Billy the Kid's Silver City — A Youth Before the Legend

The boy who would become Billy the Kid arrived in Silver City around eighteen seventy-three, when he was about thirteen years old. He came with his mother, Catherine Antrim, and his stepfather, William Antrim, who had hopes for the mines. At the time the boy went by the name Henry Antrim, sometimes Henry McCarty, and people who knew him in Silver City remembered him as small, cheerful, and sociable, fond of dancing and card games.

His mother died of tuberculosis in September of eighteen seventy-four, which left him effectively on his own. He began stealing to get by. The local sheriff, Harvey Whitehill, arrested him twice, both times for theft, and later said the boy was likeable and that stealing seemed driven by necessity rather than criminal character.

The second arrest, in eighteen seventy-five, ended with the boy climbing up the chimney of the jail and escaping. He was gone from Silver City and gone from childhood. He would spend the remaining few years of his life across the territory of New Mexico and Arizona, building a reputation that would outlast every other person in this story.

In Silver City today, the site where his mother is buried is marked, and the location of his first jailbreak is preserved in local memory and on historical markers. Grant County, where Silver City sits, is the county where Billy the Kid's legend began.