Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
Recently, I read an obscure little book I think is worth writing about. It suggests Billy the Kid lives on — genealogically.
The book is titled “Billy the Kid’s Kid — The Hispanic Connection” and was written by Elbert A. Garcia, who claimed to be the descendent of Billy the Kid. Garcia, who died a couple of years ago, wrote it mostly for his family. It lacks the proof needed for a decisive contribution to the real history of the Kid, but it does offer up a perspective worth considering.
Much has been written about Billy the Kid, some as fact-based history and even more as legend — so much so that it can be difficult determining fact from fiction.
But before we consider Garcia’s contention, let’s consider as a backdrop the established facts:
Born Henry McCarty, in 1859, in New York City, his father died when he was a child. His mother took him and his brother out west — to Indiana, then Kansas, before making their way to Santa Fe, where she remarried. They then made their way to Silver City, where his mother died in 1874 and his stepfather abandoned the kids.
As a teenage orphan, it didn’t take long before “Billy” was in trouble with the law.
By 1877, he had killed his first man, in Arizona.
Around that time, he started calling himself William Bonney and took up with some cattle rustlers. Later he went to work for a businessman and rancher in Lincoln County named John Henry Tunstall, whose death led to the Lincoln County War.
Billy’s involvement in the battle for land and control made him famous — and got him killed, a coroner’s jury determined, in 1881 at Fort Sumner.
Elbert Garcia, who contended he was Billy the Kid’s great-grandson, couldn’t prove it because, he said, records were falsified to protect Billy’s son’s true identity.
According to Garcia and his genealogical research, Billy the Kid had a girlfriend, Abrana Garcia, in the Fort Sumner area who secretly gave birth to Billy’s son — Jose Patrocinio Garcia, Elbert Garcia’s grandfather.
Garcia said that explains why, as a child, his family would travel to Fort Sumner to clean up around Billy the Kid’s graveside.
In 1926, according to the Garcia, Walter Noble Burns, author of “The Saga of Billy the Kid,” wrote about two daughters that Abrana Garcia had with Billy as the father, but Garcia essentially called that a smokescreen to hide Billy’s real child, his son Patrocinio. Out of fear for the boy’s life, Abrana and her family further concealed his father’s identity by making up a baptismal certificate showing that “grandpa Pat was baptized in Anton Chico and born in 1886” — six years after Billy’s death.
Garcia also made the point that writers in search of the real Billy the Kid have come up short of a comprehensive history because they didn’t speak Spanish, and therefore could not speak with the “Mexicans” of that time who knew Billy intimately.
The Kid was fluent in both English and Spanish and frequented the Hispanic settlements of those days — and, according to folklore among area Hispanics, was something of a ladies’ man at the dances in those rural communities.
Without interviewing in Spanish those who knew him not as a killer or a cowboy, but intimately as a young man, you can’t deliver a comprehensive history of this historical figure, Garcia contended.
Maybe that’s where fact and legend collide.
Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at: