Introducing: Real Outlaws - Billy the Kid Part 1

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Hi, Real Dictators fans.

This week we thought we'd bring you something a little different.

This is a taster episode of Noise's new show, Real Outlaws.

If you enjoy it, search Real Outlaws wherever you get your podcasts and hit follow or subscribe.

History has treated Billy the Kid as both a hero and villain.

His name is synonymous with the Wild West, with gunslingers and barroom shootouts, daring jailbreaks, and audacious escapades that have been immortalized over the decades in movies and TV.

Shrouded in myth and folklore, enshrined in pop culture, Billy the Kid is the archetypal American outlaw, living by his wits and his six-gun one day at a time.

But what is the truth behind the legend?

This is Billy the Kid, part one:

The Young Gun.

It's August 17th, 1877.

Fort Grant, Arizona.

The dry summer heat lingers even as the sun slips lower behind the distant hills.

Above the buzz of insects, the sound of raucous laughter, jeering, and an out-of-tune piano rolls across the dusty plains as a slender figure pulls open the door of Atkins' saloon.

Silhouetted in the doorway, Kid Antrim is just 17 years old and looks even younger.

Five and a half feet tall, fair-haired, and with a face as smooth as the senoritas in the bordello across the street, he doesn't tally with the rest of the rowdy saloon's rough-hewn customers.

Antrim steps inside, scanning the room with his clear blue eyes, then makes his way to the shadows in a far corner.

Not wearing the customary boots of the other ranch hands, Antrim's shoes tap the spit and sawdust floor as lightly as a dancer.

The pockets of his smart suit pants jangle with his wages.

He's here to gamble with the soldiers and cowboys.

The handle of the old revolver stuffed into the waistband of those fancy pants says that despite his age, he's not a newcomer to crusty drinking dens like this one.

He grins widely.

Crooked front teeth showing as he sits with a group of men he knows, laughing and sharing a joke.

before his face drops.

Over on the opposite side of the room, he spots Wendy Cahill, the town blacksmith.

Cahill forged the shackles that clamped the kid when he was arrested earlier in the year.

Since then, the blacksmith has taken to hacking on the kid whenever he can, calling him names and slapping him around in front of the other men.

Cahill isn't much taller than the kid, but he's twice as broad, with a temper meaner than a rattler in the brush outside.

The kid slides lower in his chair.

A couple of rounds deep, Cahill is on his way to the privy out back when he spots the kid and diverts.

Insults fly, and he quickly moves onto knocking off Antrim's hat and ruffling his hair.

Tonight, the kid isn't in the mood to take it and pushes back.

Things crank up a notch and Kid Antrim winds up on his back on the filthy floor, with Cahill kneeling on him, pinning his arms.

A few slaps around Antrim's unprotected unprotected face draw his cries.

You're hurting me.

Let me up.

Cahill laughs.

I want to hurt you, boy, he says.

Unfortunately for Cahill, he's picked the wrong night for it.

The bar is stunned into silence.

Glasses clink and chairs scrape on the floorboards as men stand to see what will happen next.

Cahill looks down and realizes he's let up on Antrim's right arm, which is now held low.

He looks further to his side and sees his own six-shooter in Antrim's hand, pressed up against his fat belly.

The gunshot shatters the silence, deafening the small bar.

Cahill's grin slips as he slumps to the floor next to Antrim.

The kid leaps to his feet, and as quick as a flash, he's out the door and grabbing the reins of the nearest horse.

He gallops east while the blacksmith lies spluttering out his life on the dusty saloon floor.

The kid has just killed his first man and earned his first indictment for murder.

In a few short years, he'll go on to kill many more and become a legend in his own lifetime.

History is full of men and women who live outside the law.

Some are heroes.

Others are villains.

Many are both.

Each week, we'll take you on a journey into the life and times of notorious outlaws from Billy the Kid and Ned Kelly to Ann Bonney and Al Capone.

We'll delve deep into their stories to find out how legends were born and continued to grow, often long after they're gone.

I'm Nathan Wiley, and this is Real Outlaws.

This week in Real Outlaws, we dig deep into the early life of Billy the Kid and find out what drove this larger-than-life character, how he wound up on the wrong side of the law, and how he turned from an everyday kid into the kid.

Henry McCarty, the boy who will later go on to become known by a variety of aliases, including the kid, is born in late 1859 in the Irish slums of New York, the eldest son of Catherine McCarty.

Michael Wallace is a journalist and historian and author of Billy the Kid, The Endless Ride.

