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"It might be best to begin with a short biographical sketch, for those not fully immersed in the gentle waters of frontier mayhem: Billy the Kid, perhaps the Old West&amp;#039;s most famous gunfighter, was born to Irish immigrants in the slums of 1850s New York and christened Henry McCarty. His mother Catherine was soon widowed, so she dragged young Henry and his brother Joe ever westward through a series of frontier towns, doing laundry to make a living, ending up in Silver City, New Mexico. She married a man named Antrim and shortly thereafter died of tuberculosis. Antrim went off prospecting and left the 15-year-old Billy (as he came to be known) to finish raising himself on the streets of Silver City. Small and slim for his age, Billy was smart, lively, and well-liked by everyone, but somewhat wild. Which is to say he did a little gambling and cattle rustling, then shot a local bully who was beating him to a pulp in a saloon. He lit out and eventually resurfaced in Lincoln, New Mexico, just in time to take part in one of the deadliest cattle/mercantile wars in Western history. Three years later, at the age of 21, he was shot dead by Sheriff Pat Garrett in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. And now the Kid is not only a legend but a virtual tourist industry in himself. New Mexico has an official Billy the Kid Trail, a scenic route through the Capitan Mountains. History buffs from Europe fly in and rent cars to see where it all happened, as do many Americans. I guess people everywhere are intrigued by gunfighters of the Old West. If these guys were drug dealers or hit men from the Russian mafia living in our own neighborhoods, they probably wouldn&amp;#039;t seem half as fascinating. We like our desperados safely dead, and Billy&amp;#039;s been gone for 132 years. Barb and I were unarmed as we headed up the canyon of the Rio Bonito into the beautiful Capitan Mountains. We were told that the little town of Lincoln was quite safe these days, as the bloody Lincoln County War had ended in 1878, so we brought no Winchesters or Colts on this trip. Just an old Nikon and a brand-new Jeep Wrangler. The heavy-duty 10th Anniversary Rubicon edition. Big tires, big Dana 44 axles, and blood-red leather seats. As we climbed the mountain highway toward Lincoln, I reached into the console, lifted out a CD, and slipped it into the Alpine audio system\u2014one of the many features that brought this Jeep&amp;#039;s sticker price to a heady $38,200. With the rustle of Spanish guitar and a jingle of spurs, the music began. It was Bob Dylan&amp;#039;s soundtrack to the 1973 Sam Peckinpah movie Pat Garrett &amp;amp;amp; Billy the Kid. To my mind, one of the great westerns, with a soundtrack that perfectly evokes the movie&amp;#039;s dusty, sunset-in-the-Southwest tone. For exactly 40 years, Barb and I have been incapable of cooking Mexican food in our kitchen\u2014or blending margaritas\u2014without listening to it. And it was this very film, I must admit, that first got me curious about the Billy the Kid legend. In those intervening years, I&amp;#039;ve acquired a small library on the Kid and the Lincoln County War. It&amp;#039;s a long-simmering interest that was brought to full boil this year by two things: a long, brutal Wisconsin winter and an excellent PBS American Experience biography of the Kid that appeared on our TV one evening during a howling blizzard. Suddenly, it seemed like an excellent time to visit the warm, dry Southwest. Look at the sky, listen to the wind, feel the emanations from the earth, etc. To me, the obvious vehicle for the trip was a Jeep Wrangler. Almost as mobile as a horse in the backcountry of New Mexico and as classically American a shape as the Conestoga wagon or a pair of cowboy boots. Also, I have a soft spot for Jeeps, having driven an Army M151 all over Vietnam, and once bashed around Baja for 2000 miles in a CJ7. I have a Jeep of my own\u2014a green 1999 Wrangler Sport with a 4.0-liter straight-six. We could have taken that, of course, but I thought it would be more interesting to try out one of the newly redesigned 2013 Wranglers, now with a smaller but more powerful 285-hp 3.6-liter V-6. Always shopping. The Rubicon, named after the famously difficult Jeep trail in California, came from Chrysler&amp;#039;s test fleet and was dropped off at our rural digs in Wisconsin with Anvil Clear Coat paint (a handsome, lustrous dark gray), a six-speed manual transmission, and a soft top. To improve our luggage space, we took out the folding rear seat.  