Some fifteen years ago, while passin’ one day through the old Fourth Ward, I came across an Irishman called Dennis McGovern, who lived in Oak Street. I met him in front of the tenement house in which he lived and got talkin’ to him. He had been a “rollin’ stone” all his life, and hadn’t “gathered much moss.” He had served in the English army, been in India, and had gone out to California in ‘49. But he had come back in ‘51 as poor as he started, and now was “doin’ odd jobs” for what he could get. He had two children, one a little girl, the other a boy, called Willie O’Reilly McGovern. This boy was then six years old, and I saw him playin’ in front of the tenement house with some other urchins, rollin’ about in the dirt. He was a vicious lookin’ chap for his tender years, which seemed to be the only thing tender about him, and I noticed that he had thin lips, a cold blue eye, and two pretty big front teeth. That is all I noticed, and I never saw the brat or his father again. And yet, so strangely do things come about in this world, that that little brat of six years old has since become one of the most notorious men in the whole country in his line, and out West and Southwest he passed for a regular hero or devil, or mixture of both. In short, this Willie O’Reilly McGovern, of the old Fourth Ward, New York, developed into the notorious bandit of New Mexico, known as “Billy, the Kid.”
It seems his father went to try his fortune out in California again the year after I met him, and leavin’ his little daughter behind (who has since died) he took his son with him. Old man McGovern died, and Willie O’Reilly McGovern “drifted to the plains” and set up for a bandit.
His career has been just as wild, darin’ and romantic, as if his name was Don Antonio Miguel de Cordova, of Andalusia, yet he was only an Irish striplin’ of Oak street, New York.
He was always “handy” with his hands; lookin’ back now upon the time I first met him, I can remember that I remarked to his father that “he seemed quick with his fingers,” and it was this quickness of hand that gave him the greater part of the darin’ reputation he afterwards acquired, for he made his big point out along the southwestern borders in bein’ the quickest man to pull a trigger in that section.
His projectin’ front teeth and thin lips correspond very well with the stories that are told of his cruelties, for I have noticed all my life that whenever a man or a woman has big front teeth–dog teeth, they call ‘em–and thin, bloodless lips, and cold steel-like blue eyes, that is the kind of man or a woman to feel no mercy, and rather enjoy torturin’ somebody than otherwise.
This “Billy, the Kid,” as he got to style himself after a while, got to take a kind of a pride in the number of people he killed, one way or the other; sometimes in fair fight, but generally in drunken brawls on very slight provocation, and sometimes without any provocation at all.
Up to last year he had killed just twenty men, one for every year in his life, he said, and as he had just got to be twenty-one he determined, from his peculiar idea of the fitness of things, to kill his extra one, or twenty-first man. This may sound like very wild talk, but there are hundreds of people in New York to-day who have in their time met just such men as these, who kill with hardly any reason or kill for no more reason at all than “Billy, the Kid,” did.
Well, Billy was soon able to make up his twenty-first man, whom he coolly shot dead in a barroom in Silver City; but while he was lucky as usual in his killin’, he wasn’t as lucky as usual this time in escapin’, and he was arrested, tried for murder, found guilty and absolutely sentenced to be hung.
This was something new to Billy, this gettin’ sentenced to be hung, and as a new thing Billy rather enjoyed it than otherwise; but he didn’t like the idea of bein’ fettered and manicled and confined in a cell, so he determined to get rid of that sort of thing as soon as possible.
There were two jailers appointed specially to guard Billy, and they had offered “jintly” a pretty big bet that they would keep Billy in limbo till they duly delivered him to the sheriff to be hung by the neck till he was dead.
Billy heard of this bet, and he sent word to one of his friends to take that that for him at whatever odds he liked. This friend took the bet at three to one, and sent word to Billy, who, when he heard it, said: “Well, he might as well have made it ten to one, for they will lose their money sure.”
One day just before the sheriff was expected with the warrant for his execution, Billy, the Kid, was lying down on his little bed in his cell as if weary and restin’. One of the jailers approached him to see whether he was sick, when all at once up jumped Billy and hit the jailer a blow on his temple with his manacles. The jailer fell unconscious. “I could have killed you just as well as not,” said Billy to himself, bendin’ over him; “but I want you to live yet to pay that bet.” So he commenced fumbling around the unconscious man’s person till he got hold of the keys of the prison which were in the jailer’s pocket. With the keys he got out of the cell, and goin’ into the guard-room nearby, which happened to be without anybody in it just then, he got hold of a rifle. Spite of his manacles Billy could manage the rifle still, and so felt that he had already gained two great points, freedom and firearms.