She was basically a strong, decent woman.

Most likely part of the great throng of famine Irish who came to this country, she ended up living fairly impoverished, as many people did, did, especially the Irish, in the bowels of New York.

And she had two sons, a son Joseph, who went by Josie, then young Henry, Henry McCarty.

Henry spends most of his childhood in the city.

His father dies soon after his brother Joseph's birth, leaving Catherine McCarty to raise the two boys alone.

The widow is well liked in the neighborhood, described as a jolly Irish lady full of life and mischief, and that she always welcomed the boys with a smile and a joke.

Catherine is by all accounts a strong, independent woman.

Bare qualities she'll pass on to her eldest son.

The family upsticks and moves to Indiana, where Catherine meets a laborer by the name of William Antrim.

The two are soon courting, and the family with Antrim moves state to state until Catherine gets ill.

She became ill what she was diagnosed with what they called called back in those days galloping consumption.

It was, of course, tuberculosis.

There were all these ridiculous remedies for treating tuberculosis, but probably the most sound one for that time was to get out into fresh air and open air.

And so, like a lot of Americans, they were gypsy-footed enough to move west.

And they lived a short time in Denver.

Soon, the family decides to move even further south to New Mexico Territory, at that time not yet an incorporated state.

That was another really good haven for what they called lungers, L-U-N-G-E-R-S, people who suffered from tuberculosis, and as she did.

So they moved to New Mexico, and Santa Fe at that time wasn't the chic southwestern city it became eventually.

It was a rough and tumble little burg at the end of the the Santa Fe Trail, the Merchant Trail, and they lived there very briefly, but long enough for Catherine and her beau to get properly married.

The family settles in a cabin in the center of Silver City, New Mexico.

It's a mining town that sprang up just a few years previously following the discovery of silver ore in the area.

It's no surprise that by the 1870s, Silver City has a violently high crime rate when it's chock full of unscrupulous prospectors, miners, and other shady types looking to make a quick buck.

It's not called the Wild West for no reason.

And that's where Antrim went to work in the mines and Catherine set about attempting to corral and raise these two boys.

But she was especially close to Henry.

Despite the town's rep, young Henry McCarty enjoys life in New Mexico.

He's a good kid, doesn't get in any trouble he plays pirates with his friends or his favorite game pretend horse races sprinting up the street henry always wins outpacing or outsmarting his friends one of these friends remarks that he never swears or acts up his teacher will later remark that he was a scrawny little fellow with delicate hands of an artistic nature always willing to help with the chores around the schoolhouse.

He didn't get much in terms of any kind of proper rearing from his so-called stepfather.

He didn't have much interest in the boys.

So he always went to his mother and she did a good job of taking care of them, making sure they went to school.

And also, she was the one that gave him various gifts, including his gift for the love of music.

She loved music.

She herself loved to sing and she loved to dance.

And sometimes she and her young Henry would go to different bayets, which are dances, and especially in Little Chihuahua in the Hispanic quarters.

And this is where our young man who became eventually the kid began learning more and more about the Hispanic culture, about everything from the music, the cuisine, the history, and the language.

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Henry has a decent start in life.

His reading and writing is better than most adults.

He's fluent in Spanish by his early teens.

He's inherited his mother's cheerful disposition.

He's neat and tidy at all times, always courteous, and ready to whip out a snappy proverb for any occasion.

Henry may only be a shade over five feet tall, with his small stature, stick-thin arms, and baby face frequently making him the butt of schoolyard jokes.

But his humor and quick wit, infectious energy, and cat-like reflexes always seem to get him out of trouble.

The family may not be well off, but they have enough and it's a happy life.

All that changes in 1874 when tragedy strikes.

Catherine succumbs to the tuberculosis that they'd moved to cure, and 14-year-old Henry McCarty's world falls apart.

His stepfather, William Antrim, is out prospecting and doesn't even return for the funeral.

When he finally does show up, it's to sell the family home, pocket the cash, and dump the kids on a local boarding house owner.

It's the fork in the road little Henry never saw coming, and one he'll never walk back from.

Josie sort of went off on doing his thing, and his thing was really working in some of the gambling houses and starting as a runner and then eventually as a gambler.

And he went that route.

The kid took up with some other lads in Silver City, but didn't really pursue any more formal education and became a boy of the streets.

You know, he had no real proper supervision, but various boys who were his mates, their mothers, gave him some solace and comfort and tried to influence him.

But he started getting into trouble.

