The Billy Buff War
Will investigators ever cease digging up Billy the Kid?
By: Leo W. Banks 07/01/2006
“It’s a Billy Buff War,” is how Prescott police detective Anna Cahall characterized the disagreement to Prescott’s Daily Courier after she contacted several people present at the disinterment in Arizona.
The “war” has no clear winners. The DNA expert at the dig couldn’t extract useable DNA from Hip Man, but he did get a usable sample from Scapula Man. Did it match the workbench blood? We don't know. The tests haven’t been completed, but the odds of a match seem long.
To make matters worse, at press time, the Yavapai County Attorney’s office was investigating whether a felony was committed—not in exhuming Miller but in removing body parts from the cemetery, the Daily Courier reported.
Are we sure the workbench blood was Billy’s? No. Are we sure Miller was Scapula Man? No. Do historians think this investigation has gone caddywampus? Oh, yes. “This disgraceful charade is historical inconsequentiality gone mad,” e-mailed Kid historian Frederick Nolan.
If history really mattered, the pedestrian story of this scrawny delinquent sent to the angels with a well-deserved hole in his heart would’ve stayed buried with his body in Fort Sumner.
But the angels sent him back to us to remake into a legend, and Billy’s is so without merit, it’s guaranteed to last forever. It rests less on what he did in life than on the image that generations of writers have created for him—a rebel without a cause. Or facial hair.
And it began in Arizona. The Kid shot his first man on August 17, 1877, at Camp Grant. Blacksmith Francis Cahill was bullying the Kid by pinning him to the ground and slapping him repeatedly across the face. The Kid went postal. Actually, given the era, we should probably say he went Pony Express. At any rate, he jerked out his hog leg, jammed it into Cahill’s belly and delivered the loudmouth to the angels.
Nearly 130 years later, the investigators looking into the Kid’s death may fly aboard Airship Billy to Texas to exhume Brushy Bill from his grave near Hico, and try to get DNA from Billy’s mom in Silver City, New Mexico.
“They told us to come back if we found more evidence,” Sullivan says. “Then we got DNA from the bloody workbench and the people in Silver City went, ‘Oh ... my ... God!’ They called us nutcases and stupid. Well, we’re just going to let them sweat for a while.”
You have to love it. Here we have a street fight, a nutty, eye-gouging brawl over a juvenile delinquent who, through some strange historical alchemy, has captured America’s imagination.
As for Sederwall, he thinks he’s located the body of A.J. Fountain, a lawyer for the Kid who was murdered in New Mexico in 1896. After unlocking that mystery, the former mayor of Capitan, New Mexico, says he’d like to come to southeast Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains and dig up another legend—Johnny Ringo, an enemy of Doc Holliday and the Earp boys. “I think we could determine pretty quick whether Ringo was murdered or committed suicide,” Sederwall says.
Will they sneak into Arizona again? Should we put out an APB for two old boys in big Stetsons, trolling for DNA?
Oh, let them come. What does it matter? No fact they unearth is likely to change a single thing we believe about Ringo, the Kid or any of the others, and thinking it will, misses the point.
They are legends, after all, people, stories and iconic events that we hold as much in our hearts as our heads. They’ve become part of us, part of the frontier that made us. For that reason, we can’t bear to let him sleep, beyond our shovels and our damnable science.
Tucson-based Leo W. Banks has been writing about the West and its legends for 30 years.
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