Leon Claire Metz - The Encyclopedia of Lawmen, Outlaws, and Gunfighters

ix

xv

As a boy growing up in Parkersburg, West Virginia, during the late 1940s, I remember reading my first western gunfighter biography. I do not recall the publisher, but the book was entitled Tie of Bid r tPie Kid, by Walter Noble Burns.

That book had a profound effect upon my life, although I would not realize it until much later. In those simple, beguiling days, it never occurred to this gullible youngster that not everything in print was necessarily true. I thought it was illegal to lie in print, that one went to jail for things like that. Another 20 years would pass before it finally dawned on me that Billy the Kid had never killed the fabled 21 men, that he had not likely slain over six. During later years I almost cried when I learned that he was probably born in New York City, that his real name wasn't William Bonney but Henry McCarty, and that he could have been as old as 24 or 25 when Sheriff Pat Garrett shot him dead at around midnight at Fort Sumner, New Mexico.

I carried many of my false western impressions and beliefs with me when I moved to El Paso, Texas, during the early 1950s. Roughly 10 years later I began researching and writing about the Wild West, initially skipping over Billy the Kid and John Wesley Hardin, believing them to have already been too well covered by other authors. Hardin in particular had written his autobiography in 1895, finishing it per

haps only hours before his death. Who could quarrel with the authenticity of that?

So my research began with the gathering of information regarding lesser-known individuals, gunfighters, and outlaws, significant personalities who had not yet become household words regarding the Wild West. Thus my first book was a biography of John Selman, the lawman/outlaw gunman who killed John Wesley Hardin. In the process of researching Selman, even though his and Hardin's lives did not come together until the mid-1890s, shortly before their deaths, I nevertheless accumulated considerable information regarding Hardin, information I retained but rarely utilized for 20 years until the early 1990s, when it occurred to me that the 100th anniversary of Hardin's violent death in El Paso, Texas, was coming up. "This might be a good time to write his biography," I said to myself.

My next book after Selman was a biography of Dallas Stoudenmire, a gunman whose name was hardly a household word anywhere in the world. He both built his reputation and met his death in El Paso.

After that, with two gunfighter biographies behind me, I ached to write about Billy the Kid, even though at the time I suspected that I could add little that was new to what Walter Noble Burns, and many other writers as well, had already recorded. Therefore, I changed my mind and instead wrote a biography of the tall sheriff who killed Billy the Kid-Pat Garrett. Surprisingly, although Billy the Kid had by now become the subject of uncounted articles and biographies, since Burns no author had turned his or her attention to Garrett. Sheriff Pat Garrett in these Billy the Kid stories had been reduced to little more than a footnote. But Garrett was much more than that. During my research, Garrett turned out to be quite a revelation; in fact, Pat Garrett changed my life. He is in many respects responsible for this encyclopedia. He made me realize that in terms of the American gunfighting West, there truly were no minor or irrelevant figures. There are merely lives that have never been properly investigated.

Pat Garrett, who even I anticipated would be peripheral to Billy the Kid, if still a figure worth writing about, turned out to be one of southwestern America's most dynamic and tragic images. In the Pat Garrett biography, it surprisingly wasn't he who was marginal but Henry McCarty-or Henry Antrim, or William Bonney, or Billy the Kid, or whatever else one prefers to call him.

From this writer's perspective, Garrett was a fascinating and towering, if deeply flawed, individual. Billy the Kid was just flawed. Nevertheless, old heroes die hard in our mental and emotional pantheons. In spite of my efforts, it remains Billy the Kid and not Pat Garrett whom folks remember. The reason, I believe, lies in the name. The name "Billy the Kid" somehow grabs the imagination, implying perpetual youth, a young man full of promise cruelly cut down in his prime. If his real name, Henry McCarty, had been used, I am convinced most folks would never have heard of him. "Pat Garrett," on the other hand, would be a nice name for a bottle of Ketchup; it is small wonder that Garrett has never grabbed intense public attention.

Still, this encyclopedia is about outlaw/lawman violence and associate themes in the American West, the West understood to lie between Canada and the Mexican border, between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean. The time period starts immediately after the Civil War and closes shortly after 1900, when the last remnants of outlaw/lawmen/gunfighters rode across the western horizon and into legend.

It is fair to say that the Civil War set the stage for the gunfighter era. The war left not only chaos but hopelessness, lawlessness, and an uprooted population, especially in the South. The South also had the

added burden of military occupation by a federal army unequipped for stabilization and rehabilitation.

Hundreds of ex-Confederate soldiers wandered the dusty roads and village towns, communities where most civilian jobs had been swept away. Markets had vanished. Schools had closed. Families had scattered. Many aimless southerners subsequently turned westward.

Oklahoma was still mostly Indian. Kansas and Missouri had hardly entered the war in the accepted sense of the word, and yet guerrilla forces had bitterly mangled each other there, leaving Kansas with an apt nickname it never deserved but certainly earned-Bleeding Kansas. Although California took the side of the Union, it had no real presence in the war and was remote from everywhere. Arkansas contributed manpower primarily to the South but became little more than a footnote to the war. As for Texas, it was big and wide, empty and yet settled when the war started, perhaps the only state still struggling with Indian problems. It was a land harboring its own sense of destiny, a people still wondering if they had done the right thing by joining the American union in the first place.

It wasn't long before two widely separated states, Kansas and Texas, far apart in distance and time, recognized that each had something the other needed. By the late 1860s, Kansas had railroads and grass but little in the way of manufactured or grown products. On the other hand, Texas had thousands of wandering longhorn cattle but no transportation and no markets.

So trails 1,000 miles long arose between Texas and Kansas, main trails and feeder trails with colorful names like Chisholm, Western, National, PotterBacon, Sedalia, and Goodnight-Loving. Within months of the end of the Civil War, the great cattle drives from Texas began in earnest, and from these drives grew violent, wide-open Kansas communities with names like Wichita, Dodge City, Newton, Ellsworth, Kansas City, Abilene, and Ogollala (in Nebraska).