And it was mostly just petty theft things that he would get involved with.

Fate has dealt Henry a cruel hand, forcing independence on him at too young an age.

He calls upon his reserves, that wit, bravery, and quick thinking, to fend for himself.

He quickly picks up the new skills a boy needs to survive in this wild land.

Gambling, fast talking, and crucially, how to shoot.

It's a tough life, and out here it's not always possible to to make it by straight means, especially when the rug's pulled out from under you.

A year after his mother's death, 15-year-old Henry has his first run-in with the law when he's caught stealing butter.

A tongue-lashing from the sheriff does no good, because several days later, it's followed by his first arrest.

Together with a local tough named Sombrero Jack, he steals a basket of clothes from a Chinese laundry.

It's believed Jack actually stole the clothes and Henry was only hiding them for him in his room.

But whatever his involvement, this minor crime is a major turning point in the teenager's life.

His landlord turns him in to the law of Silver City.

Sheriff Harvey Whitehill is a respected war veteran, well regarded by townsfolks and outlaws alike.

He's sworn to tame Silver City, and while he doesn't think anything much of it yet, he's just become the first man to arrest Billy the Kid.

Sheriff tried some hard love and discipline on him and actually locked him up.

He was just going to lock him up for the night, he said later, and then take him home and feed him and try to straighten him out.

The kid, again, was on the move and didn't actually shinnied up through the chimney in the jailhouse and he was gone.

Henry is on the run, an escaped fugitive, or in the language of the the day, gone on the scout, though he has a long way to go before he becomes a household name.

His scout takes him west on a freight wagon to find refuge with his stepfather, winding up in Clifton, Arizona.

When he tells William Antrim the reason he's left New Mexico, he's sent packing.

Before leaving, he grabs his stepfather's revolver and some clothes, then disappears from his life.

Henry heads for San Simon, roaming the dusty cattle trails.

He finds work as a ranch hand, sheepherder, and hay gatherer on the farms of the Gila River.

Anything to fill his belly and pay for a bed.

Soon, he's spending his wages gambling in the saloons of Safford and Pueblo.

Despite his easygoing nature and cheerful manner, he can rise if insulted.

which sometimes lands him in hot water.

Constantly reminded of his small stature and lack of physical prowess, he practices riding and learns to shoot well.

He trains hard, and soon he's a crackshot marksman and expert gunslinger.

The only protection available to a 15-year-old boy in this tough man's world.

He did become quite a good shot with both pistol and rifle, especially pistol.

He was ambidextrous, actually.

He was a very fine horseman.

He was a fairly small guy.

He wasn't tiny, but but he rode quite well.

And of course, he spoke Spanish.

So he got along very well, both in Arizona and New Mexico with the Spanish people and was especially drawn to them.

For all appearances, he appears to be a very likable young man.

But, and this is not at all to make excuses for him, but he just simply, as we always say, got involved with the wrong crowd.

And that ultimately proved to be his demise.

By August 1876, Henry, now going by the name Henry Antrim, has worked his way around to the Army post at Camp Grant.

Ranch hand by day, he dances and gambles in the town saloons by night.

It's a tough frontier town, violence often exploding in conjunction with the soldiers' pay packets.

It's here, gambling among the soldiers and cowboys, that Henry picks up the nickname Kid Antrim.

The reality reality is, he is just a kid.

It's still months until his 17th birthday.

By late autumn, he loses his job at the ranch.

Despite his skills, energy, and determination, he's just not suited to the physically demanding work.

He finds employment of a different kind when he falls in with a gang of horse rustlers.

A Scottish ex-cavalry soldier takes Kid Antrim under his wing, and the two begin stealing saddles and horses from the military clientele of a local brothel known as the Hog Ranch.

It's not long before angry army officers descend on the local Justice of the Peace, Miles Wood, to demand that a warrant be issued for the arrest of Henry Antrim, alias the Kid.

To become a Justice of the Peace, you didn't have to have read for the law, have a law degree, have any kind of background in the law or criminology.

you could just run and be picked for office.

So it was rather hit and miss.

And it was Billy's bad luck to end up in that precinct, that area where he was with a justice of the peace who did not necessarily find him a beguiling young man.

Kid Antrim is soon tracked down and arrested, but easily escapes into the night.

He's already building a reputation as a man difficult to catch and even more difficult to hold on to.

The kid decides to lower his profile.

He makes good by the army, showing up at the camp with five horses belonging to the 6th Cavalry.