We hit the road on an April morning into rain mixed with snow. This awful weather persisted through the Great Plains and stopped abruptly at the 100th meridian, where rainfall magically drops below 20 inches per year. It&amp;#039;s the official beginning of the Great American Desert and the eastern edge of the Texas Panhandle. Suddenly it was sunny, warm, and dry, as if a switch had been thrown. Very dry. This part of the U.S. is in its third year of severe drought. We had high winds much of the way west and discovered the square-rigged Jeep is surprisingly stable in crosswinds, though head winds dropped our mileage steeply, as low as 15.9 mpg. A good tail wind, however, could drive it back up to 21 mpg. This is what happens when a vehicle has the same drag coefficient as Grant&amp;#039;s Tomb. Average mileage for the trip was exactly 17 mpg. Seats? Comfortable enough, but no adjustable lumbar support, so we both took our own lumbar cushions. Overall, a pretty serene ride, cruising at 70 mph (2500 rpm in sixth) while the Great Plains subsided effortlessly into the rearview mirror. No need to tow the Jeep west, as some of our friends suggested. A Jeep is always a fun place to be, unless you&amp;#039;re the sort who confuses the absence of sensation with luxury. Our first Kid Alert stop was at the remains of the old Texas town of Tascosa, which used to be a cattle-drive crossing on the Canadian River. It was a tough hole-in-the-wall town visited by Billy the Kid and his pals when things got hot in New Mexico. Now there are only a few well-preserved buildings left, and they&amp;#039;re in the middle of the campus of Cal Farley&amp;#039;s Boys Ranch, which was founded for boys from troubled families in 1939. It admits both boys and girls now and fosters them until they can find stability at home or graduate. Billy probably could have used a school like this, instead of Tascosa&amp;#039;s saloons and gambling joints. The shaded valley where the campus sits is so pleasant that it&amp;#039;s probably a good thing I didn&amp;#039;t know about it when I was 12. I might have run away from home so I could learn to ride horses with Cal Farley. I always secretly held it against my parents that they were raising me in the Midwest rather than on a ranch that looked like Roy Rogers&amp;#039;s place. From Tascosa, we took lonely ranch roads into New Mexico, climbing up and over the abrupt wall of the Llano Estacado onto the vast high plains, where distant ranches look like ships lost at sea. Blazing across these open spaces at 70 or 75 mph, we discovered that wind blasts from trucks would cause the Jeep&amp;#039;s hood to rise alarmingly on its rubber side latches and then slam shut. A week later, on our way home, one latch finally snapped, and I had to use some manila rope from the Santa Fe Trail museum near Larned, Kansas, to tie it down. This gave the Jeep a surprisingly authentic wagon-train look, offset by some duct tape from a hardware store. South of Santa Rosa, we climbed through the hills to the little village of Puerto de Luna. This was another getaway spot for the Kid, but it was also where he had his last Christmas dinner, after being captured by Pat Garrett and his posse at a place called Stinking Springs. Like many small semighost towns in the Southwest, Puerto de Luna is a random collection of adobe ruins, neat little houses, faded trailers, big new ranch houses, a beautiful old Catholic church, forgotten gas stations, stray dogs, and cast-off cars. It&amp;#039;s a funky mix that&amp;#039;s somehow rather relaxing after the orderly tract homes of modern suburbia, but this village probably looked more pleasantly rustic when Billy was here. Almost nothing added to the West since about 1875 seems to be a material improvement. I suspect the Comanches and Apaches would go with an even earlier date. We followed Highway 91 south, and it turned into a well-graded gravel road that followed the Pecos River almost all the way to Fort Sumner. Big Billy the Kid site here; it&amp;#039;s where he&amp;#039;s buried.  Old Fort Sumner was an Army post long since abandoned and washed away in a flood, but the corner of the military cemetery where Billy and his sidekick Tom O&amp;#039;Folliard are buried is still there, along with a nice historical re-creation of some of the fort&amp;#039;s old buildings. The Army built the fort to oversee the disastrous Bosque Redondo Indian reservation, where so many Navajos and Apaches died of disease and despair. When the government finally let them return home, the whole fort was sold to cattle baron Lucien Maxwell, who moved his family into the old officer&amp;#039;s quarters. It was in this large house that Billy was gunned down by Garrett on July 14, 1881. The Kid was a friend of the Maxwells and had a girlfriend in Fort Sumner, so he stayed there after his daring escape from jail in Lincoln. Late one night, Garrett happened to be questioning Pete Maxwell, Lucien&amp;#039;s son, about Billy when the Kid walked into the dark room and Garrett got the drop on him. The Kid&amp;#039;s last words were &amp;quot;Qui\u00E9n es?