick-named ‘The Kid’ … is an object of tender regard," Wallace wrote to the secretary of the interior to whom he made periodic reports about life in the territory. "I heard singing and music the other night; going to the door, I found the minstrels of the village actually serenading the fellow in his prison."
But Billy’s slate would never be wiped clean. During the court proceedings, lawyers disparaged him as they argued in favor of House associates and their corrupt business and political allies. The district attorney refused to honor the amnesty deal between Billy and Wallace, who by this time had departed Lincoln to return to Santa Fe and left a representative behind.
When it appeared that no pardon was coming, the Kid just walked out of confinement, mounted a horse and galloped out of town.
Billy's actions after he left — including returning to theft and cattle rustling — did not endear him to those in power. A newspaper article christened him the ringleader of outlaws in the area. The Kid refuted this description in 1880 in one of the follow-up letters he wrote to Wallace, urging him to keep his part of the bargain. Unmoved, the governor put out a $500 reward for Billy's capture.
Billy’s life would end swiftly after that. In April 1881, he was convicted of one of the indictments he’d originally spoken about with Wallace — and then sentenced to be hanged. The Kid again broke out of confinement, killing two guards on his way. Wallace put forth another $500 reward for his capture.
In July of that year, Sheriff Pat Garrett shot Billy in a darkened room of the Fort Sumner home where his sweetheart lived.
The Hoosier details that could solve puzzles
Billy’s story would crescendo into multiple myths — that he survived and lived to a ripe age as Brushy Bill Roberts or, according to a 1901 article in the Silver City Public Library archives, that he escaped to Canada while a sheepherder occupied the grave.
"You can just about gauge how popular a dead person is by the 'he cheated death' aspect of the fame," said Bell, editor of True West Magazine.
Wallace would gain his own measure of fame as well after publishing "Ben-Hur," which he'd worked on at night while in the New Mexico Territory. But his legacy also has been inextricably tied to Billy's thanks to the pardon that never came.
In the early 2000s, late New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a history buff, mulled granting a pardon to Billy posthumously. He ultimately decided not to, in part because of the "historical ambiguity as to why Governor Wallace reneged," he told Good Morning America in 2010.
The decision has not ended arguments over whether Wallace betrayed Billy.
The mysteries surrounding Billy's early years persist, too, as a chasm that historians continue to try and fill. Historian William A. Mills — of no relation to James Mills — said more answers could be buried in Indianapolis' tax, court or other city records.
"That is a part of the picture I see that really, really needs digging," said William Mills, who has been tracing Billy's family and wrote about his brother's life in a 2019 Wild West History Association Journal article.
More answers could help unmask the real person behind the myth-heavy persona that still colors people's opinions of the Kid.
"Everyone thinks they know who Billy was," biographer James Mills said. "But the truth is a lot more interesting than the myth."
Part of that truth lies in Indianapolis.
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Contact IndyStar reporter Domenica Bongiovanni at 317-444-7339 or d.bongiovanni@indystar.com. Follow her on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter: @domenicareports.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Billy the Kid, who was famous in the Old West, had strong Indiana ties
