In the spring of 1938, Aaron Copland was asked to write the music for a ballet of the Billy the Kid story. Copland, a Brooklyn native and the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, had “certain misgivings” about the project, to say the least. Although he felt that “the young desperado of the Wild West” was an ideal subject for an “American work,” he doubted his own ability to become, as he put it, a “cowboy composer.” The ballet's producer, Lincoln Kirstein, however, would not take no for an answer. In perhaps one of the most important (and humorous) moments in American ballet history, Kirstein “quietly tucked two slim collections” of cowboy songs under Copland's arm, as if that would satisfy all of the composer's concerns. Copland took the songbooks to Paris, where he wove the various western tunes into the ballet's score.Footnote ¹

Copland knew very little of the factual history of Billy the Kid's life, and even less about the Lincoln County War, the range conflict of the late 1870s that propelled the Kid into fame. “I didn't think of the story in a realistic sense,” the composer later commented. He saw the young outlaw almost exclusively in terms of myth and image: “Anyway my knowledge of the actual historical facts were rather vague, and I thought of Billy the Kid as a legendary character, a young innocent who went wrong, part of the picturesque folklore of the American West.”Footnote ²

Copland was certainly not alone in basing his version of Billy on popular mythology. Perhaps no other American figure has inspired such a diverse array of artists and in so many different cultural forms, among them Copland, Bob Dylan, and Billy Joel in music; Michael Ondaatje, Gore Vidal, and Rudolfo Anaya in literature; Arthur Penn, Marlon Brando, John Wayne, and Sam Peckinpah in film.Footnote ³ Many of these artists have used the Kid's career to make some form of larger social commentary, while dozens of other authors and filmmakers, most notably the billionaire Howard Hughes, have exploited his story simply to make money. Yet, regardless of their motivations, nearly all of Billy's many interpreters have erred when presenting the story's most basic component – the people involved – in their works. They all participate in thinning or bleaching the Kid's multiracial context.

Copland's ballet, for example, presents just two races and cultures to its audience, white cowboys and “Mexicans.” In reality, Billy the Kid, or William Bonney as he called himself at the time, lived in close contact with Mescalero Apache Indians, African American soldiers, and Hispano farmers. A primary purpose of this article is, then, quite simple: to reintroduce the communities of color who played key roles in the events that would ultimately inspire an American legend.Footnote ⁴ In this retelling of the Kid's story, three questions will be asked of his less recognized contemporaries. First, what were the histories and circumstances of each of these three communities? Second, what roles did each group play in the events that made William Bonney so famous? And last, how did these populations view the Kid, based both on their experiences and on what they hoped and feared for their future lives in the region?

These basic questions, of course, raise the larger issue of why this bleaching of the historical record occurred, and what commercial, artistic, and ideological purposes it has served. Examining the Billy the Kid story from such a diverse and neglected set of perspectives also provides insight into our own turbulent political climate. The Kid's rise and fall has not only helped to perpetuate a uniquely Western and American ideal of individualism, but has also served to legitimize a libertarian and ahistorical ideal of violence: the rebellion of an outlaw who defies the rest of his society and his times.Footnote ⁵

The Mescalero, African American, and Hispano residents of Lincoln County had their own, much longer histories of violence, which had little resonance with the freedom associated with the Kid legend. The Mescalero Apaches, the indigenous population of the region, stood at the heart of the Lincoln County War, even though they played no role in the dozens of killings. The government beef contracts that sustained them were key to the area economy and the chief source of conflict between the factions that enlisted gunfighters like the Kid.Footnote ⁶ The black cavalry stationed at Fort Stanton, in contrast, were the newest arrivals to New Mexico. Most of these men were born in the Deep South and had known the violence of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction as children and adolescents. Though their prospects in the territory were better than those of the Mescalero, these men also faced severe prejudice, and their assignment as peacekeepers on the reservation and among the warring factions of the civilian population was both dangerous and thankless.Footnote ⁷

Hispano residents,Footnote ⁸ meanwhile, were the overwhelming majority of the population in New Mexico, and their token presence in portrayals of the Lincoln County War has been one of the most glaring misrepresentations of the conflict. From their perspective, the fighting that made Billy famous was only the most violent moment in a much longer struggle to resist the economic and cultural domination of American migrants after the Mexican War.Footnote ⁹ Hispano farmers were heavily involved in every aspect of the Billy the Kid story. Perhaps most tellingly, Billy's last words were in Spanish. On the night he was shot to death by Sheriff Pat Garrett, the Kid called out into the darkness, “¿Quién es? ¿Quién es?” (Who is it? Who goes there?)Footnote ¹⁰

Aaron Copland, like so many other artists intrigued by the Kid's story before and since, was unaware of these three communities and their rich and troubled histories. In fact, Copland's ballet presented the endemic violence of Lincoln County as a poetic version of children's play. The dancers “shoot” by pointing their index fingers and thumbs, just as a child does when pretending to be a cowboy – or outlaw – at a playground.Footnote ¹¹ Stylized versions of the Billy the Kid legend, of course, had been a part of American popular culture for fifty years by the time Copland wrote his score. But for the purposes of this article, the many portrayals of the legend are of secondary importance. The histories of violence and uncertain futures of Billy's “other” contemporaries will now take center stage. As will be seen, the legendary individualism of Billy the Kid can only be believed if one ignores the Mescaleros, African Americans, and Hispanos who helped to make his exploits possible in the first place. To return Billy the Kid to this more diverse social field, then, changes the story's potential significance to Americans. Knowing the experiences of these three communities, Billy's notorious career becomes a smaller incident in a larger narrative of violence and racial and cultural oppression.