Just then the assistant jailer, jailer number two, came along, and Billy proved that he could use his rifle by shootin’ the poor fellow dead. Billy bore a grudge against this particular man–besides, as Billy said, “he was no good anyhow, as the other man (the other jailer) was the man his friend would have to look out for the money,” alluding to the bet.
By this time the shootin’ down of the second jailer had brought a crowd out into the street, which crowd stood waitin’ around just as Billy came out with his manicles and his rifle.
Everybody understood what had happened then, and whatever might become of him, everybody in the big crowd felt perfectly certain that Billy wouldn’t be hung, this time at least.
In the crowd were a lot of women, but they cheered him, and felt kindly disposed toward him, though, heaven knows, he never was the least bit in the world good lookin’.
The men in the crowd didn’t cheer Billy, but they didn’t shoot at him either, although the brother of the man he had killed for his twenty-first victim was in the midst of the mob.
There was somethin’ awe-inspirin’ about Billy when he got his fit on him, like he had to-day, and no one liked to tackle him. Besides, Billy kept those cold, blue eyes of his on the multitude, each particular man thinkin’ that Billy had singled him out from the crowd especially and was watchin’ him particularly. And those long fingers of his had hold of the rifle, and he would fire in less than a second at anybody, anywhere and when and where he fired he never missed. In all that crowd of two or three hundred men that stood around him just then there wasn’t one who wanted to be Billy’s twenty-second man.
So he moved along manacled, yet free, and fearfully dangerous to anybody who interfered with him. He saw a man mounted on a splendid horse among the crowd. He motioned to that man to dismount. The man seemed reluctant to comply. Another command, a look from Billy, and a twitchin’ of his fingers at the trigger of the rifle, and that man was off that horse’s back in a jiffy and Billy was in his saddle. But Billy was manicled and the horse was frightened. So in a minute or so, in spite of all Billy could do, he was on the ground and the horse was gallopin’ off in terror. Just then, while Billy was on the ground, the brother of the man he had murdered, and for whose murder he had been sentenced to be hung, saw his opportunity for vengeance, and drawin’ a knife lunged it at Billy as he lay. It cut him on the leg, but only inflicted a flesh wound, and Billy, risin’, leveled his rifle at him and shot him in his tracks–just as he had shot his brother before him. He was now one dead man ahead, or, counting the second jailer, two dead men ahead of his years; but I suppose Billy thought, if he thought at all, that this was a fault on the right side.
At any rate, he didn’t trouble himself just then about this discrepancy, but seein’ another horse in the crowd he liked, he told the man who rode the animal to get off. The man obeyed at once. Then seein’ a blacksmith whom he knew in the crowd, Billy ordered him to come and knock off his manacles. The blacksmith was inclined to be a law-abidin’ citizen and didn’t like the notion of thus aidin’ a convicted murderer to escape. But he was a young, healthy man, with a family, so he liked still less the notion of bein’ shot down like a dog, so he came slowly forward, and Billy, keepin’ his eye on him and keepin’ his fingers on the rifle, the blacksmith soon rendered Billy, the Kid, a free man.
Billy gave a cheer, in which some of the women and men in the crowd joined, waived his filed and freed hands aloft and then drove his horse full tilt up the mountain side.
And thus Willie O’Reilly McGovern, of Oak street in the Fourth Ward of New York, after shootin’, as Billy, the Kid, the great southwestern bandit, twenty-three men, rode off himself a free man, little dreaming that death was soon to overtake him at the hands of a deputy sheriff.
[Editor’s notes: The account of Billy the Kid’s escape from the Lincoln County Courthouse is a typical, dime-novel retelling, full of details likely added after the fact, far away–nothing new to consider. However, the assertion that Billy the Kid’s father was a man named Dennis McGovern is new, and despite the fascination with Billy that has endured for over 140 years, that name has never appeared elsewhere. The identity of Billy’s father has always been in question, with one name “William Patrick Henry McCarty” being mentioned frequently. However, there is no good evidence of this man marrying Billy’s mother or fathering him, which makes this claim flimsy.
Evidence of a “Dennis McGovern” living on Oak Street, New York City, has yet to be found, so his name may be just as spurious as William Patrick Henry McCarty. But note that this column was published just two weeks after Billy’s death at the hands of Pat Garrett. This was almost at the inception of the mythologizing of Billy the Kid, and the question of his parentage had not yet been made an issue. So did Harry Hill reveal the ancestry of Billy the Kid? Or is this just a mud pie?]