He swears an oath, no more horse theft in Fort Grant.

The Army is satisfied and drops its complaint against the kid.

But Justice Miles Wood is not so easily satisfied.

Wood finally catches up with the kid a couple of months later in early 1877 when he spots him and his buddy heading into the Hotel de Luna in Fort Grant for breakfast.

The Justice of the Peace quickly removes his jacket and rushes across the street and into the kitchens.

He takes the plates of food out personally and, after setting them down in front of the two fugitives, pulls out a gun and tells them to reach for the ceiling.

Pair, he marches them the two and a half miles to the army stockade asking the sergeant to guard them until a trial can be arranged

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It's March 25th, 1877.

Kid Antrim sits on the filthy wooden floor of the Army guardhouse at Camp Grant.

He shouts to the guard outside.

He's finished his breakfast and needs to visit the privy out back.

The guard opens the door and steps back, watching the young thief with bored disinterest.

The slender teenager is no threat to a hardened soldier of the U.S.

cavalry.

The soldier nods at the door and the kid pushes past, stepping outside, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the warm afternoon sun.

With a glance at the following guard, he sets off walking round the building to the clapboard outhouses round back.

With one hand in his pocket, he slows and looks again at the guard.

The soldier isn't paying him much attention.

The kid lets him get a little closer.

Before whipping his hand out of his pocket, lightning fast, he launches a handful of salt straight into the startled guard's eyes.

He'd poured half a jar of salt into his pocket while eating his breakfast, and now the guard is regretting not keeping a closer watch on this young prisoner.

The soldier drops to the ground, clawing at his eyes.

Temporarily blinded by stinging tears, he can't see Kid Antrim already sprinting for the fence that separates the camp from the creek and the scrubland beyond.

Shouts go up as the guard screams for help.

Boots pound the dirt, but the kid doesn't look back.

Eyes on the mesquite trees beyond the fence.

The sound of hooves come from behind, but still he powers on.

It's a game to him, just like the horse racing games used to play not so long ago back in Silver City.

As he vaults the wooden fence, a gunshot rings out, then another.

A buzz of a bullet zips past.

Gravel explodes from the rocky ground to his right.

He skids to a halt, hands in the air.

When he turns, he sees the cavalry are on him already.

And despite his best effort, he had no chance.

He's hauled back to the camp and thrown on the floor of the stockade, the door slammed and locked behind him.

Before long, Justice Miles Wood has returned, incensed.

The escape attempt is the last straw.

He's brought the town blacksmith with him, a rough bully of a man known as Windy Cahill.

The blacksmith takes great pleasure in pinning the kid down roughly as he rivets iron shackles onto his ankles.

No more sprinting from the law now.

And Kid is left to ponder his fate as Wood leaves to attend the wedding of an Army Major at the camp.

Later that night, a soldier arrives at the function to interrupt the dancing.

He informs the major and Justice Miles Wood that the kid has escaped again.

disappearing from the locked room, shackles and all.

Unknown to Wood at the time, young Antrim had been helped up a wall by his buddy.

Squeezing through a small ventilation gap, he'd dropped down and opened the door.

In no time, they'd snuck out of the camp, back to town, and past the very party Wood had been attending.

Slipping through the dark streets, they wind up at Atkins Saloon, where a friendly bartender hammers the shackles off.

Once again, the kid has slipped away from the law.

It's not uncommon in this tough frontier territory, and fortunately for the teenager, the law has better things to do than hunt across the region for a small-time horse thief.

By summer 1877, the kid has taken another job at a ranch several miles away.

He keeps his head down, works hard, and soon he's saved enough for a fine suit and shoes.

Aware of his local reputation as a hero and daredevil escapee, he starts to venture into town again to gamble.

It's wearing these fine clothes and shoes with his six shooter stuffed into the waistband of his pants that he heads into Atkins' saloon again on the fateful night of August 17th, 1877.

There was a particular bully, an old blacksmith named, well, he went by the name of Wendy, Wendy Cahill.

And he was the local bully and would box the kid's ears and rough him up and ridicule him and so forth.

And ultimately, what happened there is he went a little too far and they ended up in a scuffle.

And the kid got a hold of Wendy's gun.

And before you know it, Wendy had been blown away, shall we say, with the wind.

He was dead.

And that totally freaked out young Antrim.

And he got on a horse and galloped away.

The blacksmith is taken by wagon to the Army hospital, where he dies the the following day.

In the kid's absence, Justice Miles Wood convenes an inquest.