In an interview conducted long after the Kid's death, a Mescalero Apache recalled a much less celebrated event from New Mexico's past. It took place in the early 1870s, when a group of Mescaleros were forced to migrate to a reservation. “We pack everything,” recalled the former Indian scout Bigmouth, “take old peoples, babies, everything, and go in night afoot, very quiet. Children they cry for food and not any food.” Many Mescaleros died on this journey. “One old woman take her blanket and give her children what food she had, just a little mouthful apiece. And keep them still so soldiers won't find. And the next morning they still alive but she dead.” The Mescaleros’ plight ended near Fort Stanton several months later, where they surrendered themselves in exchange for government-issued beef, flour, and blankets.Footnote ¹²

These events, which took place just before the young William Bonney arrived in the region, stood in tragic contrast to the wide-ranging, seasonal migrations that had characterized the lives of the Mescaleros for centuries. Making matters even worse, the meager rations the Mescaleros received in return for their surrender were a major source of graft. In Lincoln, a group of ex-cavalry officers, led by Lawrence G. Murphy, monopolized the provisioning of the reservation, what the historian Frederick Nolan has described as “the only source of real money in the region.”Footnote ¹³ It was their corrupt system that inspired a rival faction to try to take control of the Mescaleros’ food supply. Billy the Kid fought with the insurgent group, led by John Tunstall and Alexander McSween. For both sides, the Mescaleros represented a vulnerable population to be preyed upon and exploited freely.

The Indians’ dependency was in fact a very recent development. Until the US Army established the first Mescalero reservation in 1863, their geography extended, in today's terms, from the mountain ranges of southern New Mexico, to the plains of the Texas Panhandle and Kansas, to the northern states of Coahuila and Chihuahua in Mexico. In some cases referring to themselves as the “Shis-Inday,” or “the people of the forests,” they spent the warmer months in the timber-covered mountains.Footnote ¹⁴ In the fall they left this area, their spiritual homeland, to hunt buffalo on the southwestern plains. They also moved further south along the Rio Grande to harvest their staple food crop, the mescal plant, for which the Spanish gave them the name “Mescalero” or “mescal eater.” Though this singular name gives the impression that they functioned as a cohesive or united tribe, the Mescalero actually travelled in smaller groups of families, their language and cultural practices binding the various bands together more than any individual leader or locality.Footnote ¹⁵

Violence, whether in the form of raiding or open warfare, was a fundamental aspect of their lives throughout the three hundred years prior to the establishment of their first reservation. Contact with Europeans occurred as early as 1540, with the gold-seeking explorations of Coronado, but it was not until the 1590s that the Spanish began to colonize present-day New Mexico in earnest. Conflict was inevitable, as the Spaniards respected no Indian claims to the land, imposed a new ecosystem of ranching and farming, and sought forcefully to convert the indigenous population to Christianity. Most explosive of all, however, were Spanish efforts to enslave the Apache in order to provide labor for their North American empire. A seemingly endless cycle of sporadic violence followed, consisting of punitive military campaigns, retaliations, and atrocities committed by both sides. For their part, the Mescalero found the bounty of cattle, grain, and other Spanish possessions irresistible, and quickly incorporated the raiding of the new pueblos into their economy and seasonal migrations.Footnote ¹⁶ The nomadic range of the various Mescalero bands in fact expanded during the Spanish colonial period, as the introduction of the horse made hunting, harvesting, and raiding over greater distances possible.Footnote ¹⁷

The Mescaleros had to contend not only with the Spanish during this era. To the north were both the Navajos, the Mescaleros’ historic enemy, and the Comanches, an even more aggressive adversary, who had also become master horse riders by the early 1700s. The Mescaleros even found themselves fighting other Apache tribes, as the Spanish strategically pitted the Lipan, Jicarilla, and Chiricahua against them beginning in the late 1700s. “We had enemies on every side,” the Mescalero medicine man Bernard Second said of these times; “numerous enemies ready to attack us.”Footnote ¹⁸

Yet the Mescalero took great pride in their continuing independence during these centuries of struggle, as seen in Bernard Second's observation: “our history is both romantic and tragic.”Footnote ¹⁹ The Mescalero's migratory lifestyle and social organization of small bands aided them greatly in avoiding the epidemics, proselytization, and near-genocide that many tribes suffered during the Spanish colonial period, while their ability to endure the most severe privations and their intimate knowledge of a vast landscape became legendary. By the late 1700s, the Spaniards realized that a policy of extermination was hopeless and adopted a more sophisticated (and manipulative) strategy of conciliation, trade, and selective military action. The late Spanish administration signed a treaty with the Apaches in 1810, which proved effective enough that the new Mexican government renewed it in 1832.Footnote ²⁰

It was not until the United States took over the region that the migratory cycle of the Mescaleros was finally broken. In probably the most bitter irony of their long history, the Apache actually favored Texan and US ambitions in the southwest, their opposition to Spanish and Mexican rule being so strong. But in less than fifteen years, between the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) and the creation of the Bosque Redondo reservation (1863), the Mescaleros suffered the destruction of both their warrior independence and much of their traditional resources. The speed of their “reduction” was as unexpected as it was thorough. The Gold Rush in California prompted a need for safe traveling routes and the creation of military forts throughout the New Mexico Territory, while new mineral discoveries, the introduction of vast cattle herds, and the decimation of the buffalo caused a dramatic reconfiguration of the landscape. With these changes came thousands of Anglo emigrants, ranging from army veterans like Lawrence G. Murphy, to Texas ranchers like John Chisum, to dozens of young men working within and well outside the law, such as Billy the Kid. The notorious “Santa Fe Ring” that ruled New Mexico during this period provided the political muscle to make much of this transformation possible. By the time the first transcontinental railroad passed through the territory in 1881, the displacement of the Apache was irreversible.Footnote ²¹

Their lives now highly restricted, the Mescaleros found their historic relationship with the region turned completely upside down. Rations of government beef and grain now kept hundreds alive, while the military garrison at Fort Stanton maintained a close watch over their movements. Starting in the mid-1860s, a variety of army officers and civilian bureaucrats judged the Mescaleros by a new standard of behavior – “their progress … toward civilization,” as one official put it.Footnote ²² Many of the Indian agents aspired to nothing less than the Mescaleros’ complete cultural transformation: to Christianity, to a life of farming and ranching, to an American school education. Officials expressed confidence that this goal could be accomplished within a few years. “Give them each a little farm, say 10 acres,” one reported, “let them understand that it is theirs as long as they remain on the reservation … Then having something permanent to care for, they will abandon their roving mode of living for the more agreeable and peaceful occupation of the husbandman.” The key was to indoctrinate the tribe's youth. “I don't consider it possible to change the nature of the adults, whose habits and customs have long since been formed,” wrote Agent F. C. Godfroy in 1876. “It is on the younger members that I base my expectations to see this tribe classed among the civilized Indians of the future.”Footnote ²³

