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Catherine McCarty Antrim
Long before he chose the alias of William H. Bonney, Billy the Kid was simply Catherine McCarty's younger son, Henry.
Catherine may have been a widow and McCarty or McCarthy her married name. She was born circa 1829, probably in Ireland (or England), from which she emigrated, perhaps in the 1840s. If so, she may have lived in the Irish slums of lower Manhattan, near the west end of the Brooklyn Bridge. Her older son, Joseph, may have been born there; likewise her younger son. Who fathered them is unknown. Whether they were brothers is unknown, too. She also may have fled before then to Missouri or Indiana, where she may have married and or where her sons been born.
Whatever the case, Catherine emerges from the mists of history in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1865, when she first met the younger man she eventually would marry, William Henry Harrison Antrim.
By July, 1870, Catherine, her sons, and Antrim were living in or near Wichita, Kan. She opened what became by March, 1871, a thriving hand laundry business downtown. Antrim, meanwhile, had built a home and was farming on a 160-acre homestead six miles northeast.
By September, 1871, the four of them had left, possibly due to the onset of Catherine's tuberculosis. They may have lived in Denver for awhile. By March 1, 1873, however, they were in Santa Fe. There on that date in the First Presbyterian Church two blocks from the plaza, she married Antrim. Her sons were witnesses. She was 44; he was 31.
Soon afterward, the Antrim family left Santa Fe. They arrived in the gold-mining town of Georgetown, New Mexico. Soon the Antrims moved to nearby Silver City, where they settled into a simple two-room, wood-frame cabin on Main Street, one lot north of Broadway.
In a Works Project Administration-funded Federal Writers Project interview in 1937, the recollection of elderly Silver City resident Louis Abraham helped sketch the only image of blond-haired, blue-eyed Catherine extant.
She was "…a jolly Irish lady, full of life and …mischief and fun, (who) could dance the Highland Fling. The few American boys that were here when the Antrims lived here ran together all of the time. The Antrim House was the place where the boys gathered most of the time. Mrs. Antrim always welcomed the boys with a smile and a joke. The cookie jar was never empty."
While her absentee husband was off prospecting, the ailing Catherine, despite her fatal illness, socialized and made friends. She may have taken in an occasional boarder to make ends meet, but she helped support her family by baking and selling pies and cakes. Catherine may have also sought relief from her worsening tuberculosis at nearby Hudson Hot Springs. When Silver City opened its first school in January, 1874, she eagerly enrolled her boys. They remained in school for two years.
For the last four months of her life, she was confined to her deathbed. By then, Henry was already getting into trouble. As he (by then Billy the Kid) recalled after his December, 1881, capture, one incident caused her to snap at him, "You'll hang before you're 21."
"When she was dying," another elderly Silver City resident, Chauncey Truesdell remembered in 1952, "she said she was leaving two boys in a wild country, and asked my mother (Clara Louisa Truesdell, Catherine's nurse) if she would try and help them."
Catherine died on September 16, 1874. Her prospector husband wasn't there. She was buried the next day in the local cemetery (across the street and a half-block down from where the downtown library on Tenth Street is today). In Jan., 1882, after the territorial legislature passed a law prohibiting cemeteries within town limits, all the remains buried in the two-acre cemetery were disinterred, taken to the second hilltop northeast of town, and reburied in a new cemetery. There Catherine's granite headstone and grave still hug Cypress Lane in Memory Lane Cemetery.
Catherine's Grave Markers
Two Silver City funeral home proprietors, Sidney H. Curtis and S. Ernest Pollack, replaced Catherine's badly deteriorated, original wooden grave marker (her first name was misspelled) in 1947 with a granite marker (continuing the misspelling). Raymond McCune acquired the original marker (which also lists an incorrect date of death) from cemetery caretaker L. C. Raines in 1950 or 1951 and (since Silver City have a museum until 1967) donated it to the Lincoln County Courthouse.
It remains on exhibit, 250 road miles east of Silver City, on the ground-floor of the old Murphy-Dolan Store, which nominally became the county courthouse in 1881 and eventually, thanks to an extensive Works Project Administration-funded preservation effort, a state museum in July, 1939.
Sources:
Cline, Don, Antrim & Billy (College Station: The Early Press, 1990).
Kadlec, Robert F., They "Knew" Billy The Kid: Interviews With Old-Time New Mexicans (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1987).
Nolan, Frederick, The West of Billy The Kid (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).
Wallis, Michael, Billy The Kid: The Endless Ride (New York & London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2007).
Weddle, Jerry, Antrim Is My Stepfather's Name: The Boyhood of Billy The Kid (Globe: Arizona Historical Society, 1993).
