Me and Billy the Kid: Ghost and legend of New Mexico's most storied outlaw haunt Journal writer

LINCOLN — Having lived in New Mexico for nearly 49 years, it’s no surprise to me that the state’s Wild West history lies close to the surface.

Kick the ground, and it comes up with the dust.

Take for example last weekend, when more than 200 people showed up for an open house at the historic Ellis Store in Lincoln, the old frontier town 33 miles southeast of Carrizozo.

Me and Billy the Kid: Ghost and legend of New Mexico's most storied outlaw haunt Journal writer

Western historians, Western writers, Western painters, Western musicians, old cowboys, the great-great-grandson of a gunfighter and members of the general public turned out to see what Amy Gauthier, the new owner of the Ellis Store, is doing to restore a building that dates back to before the Lincoln County War, the brutal conflict between competing business interests that made bullets hum here in 1878.

Bob Boze Bell, executive editor of True West magazine, drove from Cave Creek, Arizona, to be at the open house.

“It was a roaring success,” Bell said. “It gives me hope for the future of historic preservation. All the historians told me the event was such a breath of fresh air in the putrid air of the current culture wars.”

Western nonfiction author and musician Mark Lee Gardner and his wife, Katie, came from Cascade, Colorado.

“For me, it was all about the camaraderie between old friends and new drawn together by a mutual interest in Billy,” Gardner said. “But it was not a stodgy history gathering. More like a salon with the Kid as its theme.”

Billy. The Kid. Billy the Kid.

There it is. It’s likely that Billy the Kid’s association with the Ellis Store drew most of those attending the open house to Lincoln. The young outlaw, New Mexico’s best known real-life figure, played an active role in the Lincoln County War and is said to have stayed at the Ellis Store.

It was the Kid’s mystique that pulled Paul Andrew Hutton, distinguished professor of history at the University of New Mexico, and his daughter, attorney Lorena Hutton, to the Lincoln gathering.

“I was excited to be back in Lincoln and to be once again so in awe of how that town can transport you back to the wild west days of Billy the Kid,” Paul Hutton said.

Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett shot Billy to death on July 14, 1881, in Fort Sumner. But his ghost lingers.

I know, because it haunts me.

High-voltage desperado

In my earlier years as a journalist in New Mexico, I tried to avoid writing about Billy the Kid. Not because the Kid’s story failed to intrigue me, but because so many others have told it.

Bell has written three books about Billy and illustrated them with his own artwork. Gardner’s 2011 book “To Hell on a Fast Horse” is about the Kid and Garrett.

Paul Hutton was the guest curator of the 2007 Albuquerque Museum exhibit “Dreamscape Desperado: Billy the Kid and the Outlaw in America.”

Considering all the attention Billy gets, I figured readers didn’t need me slinging ink at his tale.

Well, good luck with that. If, like me, you are a New Mexico writer who often delves into the past, you’d have a better chance not writing about drought or the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta than not writing about the Kid. The interest in him is insatiable.

“Billy was 220 volts and everyone else was 110 bolts,” said Buckeye Blake, a Weatherford, Texas, artist and Billy the Kid enthusiast. “He was quicker than everybody. Everybody’s scared to death of him.”

Blake was showing his Western-themed artwork at the open house, as was Bell. I’ve known Bell, Gardner and Paul Hutton for years, but I had never met Blake prior to last week’s event.

Never mind that. Minutes after shaking hands, Blake and I were like old friends, and he was telling me a story about what happened to one of Billy’s favorite horses.

Lori Goodloe, president of the Billy the Kid Outlaw Gang, an organization founded in 1987 to preserve, protect and promote the true history of the Kid in New Mexico, attended the open house.

Goodloe lives in Phoenix, but is often in Lincoln.

“It’s my second home,” she said. Goodloe wrote and photographed “On the Trail of Billy the Kid,” a photographic life of the Kid in New Mexico.

“When I was a kid, I just assumed he was a bank robber and a murderer,” Goodloe said. “But then I read a WPA (Works Progress Administration) interview with a woman who said she knew Billy and let him play with her children. It made me think there might be more to him.”

Riding Billy’s trail

Steve Sederwall is the author of a book recounting his cold-case investigation of the two killings the Kid committed while escaping from the Lincoln County Courthouse jail on April 28, 1881. He was standing in one of the main rooms of the Ellis Store during the open house.

“I reckon every name in the Lincoln County War has been in this room,” he said.

A short time later, Bryan Regan, a contractor who builds roads in West Texas, showed up. Regan’s great-great-grandfather, George Coe, fought on the same side as the Kid during the Lincoln County War. A ricocheting bullet cost Coe his trigger finger in the Blazer’s Mill shootout on April 4, 1878.

See what I mean about New Mexico’s frontier history being close to the surface. There are people walking around today with close ties to those wild and woolly times.

I finally gave up the notion of not writing about Billy.

In 2004, 2005 and 2006, when I was a reporter for The Albuquerque Tribune, I rode the Billy the Kid Trail Ride, a 130- to 167-mile (depending on the route) horseback ride from Lincoln to Fort Sumner. The idea was to follow, as best as possible, the Kid’s trail following his 1881 escape from the Lincoln County Courthouse.

Riders would set out in April, on or close to the date of Billy’s breakout. April 2005 was cold, wet and windy. We camped the first night in the Capitan Gap and wondered if we would get blown out of there before we froze to death.

I wrote about those trail rides for The Tribune and Western Horseman magazine. And here I am 20 years later, writing about Billy the Kid for the Journal.

Ellis Store owner Gauthier is a native of Louisiana who worked in corporate spa management in Utah. She was prompted to purchase the historic Lincoln building by stories her maternal grandfather told her about Billy the Kid. She plans to make rooms in the old building available for vacation rental and perhaps turn it into an event center.

“I came here from Salt Lake City, horns honking, sirens screaming,” she said. “Here at night, when there are no cars, it is so quiet. That’s when I feel close to the history.”

I know what she means.

The night before the start of the 2004 Billy the Kid Trail Ride, several of us spread our blankets behind the Lincoln County Courthouse, where the horses were corralled. We slept under the stars, just yards from where the Kid killed deputies James W. Bell and Bob Olinger during his escape.

Did I feel the presence of Billy’s ghost that night? You bet. Sometimes I still do.