By living on the reservation, the Mescaleros were also now vulnerable to outbreaks of disease and a level of exploitation and violence they had never before experienced. A smallpox epidemic, for example, swept through the reservation in 1877, killing “considerable numbers,” among them three Mescalero leaders and several of the tribe's “most promising young men.”Footnote ²⁴ Alcohol was also a very serious problem. “The greatest evil is undoubtedly the sale of liquor,” wrote Agent Godfroy, “of which the Indians are passionately fond, and for which they will sacrifice anything and everything, sometimes giving a horse or mule for a quart of whisky.” The illegal trade was so profitable that area traffickers openly defied army patrols and federal prosecution.Footnote ²⁵

The worst profiteering on the reservation, however, involved the beef, grain, and other contracts that sustained the Mescaleros. The “House” of Lawrence G. Murphy and his associates James J. Dolan and Emil Fritz grossly inflated the numbers of Indians at the agency, pocketing the difference that the government paid for supplies and selling the extra goods throughout the territory. Backed by the Santa Fe Ring, the House enforced its control in Lincoln County through clever manipulation of the law and brute force. It was not until the Englishman John Tunstall and the Scottish attorney Alexander McSween began to challenge the House's monopoly in 1877 that all hell broke loose. Although the Mescaleros played no direct role in the Lincoln County War, they suffered greatly as a result, and several key events of the conflict were fought on reservation land.Footnote ²⁶

At first thought, it might seem like the Apaches would ally themselves with the men who were challenging Murphy & Co., since the House exploited the reservation so egregiously. But Lawrence Murphy had worked closely with the Mescaleros ever since their first peace negotiations with the US Army, and they trusted him. In fact, Murphy's influence was so great with the Indians that over the years he frequently (and successfully) threatened the US-appointed officials who opposed him, claiming that he could foment an Indian uprising or mass exodus from the reservation if the agents did not comply with his demands. From the Mescaleros’ perspective, Murphy had provided food and supplies to the reservation for fifteen years by the time of the Lincoln County War, and had not used or threatened violence against the tribe.Footnote ²⁷

The same could not be said of the rival faction that opposed Murphy, which included Billy the Kid. John Tunstall, Alexander McSween, and their gunfighter supporters never made any effort to reach out to the Mescaleros for strategic purposes, let alone to befriend them or promise them a better way of life on the reservation if the House's control were ended. From the Mescaleros’ point of view, it was this rival group that caused the tribe great hardships during the Lincoln County War, by severely disrupting their supply of food, blankets, and tools. It was Tunstall and McSween's gunmen, not Murphy's, who carried out raids and even killed on the reservation during the Lincoln County War.Footnote ²⁸

The Mescalero held an especially negative view of Billy the Kid, whom they came to know very well during the range war as both a horse thief and a murderer. On 5 August 1878, Bonney and several of his rustling confederates rode onto the agency to raid livestock from the reservation's corral. A group of Mescaleros were just a few hundred yards away, waiting to receive their food rations from the agency's clerk, Morris Bernstein. The clerk thought he could stop the rustlers and went out to meet them. A Mescalero woman told her grandchildren what she witnessed that day.

The Kid and his companions made off with dozens of horses and mules, and no one was ever convicted of murdering Bernstein, whom the Mescaleros liked and respected. Yet this was only one of several violent encounters the Apaches had with the Kid that year. “At Fort Stanton Billy the Kid was making a raid on the Indians all the time for their horses,” said Percy Big Mouth, who recalled the murder of an unarmed Mescalero. “Billy's gang came and shoot the camp up. One woman still in the tipi. They see her shadow and kill the woman. They took her horses and left.”Footnote ³⁰

Clearly, the Mescaleros did not see Billy the Kid as a symbol of freedom on the range, either at the time of the Lincoln County War or since. On the reservation, stories of the Kid's exploits underscored the tribe's dependency on the federal government for their land and food, as well as their vulnerability to raids carried out by a variety of rustlers and vigilantes. Indian Agent Frederick Godfroy unintentionally captured the absurdity of the Mescaleros’ situation when he wrote to the commissioner of Indian affairs at the height of the conflict: “This agency will not be a complete success until it is … out of the reach of the influence of designing and unscrupulous persons, both Americans and Mexicans.”Footnote ³¹ In other words, the Mescaleros’ “progress” toward assimilation would be possible only if they could avoid contact with the non-Indian residents of Lincoln County. “I am fully satisfied that these Indians are tractable and obedient, and by removing these outside influences their civilization could be advanced more rapidly.” The Mescaleros’ “tractability” and “obedience” stood in stark contrast to the Kid's violence and predations, a crucial source of his livelihood during these years and the outlaw image of his freedom that has persisted ever since.

Long after these events, the celebrated cowboy writer Charles Siringo described a conversation he had with Billy the Kid at the time of the Lincoln County War. According to Siringo, Billy claimed that the first man he ever killed was a black soldier. “At the tender age of twelve,” wrote Siringo, “young Bonney made a trip to Fort Union, New Mexico, and there gambled with the negro soldiers. One ‘black nigger’ cheated Billy, who shot him dead.” Although there is no evidence to prove Siringo's statement, the story was widely repeated for much of the twentieth century.Footnote ³²

This popular acceptance perhaps highlights the racism and lawlessness that black soldiers faced in New Mexico more than any proven event of their service. Although African American cavalrymen achieved fame while fighting and “pacifying” the Apaches, their treatment by white citizens fell far short of respect and tolerance. For his part, Billy the Kid never killed a black soldier. But his activities, both as a hired gun of the Tunstall–McSween faction and as a cattle and horse rustler both on and off the Mescalero reservation, put him in violent opposition to the men of the segregated Ninth Cavalry. As will be seen, in a region where rival white Anglo interests controlled local law enforcement entirely, the black soldiers’ presence as the only legitimate source of federal authority served to exacerbate rather than subdue tensions. The black troopers’ difficult (if not impossible) situation in Lincoln is one major reason – among many – why they have been excluded from nearly every popular representation of the Billy the Kid story.