It could so easily have been chalked up as just another ballroom altercation, particularly in light of the kid's size and testimony that the blacksmith was a bully.

But despite the killing not being premeditated, and despite witnesses coming forward to say Kid Antrim had no choice and shot in self-defense, the jury rules the killing to be unjustifiable and criminal.

No doubt, the kid's previous tangles with both Wood and Cahill come into play in the verdict.

Both had been shown up by the kid's antics.

Many of the kids' compadres think he was wise to skip town, given the number of soldier and cowboy friends of Cahill's in the area.

Now, it's no longer horse theft.

Henry McCarty, alias Henry Antrim, alias Kid Antrim, alias the kid, is wanted for murder.

And it's another signpost on the road to the man he'll become.

Kid Antrim flees straight back to the area he knows so well.

Riding hard in his sweat-stained filthy suit through hard country, he is back over the border into New Mexico.

A week later, a traveler shows up back in Fort Grant with the horse the kid stole from outside the saloon that night, explaining that he met a fine young man in New Mexico who gave him the horse to return to its rightful owner.

Kid Antrim has kept his promise.

No more horse theft in Fort Grant.

The kid crosses deeper into New Mexico by hedgehopping.

Hedgehopping, in a way, goes on to this very day.

You know, a lot of criminals will acquire a car that belongs to someone else and commit a crime, and then immediately they want to get rid of that car.

What the kid was doing was sort of emulating the old defunct in America Pony Express, where these young men would ride from Missouri all across the plains and into over the mountain into Sacramento, California, delivering mail.

And along the way, they had stations where they would get on another fresh mount and so forth.

So what the kid was doing was changing horses for two main reasons.

One, not to be pinned with that horse because people would recognize that roan horse belonged to so-and-so or so but also to get a fresh mount and it was quite effective for it

finally after days of hard riding he shows up at the home of a compadre outside fort stanton in lincoln county new mexico starving and close to death He is nursed back to health by his friend's mother.

After recovering, he joins a local gang of bandits and cattle rustlers in Lincoln County, known as the Boys.

He's come of age on the run, a schooling in the ways of the West, setting him up perfectly for a life of the gang.

He takes to wearing a sombrero, like his hero back in Silver City, Sombrero Jack, and always takes care over his appearance, wearing good quality clothes.

He is known among the gang for his charisma.

Gregarious and affable, he's one of the only gang members who can read and write.

The fluent Spanish helps with the senoritas, and he's already making a name for himself among the Hispanic population as a charismatic underdog hero.

By the autumn of 1877, Kid Antrim is approaching his 18th birthday and has already fallen in with a way of life that plays to his skills and talents.

The stunted trees of the rolling Capitan Mountains cast long shadows shadows in the golden evening sun.

The smell of cooking drifts across the low, scrubby bushes.

Beans and bacon spit in a pan hanging over the campfire.

A group of men sit around it laughing, swigging moonshine from a glass jar being passed around, trading tall tales.

One young man sits back from the others.

Kid Antrim seldom drinks, because he knows a quick getaway might be called for at any moment.

The 17-year-old is at a natural disadvantage to the cowboys, and constantly needs his wits about him to survive in this harsh wilderness.

Another gang member approaches, dropping his bags next to the fire.

He's been in to Lincoln to fetch supplies.

He tosses a newspaper to the kid, the only one in the group who can read.

and asks him to recite the headlines.

He's a couple of pages in when a short story catches his eye, only a couple of paragraphs.

It tells the story of an eyewitness in Silver City who claims to have seen local boy turned fugitive Henry McCarty.

The kid smiles.

He hadn't made an effort to keep a low profile on his trips to the town, though he hasn't gone by that name for a while.

His nickname of the kid has stuck for good, but in a further effort to distance himself from the murder in Arizona, now he goes by the name William H.

Bonney.

The other gang members have taken to shortening this new alias.

Now they call him Billy the Kid.

As he stands to stretch, Billy the Kid casts a long shadow in the setting sun.

Next time on Real Outlaws, we'll ride with Billy the Kid and the infamous Regulators, the gang at the center of one of the bloodiest feuds in the Old West.

Murder and mayhem escalates into full-scale war, and we'll see Billy transform from small-time cattle rustler to big-time folk legend in his own lifetime.

Can Billy the Kid take on rival gunslingers and the might of the U.S.

Army, or will the law finally catch up with him?

If you enjoyed this taster, follow Real Outlaws wherever you get your shows for more episodes.