Who is henry mccarty

Later Billy and five companions ambushed and killed Sheriff Brady and his deputy, George Hindman, on Lincoln's main street. Buckshot Roberts, a Murphy partisan, killed Dick Brewer before he himself expired from bullet wounds.

After that, Billy emerged as a leader among the McSween men. In July he participated in the "five-day battle" in Lincoln, where the Murphy partisans besieged the Regulators in McSween's home. McSween was killed, but Billy and the others escaped from the burning house. Thereafter, Billy and his cohorts used no restraint in continuing the fight against the "House of Murphy," whom the power structure in New Mexico endorsed as the victor.

In August the Kid was present when Morris J. Bernstein, clerk at the Mescalero Indian agency, was killed. Afterward he stayed for a time at the Chisum ranch while he and his friends stole horses and cattle from known Murphy partisans.

Billy the Kid arrived in the Panhandle in the fall of , after Chisum had sent some of his cattle to graze in the Canadian valley in the vicinity of Tascosa. Although not in Chisum's employ, Billy and four companions, Tom O'Folliard, Henry Brown, Fred Waite, and John Middleton, followed in the cattleman's wake, trailing approximately stolen horses, which they planned to sell to Panhandle outfits.

Billy intimidated Ellsworth Torrey, after the Boston rancher had run off the Kid's men for insulting his wife and daughters; otherwise the group was generally well-behaved during their stay in Tascosa and spent money freely.

Although his reputation had preceded him, Billy soon made friends among Tascosa residents, notably a young transient doctor, Henry F. By the winter of —79, after selling the horses, Billy and Tom O'Folliard had returned to their home turf and soon added new members, including Charlie Bowdre and Dave Rudabaugh, to their rustling operation.

In the aftermath of the Lincoln County War, Lew Wallace, the new territorial governor of New Mexico, published a wanted list which included the Kid, who was implicated in the murder of Sheriff Brady.

A momentary truce called in February ended when Murphy partisans killed a lawyer named Houston Chapman. Seeking to end the troubles once and for all, Governor Wallace arranged a meeting with the Kid and promised a full pardon for all charges against him in exchange for his testimony against Chapman's murderers. Assured that his own life was not endangered, Billy agreed to have himself placed in custody at Lincoln, but then Chapman's killers escaped. Nevertheless, Billy remained in custody until the spring of , when many of the cases arising from the Lincoln County conflict came before the court.

By arrangement with the governor he was allowed considerable freedom, but the pardon he hoped for was delayed. Growing impatient, Billy told his guards that he was tired of waiting, walked away from the store where he was being held, mounted a horse, and rode out of town as the guards watched. Billy remained on the loose for several months thereafter.

When the cattleman refused to pay, Billy vowed he would collect in some other way and from then on helped himself to Chisum's livestock. In January he killed a bounty hunter named Joe Grant in a saloon at Gallinas, after Grant's gun misfired. By then Billy the Kid and his gang were the bane of all cattlemen in the area and were part of the reason for the formation of the Panhandle Stock Association in Mobeetie.

He escaped, however, and seems to have resurfaced at the Greathouse Ranch, where a man named Jim Carlyle died. Billy received the blame for that, and the new Lincoln County sheriff, Patrick Floyd Garrett , made catching the Kid his first priority. Billy and the other rustlers escaped, but a few days later the posse caught up with them at Stinking Springs, twenty-five miles from Fort Sumner.

After a brisk gunfight, in which Charlie Bowdre was killed, Billy and three remaining cohorts surrendered. They were taken to the jail in Las Vegas, then to Santa Fe, before being moved to Mesilla for trial the following spring.

There the Kid was initially charged with the shooting of Buckshot Roberts, but after that charge was dropped he was tried, convicted for the murder of Sheriff Brady, and sentenced to hang. In order to restore peace to Lincoln County, Wallace proclaimed an amnesty for any man involved in the Lincoln County War who was not already under indictment. The arrangement called for McCarty to submit to a token arrest and a short stay in jail until the conclusion of his courtroom testimony.

Instead, Billy was returned to jail in June McCarty slipped out of his handcuffs and fled with friend Doc Scurlock. For the next year and a half, McCarty survived by rustling, gambling and killing. In January , during a well-documented altercation, he killed a man named Joe Grant in a Fort Sumner saloon.

McCarty then let Grant know who he was. When Grant fired, nothing happened, and McCarty then shot him three times. At some point in the night it became apparent to Carlysle that the outlaws were stalling, when suddenly a shot was accidentally fired from outside. Carlysle, assuming the posse members had shot Greathouse, decided to run for his life, crashing through a window into the snow outside. As he did so, the posse, mistaking Carlysle for one of the gang, fired and killed him.

Realizing what they had done and now demoralized, the posse scattered, allowing McCarty and his gang to slip away. McCarty later wrote to Governor Wallace claiming innocence in the killing of Carlysle and of involvement in cattle rustling in general.

During this time, the Kid also developed a friendship with an ambitious local bartender and former buffalo hunter named Pat Garrett. The posse led by Garrett fared much better, and his men closed in quickly.

On December 23, he was tracked to an abandoned stone building located in a remote location called Stinking Springs. The next morning, a cattle rustler and good friend of McCarthy named Charlie Bowdre stepped outside to feed his horse. Mistaken for McCarty, he was killed by the posse.

McCarty was jailed in the town of Mesilla while waiting for his April 6, trial and spent his time giving newspaper interviews and also peppering Governor Wallace with letters seeking clemency. Wallace, however, refused to intervene. On April 28, while Garrett was out of town, McCarty stunned the territory by killing both of his guards and escaping. The details of the escape are unclear. Some historians believe that a friend or Regulator sympathizer left a pistol in a nearby privy that McCarty was allowed to use, under escort, each day.

McCarty then retrieved this gun and after Bell had led him back to the courthouse, turned it on his guard as the two of them reached the top of a flight of stairs inside. However it happened, Bell staggered out into the street and collapsed, mortally wounded. The townsfolk supposedly gave him an hour that he used to remove his leg iron. The horse was returned two days later. There are at least two versions of what happened next. One version says that as the Kid entered, he could not recognize Garrett in the poor light.

Who is it? In a second version, McCarty entered carrying a knife, evidently headed to a kitchen area. Much about his early life is unknown or unverified.

Before he was shot dead at age 21, Billy reputedly killed at least nine people in the American West. Billy the Kid called himself William H. Bonney, but his original name was probably Henry McCarty.

Around , Billy and his brother traveled west to Indiana with their mother and Antrin, and by the group was in Wichita, Kansas. They soon moved farther west, down the cattle trails, and in a legally married Catherine and William Antrin appeared on record in New Mexico territory.

Billy soon left his brother and stepfather and took off into the New Mexico sagebrush. He worked as a ranch hand and in supposedly killed his first men, a group of reservation Apache Indians, in the Guadalupe Mountains.

According to legend, it was not long before Billy killed another man, a blacksmith in Camp Grant, Arizona. Billy the Kid, as people began calling him, next found work as a rancher and bodyguard for John Tunstall, a English-born rancher who operated out of Lincoln, New Mexico. When members of a rival cattle gang killed Tunstall, in , Billy became involved in the so-called Lincoln County War. No arrests were made, however. In July , the rival gang surrounded the house where Billy and his gang were staying just outside of town.