The roughly one hundred African American cavalrymen assigned to Fort Stanton were complete newcomers to New Mexico. Unlike the Mescaleros, who had lived in the region for centuries, these men had never set foot in the territory until late 1875.Footnote ³³ Their main task was to police a vast section of the Southwest, hopefully preventing the Mescaleros from making any raids on the civilian population while “encouraging” the remaining independent bands of Apaches to submit to life on the reservation. The soldiers’ responsibilities were even more numerous and complicated, however. Almost immediately, they found themselves deeply entangled in the politics and bloodshed of the Lincoln County War.

Today, the black cavalrymen of the West are popularly referred to as “Buffalo Soldiers,” a term believed to have been created by Native American tribes of the Great Plains. It was probably the Comanche Indians who first claimed that the black men's hair resembled the fur of a buffalo and meant the term as a sign of respect for the soldiers’ endurance and fighting skills. At the time of Billy the Kid's exploits, however, the phrase did not yet have wide usage, and the men themselves did not use the term until well into the twentieth century.Footnote ³⁴ The Plains Indians’ respectful attitude, meanwhile, stood in stark contrast to the treatment the black soldiers received from the white population of the Southwest, both within the army and among the white citizens whom the men were sworn to protect. Instances of verbal abuse, discrimination, and violence abound during the soldiers’ years in New Mexico.

The Ninth Cavalry's history in fact reflected the high hopes and crushing defeats of the Reconstruction era, and the black soldiers’ participation in the Lincoln County War should be understood within that larger context. The sheer creation of the unit itself was a bold and important achievement of Radical Reconstruction. In July 1866, the radical Republican majority in Congress authorized six cavalry and infantry regiments made up of black soldiers who would serve under white officers. The men would be fully armed and trained for combat duty and given important assignments along the western frontier. Perhaps most significantly for the time, the black troops were to receive the same pay as white soldiers.Footnote ³⁵

The Ninth Cavalry opened its first recruitment drive in August 1866, and hundreds of African Americans from across the country flocked to enlist. Since the regiment was regionally based in New Orleans, and its main recruiting offices were in Louisiana, Texas, Kentucky, and Florida, its “entering class” of black men hailed overwhelmingly from former slave states. Most of the recruits were presumably born into the plantation system of the Deep South and knew no other way of life until Emancipation and the Union Army liberated their slave communities.Footnote ³⁶

Despite the fact that the regiment was created from scratch, it contained hundreds of veteran soldiers who had seen combat during the Civil War. Nearly 40 percent of the unit's original roster of 818 men had fought in the Union Army.Footnote ³⁷ Private Rufus Slaughter, for example, who was born a slave in Warren County, Kentucky, served in a Union artillery unit during the last year of the war. He was twenty years old when he enlisted in the “Ninth Horse” and remained a member of the regiment for the next two decades before retiring to become a farmer in Nebraska.Footnote ³⁸ Most of the unit's new recruits, like Slaughter, were single and in their early twenties. Those who were not veterans were overwhelmingly laborers or farmers or had worked at some form of rural or agricultural trade, as blacksmiths, hostlers, or tanners. Only a small percentage of the men came from large cities or held urban or industrial occupations, such as waiters, machinists, steamboat crewmen, or railroad engineers. Overall, the members possessed almost no formal education, could not read or write, and left almost no personal correspondence or other writings describing their military experiences.Footnote ³⁹

One can only speculate, then, on how these men must have felt about their incredible historical moment – between slavery, war, and Reconstruction – and what feelings and aspirations they might have had as they awaited deployment on the western frontier. Signing on for five-year tours of duty, they committed themselves to a hard existence of army discipline, remote locations, and real danger. But they were also beginning a new life in so many other ways: as free men, as new citizens representing the full authority of their government, and as settlers on an exotic frontier far from the slave worlds they had left behind. In fact, the most distinctive trait observed among these soldiers was a tremendous sense of pride. Chaplain George Mullins, a white officer who worked with Buffalo Soldiers, commented that the men were intent “to be all that soldiers should be” and felt a great responsibility as representatives of “the colored people of the whole country.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Their masculinity also was clearly at issue. As Mullins observed, the soldiers possessed a “manly anxiety” for respect from white officers and civilians.

For nearly a decade, until their reassignment to New Mexico in 1876, the men of the Ninth Cavalry served in southwestern Texas along the Rio Grande. They fought bands of Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Indians, as well as an array of border bandits, outlaw gangs, and Comanchero raiders. The soldiers also built forts, worked on roads and telegraph lines, escorted wagon trains and cattle drives, and protected mail stations and watering holes. Nonetheless, despite their many labors, the Ninth became a target for the rising redeemer movement of Texas and the rest of the South. Anti-Reconstruction newspapers and politicians made unsubstantiated charges of black soldier cowardice and criminal behavior, going so far as to claim that the black troops fraternized with hostile Indians and threatened and harassed white women throughout the region. These early Redeemers sought not only to remove black troops from Texas, but also to disband the US Army's black regiments altogether.Footnote ⁴¹

Though the Ninth Cavalry was able to survive these criticisms and remain intact, Congress drastically reduced the enlistment pool available to black units. The regiment, which once numbered over eight hundred, could count only 276 enlisted men when it moved into New Mexico Territory in early 1876. The regiment was also very different in composition from its immediate post-Civil War origins. At the Fort Stanton garrison in 1879, for example, only 15 percent of the men were from the Deep South, reflecting intense white opposition to recruitment there during the last years of Reconstruction. A full third of the members now came from northern states. The unit's average age was twenty-two, which by this time meant far fewer veterans, and none of the Civil War.Footnote ⁴² One can also legitimately speculate that the regiment's expectations for the postwar period had changed as well, and not for the better.

