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Governor Bill and Billy the Kid

BAYFIELD, Colorado - The Governor is digging up Billy the Kid and the people of Fort Sumner are hot lead mad about it. The only thing you need to know about Fort Sumner, New Mexico, is that it is the deathplace of Billy the Kid. In fact, that is the only thing there is to know about Fort Sumner, New Mexico, because that is pretty much what Fort Sumner is all about. There is a Billy the Kid café with Billy the Kid specials, a Billy the Kid Motel, Billy the Kid memorabilia and a “Welcome To Fort Sumner” sign that proudly claims the corpse of the Kid as its own. Fort Sumner is a county seat, but that’s not important. The graveyard on the hill and its decomposing celebrity are what is important.

There is a fancy grave inside a black wrought iron fence with a marker that says the Kid lies below. Tourists flock to it. It’s not Graceland, but it’s Fort Sumner’s essence, the reason Mr. and Mrs. Buckspender turn right instead of left, the reason they have fewer sheckles to shed in Albuquerque. Fort Sumner needs thousands of Buckspenders to eat its food, buy its gas, wrinkle its sheets and inflict its BTK collectables on unsuspecting relatives, friends, and co-workers during Christmas and other compulsory giving events.

But Governor Bill Richardson won’t stop digging until he gets to the truth. “We're going to seek DNA evidence of Billy the Kid's mother, who is buried in Silver City,” the former United Nations ambassador told CNN on June 13. “We're also going to get the national labs that are in New Mexico, Los Alamos, Sandia, to help us with forensic technology, radars. You know, there are a lot of bullet holes in these courthouses that have to be determined where they came from. So, we're getting modern technology, forensic technology, DNA, to establish the truths involving Billy the Kid.”

That’s the kind of effort the Governor showed when he would martial forces to retrieve live hostages. This is believed to be his first shot at raising the dead.

Fort Sumner is outraged. The destiny of Fort Sumner is threatened. The worst-case scenario for the Fort Sumnerians is that the Governor will dig up the WRONG BODY from under the Bonney patch and Fort Sumner will have egg all over its tourist-licking face, after which it might no longer matter to the Buckspenders and their VISA cards. Fort Sumner will be just another gas stop, a rustic county seat, and wide spot on a road with a sign that reads, “Welcome to Fort Sumner. Who Knew?” Fort Sumner needs the Kid.

And it might be the wrong body. Nature has a way of monkey-wrenching history and a storm displaced the grave markers in the Fort Sumner cemetery. A caretaker returned them to where he believed they belonged, but nobody knows for sure. According to a cemetery plat, William Bonney was buried in a row with three graves that also contained two of his gang members. The gravesites had numbers but the sequence might have changed. There is a possibility that the site marked as the Kid’s grave actually contains one of his gang members and that the Kid is buried elsewhere.

While nature played havoc with the Fort Sumner cemetery and confused the location of the Kid’s grave marker, human beings apparently did no better with the penultimate resting place of Catherine Antrim, his mother, who died in Silver City. “Her grave was relocated in 1882 from the original cemetery,” states the web site www.aboutbillythekid.com, which is operated by the Billy The Kid Historic Preservation Society (BTKHPS). “But there is a possibility her grave was reused or other bodies buried on top of her, and there is also a possibility she wasn’t even relocated at all, but only her grave marker was replaced.”

This raises the possibility the Governor will have to evict the dead from their resting places in both cemeteries. If the Kid is roaming somewhere under the Fort Sumner cemetery and the Kid’s Mom is similarly lost under the sands of Silver City, the state of New Mexico is going to disturb more bodies than Spielberg. Many historic skulls will be drilled, many old rested bones turned, and quiet squares of grassy tombs disturbed in the effort to find out whether Fort Sumner is living a lie. The Governor promises at most a temporary occupation, but many fear the matter will grow into full-blown cemetery building effort and lead to a quagmire. He already faces vocal opposition from Fort Sumner and BTKHPS.

Then there is the possibility few dare speak out loud: that Henry McCarty - William Bonney - Kid Antrim -Billy the Kid is not planted in Fort Sumner at all but is instead pushing daisies up through Texas topsoil. “Some Texans claim they have the real body of Billy the Kid,” notes Governor Richardson,” “but we say we have it in Fort Sumner, New Mexico.” Texans claim a character that called himself “Bushy Bill” and lived to a ripe old age was really the Kid.

Besides the interstate rivalry, the panic of Fort Sumner, and the opposition spit out by BTKHPS, there are two interesting modern, law enforcement sidebars. The mayor of Capitan, New Mexico, for example, wants to know if the Kid killed two Capitan cops, noting there is no statute of limitations on murder. He didn’t say how a sentence would be carried out upon conviction, given that the Kid is quite seriously dead whichever state he’s under.

The Governor has a more forgiving attitude. He said this during the CNN interview: “There's a whole Western lore that involves a decision a governor would have to make. Many years ago, the territorial governor of New Mexico, Lou Wallace, told Billy the Kid he might pardon him if he started behaving. That promise wasn't fulfilled. So I'm going to look at a lot of evidence involving Billy the Kid and what he did in terms of when he escaped from the Lincoln County, New Mexico jail, and then decide whether to pardon him or not.”

Imagine that. In New Mexico, Governors pardon other people, not vice-versa.

For what it’s worth – which is to say, nothing – I’m with Fort Sumner and BTKHPS. You can’t dig up the past because the past is more than dirt and misplaced cadavers, more than anything Bill Richardson or anybody else can dig up anywhere, more than the historical authenticity of a grave marker, more than a string of DNA. The past has become what it is and nobody can find its origins when they have gone hiding. You might as well dig in the air.

At the end of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” a newspaper editor says, “This the West, Senator. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

This is the West, Governor. If the grave marker says Billy the Kid lies below, we believe it. If he lies there unpardoned, so be it.

© Mike Tully July 23, 2003

All content on this page © by Mike Tully