Where the West was truly wild

The Tunstall-McSween store was a key site in the Lincoln County war but is now a museum. Picture / Adrian Schofield

It took the law three months to catch up with Billy the Kid after his final jailbreak. I tracked him down in less than a day. Admittedly, I had a couple of advantages over Sheriff Pat Garrett and his posse. William H. Bonney is a heck of a lot easier to find now he is buried in a dusty graveyard on the banks of the Pecos River instead of riding hell-for-leather all over New Mexico.

It is also much easier to follow the Kid's trail when you're driving a mid-size rental car on the long, straight roads that carve through the arid landscape of the American southwest. Garrett and company had to rely on single-horsepower transportation.

Billy was a source of public fascination even before he was shot by Garrett in 1881 and, since then, hundreds of movies have been made and books written about him.

In the past few years, Billy has once again hit the headlines, as a group of historians and the local sheriff are trying to get permission to dig up his grave. They want to clear up the lingering conspiracy theory which claims that Garrett didn't get his man and the Kid died of old age.

The Fort Sumner graveyard isn't the best place to look for Billy, though. You can find a lot more of him in the ghost towns and back roads of southern New Mexico, where his story is ingrained in local folklore.

Driving south out of Albuquerque, I was curious to see how much was left of the Wild West that Billy knew.

My first stop was Lincoln, a small town in the remote Rio Bonito Valley and the scene of Billy's best-known escapades.

Lincoln has become something of a mecca for Western fans, but the town was almost deserted when I visited just after the summer tourist season. I even startled a couple of deer that were wandering undisturbed along the main street.

In the 1880s, Lincoln was not so sleepy. It was known from New York to San Francisco as one of the most violent spots in America, and plenty of people were killed in the gunfights that erupted here.

Strung along the town's main street are about 30 adobe brick buildings, almost all of which date to Billy's era.

Lincoln died out about the turn of the century, and it remains one of the best-preserved relics of the Old West. The entire town is designated as a New Mexico state monument.

To follow in the Kid's footsteps, I stayed at a bed-and-breakfast called the Casa de Patron, which was a hotel and store in Lincoln's wilder days. Billy often partied at this house, and was imprisoned in one of its rooms for nearly a month after he turned himself in at the urging of New Mexico Governor Lew Wallace.

If you're the only person in the old house late at night, as I was, it is easy to imagine that every creak could be Billy, still stalking the scenes of his youth. They call them ghost towns for a reason, don't they?

The Tunstall-McSween Store is still in the centre of town, a key site in the bloody Lincoln County war that first brought the Kid notoriety. He was one of John Tunstall's famous regulators who rode against the gunmen of local cattle tycoons Lawrence Murphy and Jimmy Dolan.

The building was still a general store until the 1950s, but now it operates as a museum. The store's long verandah over the wooden board sidewalk looks like a set straight out of a Western movie.

Crunching down a gravel path beside the store, I found the old corral where Billy and his pal Jim French hid to gun down the corrupt Sheriff Brady as he walked along the main street.

No ghost town would be complete without its graves, and behind the corral site are the simple wooden crosses marking the resting places of Tunstall and Alexander McSween, both killed during the Lincoln County war.

At one end of the town is the enormous, brooding Murphy-Dolan store, which was known throughout New Mexico as the Big House. After the Lincoln war it became the courthouse, and it was from here the Kid made the most famous of his escapes after being captured by Garrett.

There is still debate over how he did it, but Billy overpowered and shot his guard as he was being escorted from the outhouse. Deputy US Marshal Bob Ollinger heard the shot from across the street and came running.

Visitors can gaze out of the same second-storey window Billy did, and imagine the surprised look on Ollinger's face when he looked up and saw his own shotgun in the hands of his former prisoner. According to witnesses, the outlaw smiled and said, "Hello, Bob" just before he shot the marshal.

A few miles along the highway to the west is White Oaks, even more of a ghost town than Lincoln. It was once a thriving mine settlement, and some of the deepest gold mines in the country honeycomb the surrounding hills.

Billy sold stolen cattle here, and was involved in a shootout with a posse from the town that left Deputy Jim Carlyle dead. In the local cemetery is the grave of Deputy James Bell, another of Billy's victims.

Among the derelict remains of White Oaks is a small brick building that was a lawyer's office. Now it is a bar identified by an old sign by the door "No Scum Allowed". Two ranchers were the only other patrons when I stopped in for a drink, but they were more than happy to tell a few tall tales to a foreigner.

About a three-hour drive away is Fort Sumner, the other major site associated with Billy. As you travel northeast the steep terrain of the Rio Bonito Valley opens into flat, sweeping vistas that only end in mountain ranges barely visible in the distance.

After he busted out of the Lincoln courthouse, Billy holed up with his girlfriend in a small settlement at the abandoned Fort Sumner Army Post.

It was here that Sheriff Garrett ran the outlaw to ground for the last time, ambushing and killing him in a dark room, according to Garrett's story, anyway.

All that is left of the old fort is its graveyard, just a stone's throw from the Pecos River. On the riverbank is a plaque marking the spot where the Kid fell.

Henry McCarty, alias William Bonney, alias Billy the Kid is buried in the graveyard beside his sidekicks Charlie Bowdre and Tom O'Folliard, who were also killed by Garrett and his posse.

Over the years souvenir hunters have chipped away and even stolen the grave marker, so now the gravesite is enclosed with a steel cage, the only one that Billy couldn't break out of.


Checklist

LINCOLN

* Getting There

Best place to fly into is Albuquerque, New Mexico. Southwest Airlines or US Airways will probably be the cheapest options. To get to Lincoln, rent a car and drive about 130km south on Interstate 25, then about the same distance east on Route 380, passing the turnoff to White Oaks on the way. To get to Fort Sumner, drive east on 380 to Roswell, then about 125km north on routes 285 and 20.

* What Else To See

Near Lincoln is the Valley of Fires, an ancient lava field made up of contorted black rock.

The White Sands National Monument, a series of huge, bleached-white dunes, is also worth a visit. Just south of Albuquerque is the Very Large Array, long lines of huge radar dishes pointed to the sky to capture signs of life from Outer Space. Ironically, nearby Roswell is the scene of famous UFO sightings.
 

* Further Information

The internet has many sites about Billy the Kid. Two useful starting points are www.aboutbillythekid.com and www.billythekidhistoricpreservation.com/. Information about Fort Sumner can be found at www.ftsumnerchamber.com/tourist.htm and www.legendsofamerica.com/NM-FortSumner.html.

An interesting essay about Lincoln is at www.southernnewmexico.com/Articles/Southeast/Lincoln/Lincoln.html.