The soldiers’ New Mexico assignment, meanwhile, was every bit as difficult as what they had experienced in Texas. Through the years from 1876 to 1881, the regiment had to operate at half-strength or less while covering a land area the size of Pennsylvania. And yet it was here that the Ninth was able to achieve a level of respect and national recognition that was not possible in the Reconstruction-era South. In New Mexico, the soldiers played major roles in the Victorio's War and Nana's War campaigns, and rode thousands of miles on scouting expeditions and while patrolling the territory's Indian reservations. Perhaps most significantly, six black members of the regiment received the Medal of Honor. Only one member received the same honor in Texas, where the regiment served nearly twice as long.Footnote ⁴³

This is not to say that New Mexico was color-blind toward African Americans, whether in or out of uniform. Far from it. Though Jim Crow did not reign in the territory, and local establishments like restaurants, hotels, and saloons were not segregated, the atmosphere off-barracks could be extremely hostile, or as historian Monroe Lee Billington has argued, “An unwritten rule appeared to be that white civilians could murder black soldiers with impunity, for these individuals were seldom punished for their crimes.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In the town of Lincoln, where the most important events of Billy the Kid's career would soon take place, two horrific episodes of racial violence occurred just a few miles from Fort Stanton. On the day Susan McSween and her husband arrived in Lincoln in March 1875, a black prisoner was shot to death in the street. “One night the sheriff wished to go to a dance,” McSween recalled, and Lincoln had no jail at this time. “So the sheriff told his prisoner he could run away … When he did, he shot him and went to the dance.” The sheriff then fled the area and was never prosecuted for the murder.Footnote ⁴⁵

A shooting that took place a year later directly involved the soldiers at Fort Stanton. In December 1876, Frank Freeman, a white outlaw from Alabama who boasted publicly that he was a “nigger-killer,” became enraged when a Ninth Cavalry sergeant sat down next to him at a restaurant in a Lincoln hotel. According to a newspaper account, “Freeman, who had one of his murder fits on, took the sergeant by the hand in a friendly manner, and with his other hand reached around and placed the muzzle of his pistol at the back of the sergeant's head and fired.” The shot did not kill the black soldier, whom Freeman appeared to have targeted for no other reason than racial hatred. Freeman then went on a shooting rampage through the streets of Lincoln, vowing that “he intended to kill every man in town that he didn't like,” before he finally rode away. The Alabaman was later killed by a sheriff's posse the following spring.Footnote ⁴⁶

In such a lawless and racially charged atmosphere, it is not surprising that the men of the Ninth Cavalry faced a very dangerous situation when the Lincoln County War broke out in February 1878. Over the course of a year, the black soldiers worked almost continuously – and thanklessly – to preserve some sense of law and order amidst the many killings committed by both sides. On several occasions the men were posted in the town itself with the dubious assignment of maintaining the peace. They had to escort, under armed guard, the county's judge and court staff from Fort Stanton to Lincoln every day while the court was in session. Worst of all, the soldiers had to assist the sheriff currently in office, whose allegiances changed according to whichever rival gang controlled the position at the time. The troopers had no choice but to serve arrest warrants, search homes for suspects and stolen goods, and ride with sheriff's posses to apprehend wanted gang members when the civilian population was too afraid to pursue the killers themselves. Of course, all of this work in Lincoln came in addition to the Ninth's primary task, of keeping a close eye on the Mescalero and other Apache Indians across thousands of miles of New Mexican desert and mountain ranges.Footnote ⁴⁷

Nonetheless, it was arguably these same soldiers, and more specifically an African American private, who determined the outcome of the Lincoln County War. The conflict finally reached its boiling point in mid-July 1878, when the two rival factions amassed their gunfighters in Lincoln for a showdown. At first the insurgent group, led by Alexander McSween, held the upper hand, as his hired gun William Bonney and sixty other men greatly outnumbered the Murphy–Dolan forces.

The tide soon turned, however, when on the afternoon of 17 July, Private Berry Robinson was sent into Lincoln to deliver a message. The black cavalryman was stopped on the outskirts of town by four armed men, who demanded to know where he was going. When Robinson told them only that he was on government business, one of the men said, “You talk pretty damn saucy.” Robinson replied, “I talk no more damn saucy than you do,” upon which the men drew their guns and positioned themselves around the soldier. Robinson then loaded a cartridge in his carbine and placed the rifle in the “advance position” (resting on his right thigh, pointing forward with his finger resting on the trigger). After what must have been an incredibly tense moment, Robinson moved his horse past the four men and rode on into Lincoln. His worries were not over, however, as he immediately came under fire. Robinson later testified, “There the men at the McSween house shot at me through portals on the top, one ball whistled past my horse's head. He got scared and fell. I got off but held on to his bridle and remounted.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Robinson escaped harm, but the threats to his life compelled the regimental commander at Fort Stanton to order troops into Lincoln. The next day Colonel Nathan Dudley led a contingent of thirty-five soldiers into the center of town, where they set up an encampment. Most menacingly, the unit brought a mountain howitzer and a Gatling gun, and immediately pointed the cannon at the strongholds of the McSween forces. This action caused two-thirds of the McSween gunmen to flee Lincoln, whereupon the Murphy–Dolan group took full advantage. With Dudley's troops not interfering, the “House's” men lit the McSween home on fire, and in the early morning of 20 July, killed the lawyer and several of his supporters. William Bonney was able to escape the siege in a hail of bullets, marking the beginning of his notorious outlaw career.Footnote ⁴⁹

The black cavalrymen who were present in Lincoln left no expression of their perspective on the range war or Billy the Kid, whom they knew by sight and reputation even if they had little personal contact with him.Footnote ⁵⁰ Members of the regiment were ordered to serve warrants for the Kid's arrest both during and after the “Battle of Lincoln,” and at one point pursued him as part of a sheriff's posse. Most likely the soldiers had a negative view of Billy and the McSween faction and favored the House of Murphy, whose leaders were former cavalrymen who had served at Fort Stanton. It was, after all, a group of McSween men – and perhaps even the Kid himself – who shot at Private Berry Robinson.Footnote ⁵¹

Yet overwhelmingly the soldiers must have felt weariness and disgust for the whole affair. As their commanding officer reported, in the most prosaic terms, “Unquestionably the troops find this duty disagreeable, as it must expose them to more or less odium or obloquy from the community.”Footnote ⁵² Perhaps the best indication of the soldiers’ feelings can be seen in how many of the men remained in the territory after retiring from the army. Of the hundreds of African Americans who served in New Mexico, only a handful ever stayed on.Footnote ⁵³

Two years after the Lincoln County War had ended, a young man named Miguel A. Otero Jr. boarded a train at his hometown of Las Vegas, New Mexico. Also on the train that day was Billy the Kid, who, under heavily armed guard, had been captured just a few days before by Sheriff Pat Garrett and his posse. Miguel Otero was twenty years old at the time, about the same age as Billy. The young men talked briefly that day and later at the Santa Fe jail, where Otero brought the Kid tobacco and candy. “He was very fond of sweets and asked us to bring him all we could.”Footnote ⁵⁴ By this time Billy had become notorious throughout the territory, both for his exploits in the Lincoln County War and as one of the region's most active cattle and horse rustlers. The Kid had been directly involved in the killing of at least seven men, with more to come.

