Chat
|
Daily Search
|
My GenForum
|
Community Standards
|
Terms of Service
|
|
|
Lana, I found a clipping from "The Wichita Eagle" by Beccy Tanner a historical writer for the staff.
"The Wild West has been tamed at the southeast corner of 21st St. and Oliver where Unity Church of Wichita now stands. But in 1870, it was the home of one of the West's most notorious outlaws.
Henry McCarty, later known as Billy the Kid, arrived in Wichita in the summer of 1870 with his mother, Catherine McCarty, and his younger brother, Joe. Henry was 11. An though his days as an outlaw were still to come, by the time his family left Wichita barely a year later, he and his mother both had developed reputations--he as "a street urchin" and she as a business leader.
The widow McCarty and her two sons arrived in Wichita from Indianapolis in July 1870, said Waldo Koop, a local historian and author of the book "Billy the Kid, the Trail of a Kansas Legend."
Koop said a business district was developed along what is now Main street, north of Central, and McCarty purchased several lots in the area and opened a laundry.
When a petition to incorporate Wichita was approved later that year, McCarty was the lone woman among 125 signers.
"Women just didn't hve a lot of say then in governmental affairs," said Bill Ellington, historian at the Wichita Public Library. "Many merchants wee asked to sign. And she was indeed a merchant, which would have given her a little more clout that most women."
But though she favored incorporating Wichita, McCarty moved her family out of town not long after the signing.
Koop said the little cowtown may have been too raucous for her. Part of the problem, he said, was that Henry was exposed to numerous gunfights.
Early maps of the Wichita area indicate the family moved to the quarter section of land at what now is 21st and Oliver. Near it was a quarter section woned by WILLIAM ANTRIM, who arrived in Wichita from Indianapolis at the same time as the McCartys.
McCarty and ANTRIM married on March 1, 1873, in New Mexico, Koop said.
But in 1870, Koop said, ANTRIM helped the McCarty's establish a home by helping them erect a cabin, dig a well and storm cellar, and plant hedges ( before barbed wire Osage Orange "Hedge" trees were planted closely together for fencing of livestock) and fruit trees And he taught Henry how to work the land.
Plans for the homestead were cut short in the spring of 1871, when ANTRIM and the McCartys began selling their property.
"It's not difficult to reconstruct the reason, for one can imagine the signs oif ill health for the widow, a trip to a physician and the dread pronouncement of tuberculosis," Koop wrote in his book. "Not uncommon affliciation in those times, its diagnosis was generally followed by a recommendation for a move to the high and dry climates of Colorado and New Mexico."
McCarty died less than a decade later in Silver City, NM, Koop said.
When Henry became a teenager, he began his career as a gunfighter. Legend has it that he killed at least five men and as many as one "for every year of his age." In 1881, when he was 22, Billy the Kid was shot by PAT GARRET (thats where I got that name) in Fort Sumner, NM.
The news of his death spread throughout the nation. In Wichita, Marshall Murdock, editor of The Wichita City Eagle, wrote this epitaph:
"Billy the Kid, an account of whose tragic death we published two weeks since, formerly lived in Wichita, and many of the early settlers remember him as a street gamin in the days of longhorns."
Followups:
|
| http://genforum.genealogy.com/antrim/messages/59.html | ||
 |
Agreement of Use Link to GenForum Add Forum |
|