BILLY THE KID BORN:

Here is some more unimportant trivia that you probably will never use. This is the kind of information that has been creeping into my brain ever since I was a kid. I've always had a fondness for unusual or little know historical facts. "Who'd a thunk it !!!!!!!!"

.........................PEACE.............................Scott


BILLY THE KID BORN:
November 23, 1859

The infamous Western outlaw known as "Billy the Kid" is born in a poor Irish
neighborhood on New York City's East Side. Before he was shot dead at age 21,
Billy reputedly killed 27 people in the American West.Billy the Kid called
himself William H. Bonney, but his original name was probably Henry McCarty.
Bonney was his mother Catherine's maiden name, and William was the first name of
his mother's longtime companion--William Antrin--who acted as Billy's father
after his biological father disappeared. Around 1865, Billy and his brother
traveled west to Indiana with their mother and Antrin, and by 1870 the group was
in Wichita, Kansas. They soon moved farther west, down the cattle trails, and in
1873 a legally married Catherine and William Antrin appeared on record in New
Mexico territory. In 1874, Billy's mother died of lung cancer in Silver
City.Billy soon left his brother and stepfather and took off into the New Mexico
sagebrush. He worked as a ranch hand and in 1876 supposedly killed his first
men, a group of reservation Apache Indians, in the Guadalupe Mountains.
According to legend, it was not long before Billy killed another man, a
blacksmith in Camp Grant, Arizona. Billy the Kid, as people began calling him,
next found work as a rancher and bodyguard for John Tunstall, a English-born
rancher who operated out of Lincoln, New Mexico. When members of a rival cattle
gang killed Tunstall, in 1878, Billy became involved in the so-called Lincoln
County War.Enraged at Tunstall's murder, Billy became a leader of a vigilante
posse of "regulators" sent to arrest the killers. No arrests were made, however.
Two of the murderers were shot dead by Billy's posse, and a worsening blood feud
soon escalated into all-out warfare. After Billy's gang shot dead Lincoln
Sheriff Bill Brady, who had sanctioned Tunstall's murder, Billy's enemies
conspired with the territorial authorities to do away with the regulators.In
July 1878, the rival gang surrounded the house where Billy and his gang were
staying just outside of town. The siege stretched on for five days, and a U.S.
Army squadron from nearby Fort Stanton was called in. Still, Billy and his gang
refused to surrender. Suddenly, the regulators made a mass escape, and Billy and
several of the other regulators miraculously managed to shoot their way out of
town.After more than two years on the run, Billy was arrested by Lincoln Sheriff
Pat Garrett, a man Billy had previously befriended before Garrett became a
lawman. In April 1881, Billy was found guilty of the murder of Sheriff Brady and
was sentenced to hang. On April 28, two weeks before his scheduled execution,
Billy wrested a gun from one of his jailers and shot him and another deputy dead
in a daring escape that received considerable national attention.On the night of
July 14, 1881, Garrett finally tracked Billy down at a ranch near Fort Sumner,
New Mexico. He gained access to the house where Billy was visiting a girlfriend
and then surprised him in the dark. Before the outlaw could offer resistance,
Garret fired a bullet into his chest. Billy the Kid was dead at age 21.