Unlike Billy, Miguel A. Otero Jr. was a well-educated young man from one of New Mexico's most prominent families, who would go on to become the first Hispano governor of the territory.Footnote ⁵⁵ Yet, long after his political career was over, Otero felt compelled to write a biography of the outlaw, an early form of revisionist western that the governor pointedly entitled The Real Billy the Kid.Footnote ⁵⁶ Otero's view of Bonney differed completely from the perspectives of both the Mescalero Apaches and the Buffalo Soldiers. “I liked the Kid very much,” he wrote; “nothing would have pleased me more than to have witnessed his escape.” Indeed, Otero was sympathetic to all aspects of the Kid's short and violent life. “He had his share of good qualities and was very pleasant. He had a reputation for being considerate of the old, the young, and the poor; he was loyal to his friends and above all, loved his mother devotedly.” Otero observed, “He was unfortunate in starting life, and became a victim of circumstances.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Otero's account, written during the Great Depression, not only provides a reappraisal and defense of Bonney's character. The governor also offers a decidedly Hispano perspective on the Lincoln County War and the social and political history of territorial New Mexico as a whole.Footnote ⁵⁸ In his view, the Kid's career and the conflict in Lincoln were only the most famous events in a much larger narrative of Hispano dispossession and disenfranchisement. To Otero, the Murphy–Dolan faction and the Santa Fe Ring were the real criminals of the story, along with Pat Garrett and the cattlemen who financed efforts to capture and kill the Kid. The governor's portrayal of the Tunstall and McSween insurgents, in contrast, resembles a western David fighting a Goliath of greed and political tyranny. Otero claims that the Hispano population allied themselves entirely with the Tunstall–McSween group, and there is no question in his mind as to how the community felt about William Bonney. “Billy was on the friendliest of terms with the native element of the country; he had protected and helped them in every possible way. The natives would have done all in their power to have been of assistance to him.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Otero's choice of language is significant here. By “native,” he does not mean the Mescalero Apaches or other Indian tribes of New Mexico. “Natives” and “the native element” refer to people like himself, of Spanish descent and heritage, whose ancestors colonized the region starting in the late sixteenth century. At the time of the Lincoln County War, this population self-identified for the most part as nativos or mexicanos, in contrast to the indigenous indios and the immigrant americanos from the United States. By 1936, when Otero wrote his biography, these forms of self-identification had evolved even further, with Hispano-Americano or “Spanish-American” used to distinguish residents of Spanish descent from both the Anglo population and immigrants from Mexico. As Charles Montgomery has argued, the term “Spanish-American” was in fact created by the Hispano elite, people like Otero, who saw their socioeconomic and racial status severely threatened by the rising Anglo population. In their usage, the phrase asserted their European descent, whiteness, and loyalty to the United States.Footnote ⁶⁰

The process of Hispano decline did not begin immediately with the US takeover of the territory after the Mexican War. In fact, the territory's Hispano population initially benefited in important ways from their new government. The forts and military presence that the American army provided in the 1850s finally subdued the Apache tribes in central and southern New Mexico, making sustained Hispano farming and ranching possible in the region that became designated Lincoln County. Meanwhile, the land routes and cattle trails that connected the territory to the California Gold Rush and the growing Mid-west made many Hispano families prosperous, including the Oteros, whose business interests included important elements of the new American economy such as merchandising, banking, and railroads.Footnote ⁶¹

After the Civil War, however, the dangers of incorporation into the American political and economic system became clear. By the early 1870s, the cadre of lawyers, politicians, and businessmen known as the Santa Fe Ring held the real power and future of New Mexico: its courts, territorial offices, and government contracts. The Ring asserted this power in the most fundamental way, by denying long-time Hispano claims to the land itself, initiating a process of dispossession and landlessness for thousands of families. The 1880 census illustrates and perhaps contributes to the marginalization of Lincoln County's Hispano population, listing men of Spanish descent overwhelmingly as “laborers.” Few are defined as herders, farmers, or teamsters, occupations that suggest some level of skill, property ownership, or independence. While this imbalance could reflect the census takers’ prejudice, there is little question that the Hispano community's economic and social circumstances were by then stagnating or in sharp decline in comparison to the region's Anglos. The Anglo population in these same years expanded and prospered, mainly through new sources of wealth, particularly mining and large-scale cattle ranching, which the denial of Hispano land claims made possible.Footnote ⁶²

Making all of this even more painful and frustrating to Hispanos, in Lincoln County and elsewhere, was the fact that they represented the overwhelming majority of the territory's population and still controlled most of the local political offices. As late as the year 1900, Hispanos outnumbered Anglo residents two to one in New Mexico. The situation in Lincoln County at the time of the range war is especially illuminating. Of a total of 638 people then living in the town of Lincoln, 590 had Spanish surnames. In other nearby communities the proportion of persons of Spanish descent was even higher, such as in Plaza San Patricio (227 of 229 residents) and Plaza Picacho (196 of 198).Footnote ⁶³ In terms of politics, Hispanos served as representatives in the territorial legislature and as county commissioners, probate judges, sheriffs, and Justices of the Peace. It was Saturnino Baca, a former surveyor and Union army captain, who led the effort to create Lincoln County in 1869. (Legislators in fact wanted to name the county Baca, but he refused, insisting that the territory honor the memory of the late President instead.)Footnote ⁶⁴

The racism and open contempt of many of the new Anglo emigrants, meanwhile, provided the most volatile source of anxiety for the Hispano population. Frederick Nolan has named emigrants from Texas as by far the most hostile and dangerous group within the Anglo population.Footnote ⁶⁵ According to Nolan, the Tejanos were “raised with the belief that Hispanics – ‘Mexicans,’ or ‘greasers’ as they called them – were subhuman, and they treated them accordingly”:

In Lincoln County, this tension fueled both racial segregation and a series of violent conflicts leading up to the Lincoln County War. The 1880 census recorded how the county's newest areas of settlement were almost exclusively populated by white residents, as seen in the mining towns of White Oaks and Rio Peñasco. Statistics on intermarriage and the naming of children also highlight this separation. Of the twenty-one mixed Hispano-Anglo marriages recorded in Lincoln County, only one of the couples, Sheriff Pat Garrett and his wife, lived in a majority white community. Children of these marriages living in majority Hispano communities were for the most part given Spanish names. In areas where the white population was a significant minority, however, children of mixed marriages had English names.Footnote ⁶⁶

Meanwhile, many incidents of violence erupted between these populations, the most deadly of which was the so-called “Horrell War.” In late 1873, the Horrell clan came to New Mexico on the run from the law having killed five Texas Rangers. Buying land in Lincoln County's Ruidoso Valley, they immediately came into conflict with the local Hispano community. The fighting most likely began as a confrontation over irrigation rights, and left a Hispano farmer dead. This was followed by an arrest attempt (four men killed, including the town constable, Juan Martín) and a series of indiscriminate killings. The most vicious occurred when the Horrells attacked a party celebrating the marriage of a young couple, Encarnación and Joe Rafael Gutiérrez. A newspaper reported, “at about midnight [the Horrells] went into the house, shot out the lights first and then began shooting at random.” Five members of the wedding party were killed. When the community finally drove the Horrells off their farm and burned their ranch house to the ground, the Texans lashed out one last time, slaughtering five unarmed Hispano wagon drivers on the road as the clan left the territory entirely.Footnote ⁶⁷

Lawrence Murphy and Jimmy Dolan aided the area's Hispano population in its fight against the Horrells, though more out of self-interest than any heartfelt commitment to their neighbors’ welfare. This support marked the last time the House of Murphy and the local Hispano community would stand together on the same side of an armed conflict. By the time the Lincoln County War broke out four years later, L. G. Murphy & Co.’s monopoly on economic and political power had grown tremendously, and with it widespread Hispano resentment. Juan B. Patrón, whose father was killed in the Horrells’ attack on the wedding party, described the situation. “Murphy controlled everything that there was any money in – and dictated who should run for office and who should not.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Because the House held the government contracts for the Mescalero reservation and Fort Stanton, it not only dictated the prices that area Hispano farmers received for their crops and beef, but also monopolized, as the area's only firm with a ready cash flow, all banking and credit services. By 1878, many of Lincoln's Hispano families were heavily in debt and at risk of losing their land and possessions. Not surprisingly, the Hispano community actively allied themselves with John Tunstall, Alexander McSween, and ranching baron John Chisum and the insurgency movement.Footnote ⁶⁹

During the Lincoln County War, the local Hispano population played critical roles in every aspect of the fighting, a fact that neither popular representations of the Kid nor the voluminous historical literature on his exploits have fully recognized.Footnote ⁷⁰ It was town constable Atanacio Martínez who organized the Regulators, the group of pro-McSween gunmen that started the Kid off on his path to worldwide fame. When Billy and other Regulators gunned down Sheriff William Brady on the main street of Lincoln, it was the Hispano county commissioners who appointed a McSween supporter to take his place, helping the feud grow and intensify. Most tellingly, nearly all of the men who were with Alexander McSween at the climax of the “Battle of Lincoln” were Hispanos. When the lawyer was shot to death while attempting to escape his burning house, Vicente Romero and Francisco Zamora, both allies, fell dead on either side of him. After the battle, Hispanos formed the majority of the grand jury assigned to investigate the killings, and it was Juan B. Patrón who founded the Lincoln County Mounted Riflemen, a civilian militia created to reestablish peace in the region. Patrón's unit was made up almost entirely of Hispano men who had supported the McSween cause.Footnote ⁷¹

But it was not until after the Lincoln County War subsided in the spring of 1879 that Billy the Kid fully immersed himself in the Hispano community of the region, and the population, in turn, embraced him. It is important to note here that the Hispanos of Lincoln County were also relatively new to the region, having moved there mainly as sheep ranchers and subsistence farmers in the years of pacification after the US conquest. The area's Hispanos were not connected to the Santa Fe Ring and were not prospering like Miguel Otero's family in the new American economy. By the late 1870s most of them were heavily in debt or had lost their farms to the House of Murphy and backed the Tunstall–McSween insurgency and the daring young man now known as Billy the Kid. The territory's newly appointed governor, Lew Wallace, personally witnessed this strong support. Wallace was in Lincoln when the Kid was held prisoner briefly in the town jail. “I heard singing and music the other night,” Wallace wrote to Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, and “going to the door, I found the minstrels of the village actually serenading the fellow in his prison.”Footnote ⁷² When Bonney got out of jail, he made the majority Hispano area of Fort Sumner his home base and safe haven. The Kid became fluent in Spanish and cut an attractive figure at the bailes, the dances that frequently took place in the villages and ranch houses of the region. Many people recalled how Bonney was especially popular with the Hispana women, but respectful enough to avoid any trouble with their husbands and parents. Paulita Maxwell, related to the prominent family at the heart of the infamous Maxwell Land Grant controversy, remembered that Billy “fascinated many women.” “In every placeta [sic] in the Pecos some little señorita was proud to be known as his querida,” she claimed. Perhaps the best sign of the community's appreciation was the nickname they gave to Billy and the men he rode with, “Los Bilitos.”Footnote ⁷³

Finally, the Kid spent the last three months of his life almost exclusively with Hispano friends and supporters, speaking mainly Spanish the entire time. The most remarkable event of his career, and what made him nationally famous even while he was still alive, was his daring escape from the Lincoln County jail on 28 April 1881. The Kid shot and killed two sheriff's deputies in broad daylight, then rode off on a horse, leaving the town and the territory both stunned and terrorized. These events have been retold and filmed countless times, but less acknowledged is the help that Billy received in the next few days from area farmers like Francisco Gomez, Jose Cordova, Scipio Salazar, and Yginio Salazar, who gave him food and shelter, removed his prison shackles, and insisted that he escape to “Old Mexico.” The Kid in fact felt so safe and secure in the Fort Sumner area that he never crossed the border to freedom, and was staying with a friend, Jesus Silva, when Sheriff Pat Garrett finally closed in on him. It was in the Fort Sumner home of Don Pedro “Pete” Maxwell where Garrett shot Billy dead. On the night of 14 July 1881, the Kid called out in the darkness, “¿Quién es? ¿Quién es?” (Who is it? Who goes there?) – the last words he ever spoke. The next morning the town alcalde Alejandro Segura assembled a group of residents to officially state the cause of Billy's death. The coroner's jury, made up of five Hispano men, declared the killing a justifiable homicide.Footnote ⁷⁴

