Among outlaws, Billy the Kid left a long Arizona trail

From Dec. 31, 2007:

Were any of the famous Old West outlaws, like Jesse James or Billy the Kid or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, active in Arizona?

Sort of. Billy the Kid killed his first man in Arizona, and among the claims that Butch and Sundance didn’t die in Bolivia are accounts that Butch turned up in Arizona.

Billy the Kid was born William Henry McCarty in 1859 or so in New York City.

The family seems to have moved from Indiana to Kansas and ended up in New Mexico in hopes the climate would help his mother battle tuberculosis.

When she died in 1873, Billy took off for Arizona to find his stepfather, a man named William Antrim. Billy found him in Clifton, but Antrim didn’t like Billy hanging around with him, so the Kid was left to his own devices.

For a couple of years, Billy the Kid bummed around Arizona as a ranch hand, maybe as a gambler. He hooked up with a horse thief named John Mackie, got arrested and escaped.

One day in 1877, the Kid was in a saloon in Camp Grant, in southern Arizona, and got into an argument with a bully named Frank “Windy” Cahill, who liked to pick on Billy.

The details of the fight vary, but the upshot was that Billy shot and killed Cahill, saddled up and rode to New Mexico.

As for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, they may have done a bit of bad-guy stuff in Arizona early in their career. One story holds that they suckered a couple of Arizonans to pose as them and go to Bolivia to recover money stashed there, and that it was those gullible souls who died there.

Others say Butch was seen around Arizona in the 1930s, vacationing in Fredonia or living in Nogales.

Jesse James was a Midwest boy and never made it to Arizona. I read one highly implausible story that, instead of being assassinated by Robert Ford, Jesse took a new name, went on to be elected a U.S. senator from Montana and owned a silver mine in Jerome.

I doubt it.