The Hispano community's affection for the young outlaw grew tremendously over the next few decades, to the point where it is difficult to determine how the population actually felt about Bonney during his lifetime, or whether there had been a division of opinion along class lines that faded with time. Former governor Miguel A. Otero Jr.’s hagiographic account of the Kid reflects how even a member of the Hispano elite could champion Billy by the mid-1930s. Otero included only the most positive of recollections in his biography, regardless of the social class of his interviewees. Paulita Maxwell, rumored to be the Kid's love interest and the reason he stayed in Fort Sumner, claimed that “Billy was a good boy, but he was hounded by men who wanted to kill him because they feared him. He was always on the defensive.” Another friend, Martín Chavez, echoed these sentiments, while emphasizing the ethnicity of the men Bonney killed. “Billy was a perfect gentleman and a man with a noble heart. He never killed a native citizen of New Mexico in all his career; the men he did kill, he had to in defense of his own life.” For his part, the well-bred and educated Otero proclaimed Billy a social bandit and a folkloric hero. “I can honestly say that he was ‘a man more sinned against than sinning’,” Otero concluded.Footnote ⁷⁵

It might be expecting too much to wish Aaron Copland had incorporated the lives and histories of New Mexico's communities of color into a single work about Billy the Kid. Copland's ballet score is only thirty minutes long, hardly enough time to provide much more than a touch of borderlands exoticism, let alone a larger context of racial violence. Yet even the more “serious” and self-consciously revisionist treatments of Bonney, such as Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), and Larry McMurtry's Anything for Billy (1988), remain uninformed by the long, difficult histories of New Mexico's communities of color.Footnote ⁷⁶

There are many reasons for this lack of attention. First and foremost is the fact that the telling of Bonney's story has been from the outset an overwhelmingly commercial enterprise, targeting an almost exclusively white audience. No fewer than seven dime novels appeared in the year following Billy's death, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. The more fanciful portrayals of his life were the most profitable through the first half of the twentieth century, and publishers and movie studios gave little, if any, consideration to producing sympathetic or realistic portrayals of New Mexico's non-white population. Serious historical treatment also lagged far behind. The first scholarly interpretations of the Lincoln County War and Billy's career did not emerge until the 1950s, and arguably Joel Jacobsen's Such Men as Billy the Kid (1997) is the only full-length academic work to present the subject in a broader historical context.Footnote ⁷⁷

The undeniable excitement of the Kid's life, meanwhile, has helped to frame almost all consideration of Bonney, who appears as an individual engaged in a sort of timeless rebellion, rather than a product of a specific multicultural environment and history. This framing is not surprising since, contrary to the highly embellished legends of the Old West, incredible things really did happen to Billy, and he in turn made spectacular events happen. Bonney was present at every key moment in the Lincoln County War, including the killings of John Tunstall, Sheriff William Brady, and “Buckshot” Roberts, among many others. He did in fact survive the burning of McSween's house, miraculously dodge a hail of bullets, and escape into the night. He did gun down, in the most dramatic fashion, two deputies in his breakout from the Lincoln jail. And, with a five-hundred-dollar bounty on his head, he was indeed shot to death, holding a six-gun in one hand and a butcher's knife in the other. All of these things happened, and for over 130 years, artists and historians (mostly, if not exclusively, men)Footnote ⁷⁸ have fallen under the spell of this narrative and have preferred to offer a variety of interpretations of the Kid and his motivations rather than describe him in relation to his diverse contemporaries and complex social context.

Yet, as briefly proposed here, the Kid's anarchic freedom and international fame both depended on and stood in stark contrast to the very different lives and communities of New Mexico's Mescalero Indians, black soldiers, and Hispano farmers. Ultimately, Billy was only a minor character in their stories. After his death, the destruction of the Mescaleros’ independent, migratory way of life continued, as seen in a government report published in 1890, which refers to the Apaches on the reservation repeatedly as “blanket Indians.” “Begging with them is an art,” the report observed, “which they practice with a degree of skill greater than that of the white professional beggar.”Footnote ⁷⁹

The black members of the Ninth Cavalry, meanwhile, left New Mexico the same year Billy died, never to return. Their work in ending the Apache threat completed, the regiment next undertook a similar assignment in the Sioux territory, followed by service in the Spanish–American War, where they fought alongside Teddy Roosevelt in the battle of San Juan Hill. The Buffalo Soldiers helped to expand and enforce US territorial possessions at the same time that black rights became more and more restricted throughout the American South.Footnote ⁸⁰

Finally, for New Mexico's majority population, the election of Governor Miguel A. Otero Jr. in 1897 marked the twilight of “native” political influence, rather than a triumph of Hispano political power. As the historian Maria Montoya has observed, during the first half of the twentieth century, much of the population became de facto second-class citizens “in terms of employment, housing, and education.”Footnote ⁸¹ A Hispano politician of the 1930s expressed the hypocrisy of their situation: “If they go to war, they're Americans; if they run for office, they're Spanish Americans; but if they're looking for a job, they're damned Mexicans.”Footnote ⁸²

It was really not until the rise of the civil rights, Native American, and Chicano movements of the 1950s and 1960s that a larger historiographical awareness of these communities began to emerge. But recent events, even after more than two generations of academic scholarship, seem to be making a more inclusive telling of the Kid's story possible, if not inevitable. Today, New Mexico is once again a battleground – a “battleground state” in the last four presidential elections – and the demographic and political implications of this change have made the rest of the country (at least somewhat) more aware of the region's “majority minority” population.Footnote ⁸³ Despite the Kid's fame, there has always been a vagueness in the popular imagination about his geographic space – New Mexico and the far Southwest in general. This vagueness has reflected and perpetuated a confusion and an ignorance about the diverse communities who have lived there. Perhaps the historical present is finally catching up with the historical past, and any new ballets about the Kid will be informed by more than an armful of cowboy songs.