&amp;quot; Who is it? Billy the Kid, a friend of wealthy ranchers? Speaking Spanish? Yes. Seems the Kid&amp;#039;s enduring historical popularity rests on basically three pillars: One: The Kid emerged from many gun battles alive and with a growing reputation for accurate shooting. He also made a daring escape every single time he was captured. Two: He was on the slightly more sympathetic side in the brutal Lincoln County War, riding with the Tunstall-McSween faction rather than the more corrupt Murphy-Dolan gang. Nearly all of the Kid&amp;#039;s killings were in revenge for the murders of his boss, the young English rancher John Tunstall, and Tunstall&amp;#039;s lawyer, Scotsman Alexander McSween. Yes, if you take the Scots, Brits, and Irish out of this story, there is no war. Typical American history, in other words. Three: He was not a dim-witted thug. Nearly all who knew the Kid described him as having a good sense of humor. He didn&amp;#039;t drink, blended comfortably into the Hispanic culture of old New Mexico, spoke fluent Spanish, liked music and dancing, and was popular with the girls. He could read and write well and (we can see from his many letters to Governor Lew Wallace, asking for amnesty) had quite elegant handwriting. After buying more Western-history books for extra road-hugging weight at two museums in Fort Sumner, we headed south toward Lincoln, epicenter of the Kid&amp;#039;s legend. It was here he and his pals joined the Tunstall-McSween faction, ambushed their archenemy Sheriff William Brady, and fought a two-day gun battle to protect McSween before the young lawyer was killed. Lincoln is also the town where Billy escaped the gallows by killing his two guards with their own guns. It&amp;#039;s perhaps the most famous and eternally dissected jailbreak in Western history. So many men died on or within 50 feet of this main street, you can&amp;#039;t believe they ever got the blood cleaned up. According to historian Robert Utley, in 1880, the last full year of the Kid&amp;#039;s life, the homicide rate in the New Mexico territory was 47 times the national average. Sort of like modern Baghdad, with the advantage of rattlesnakes.  When you drive in now, what you see is probably the most perfectly preserved little town in the West, stretched out along one quiet street in the Rio Bonito valley. On the north end sits the huge two-story Murphy-Dolan Store and courthouse, looking exactly as it does in photographs taken in the 1880s. And across from it is the equally old Wortley Hotel, where we parked our Jeep and checked in with Vic and Cathy Garrison, who recently restored the place to its traditional level of charm. You sit in the Wortley Hotel dining room now, and you realize this is exactly where the sadistic U.S. Marshal Bob Ollinger was sitting when he ate his last meal. While eating, he heard gunfire from the jail across the street, hustled over to see what was wrong, and was confronted with the sight of the Kid pointing Ollinger&amp;#039;s own double-barreled shotgun down at him from an upper window. &amp;quot;The Kid&amp;#039;s killed Deputy Bell!&amp;quot; someone shouted on the street. Ollinger looked up at the muzzle of the shotgun and said, &amp;quot;Yes, and he&amp;#039;s killed me, too.&amp;quot; Billy said, &amp;quot;Hello, Bob,&amp;quot; fired both barrels, then broke the gun in half and threw it into the street. He nonchalantly filed his chains in half, armed himself to the teeth, climbed onto a borrowed horse (which he later returned), and rode out of town while everyone stood around and watched. A few bystanders later said they thought of shooting at him but didn&amp;#039;t. I think the modern term is &amp;quot;not my job.&amp;quot; We toured the old general store and met Jack Valentine and his wife Linda, who are volunteer guides to this historic building. Jack is a retired rodeo champion with a small ranch just northwest of town. He kindly invited us out there so we could drive the Jeep across the Rio Bonito (which is all of 42 inches wide in this dry spell) in the approximate spot where Billy made his escape into the mountains. We then drove on a rough two-track road to the top of Capitan Gap, where the Kid likely crossed the ridge, with the Jeep&amp;#039;s high range engaged. This is a fully locked system that&amp;#039;s not supposed to be used on clean, dry pavement. I tried low range, but it&amp;#039;s a rock-crawling ratio and was never really needed on this trip. In any case, the Jeep has a way of making you fearless when exploring trails like this. It&amp;#039;s the high ground clearance and short wheelbase and overhang that make the Wrangler such a good backcountry companion. There&amp;#039;s nothing that passes for a road that can&amp;#039;t be negotiated, so you&amp;#039;re never turned back by doubt. It&amp;#039;s quite liberating, and it allows you to visit places you&amp;#039;d never go with a car, or even with a longer and lower SUV. The Wrangler&amp;#039;s abilities aren&amp;#039;t needed most of the time, but when things get rough, it&amp;#039;s nice to be fully armed.  In our last big day on the Kid Trail, we ganged up with photographer Ryan Heffernan and his friend Liz Lake (in Ryan&amp;#039;s very capable Subaru WRX) and took dirt and gravel ranch roads north to the old mining town of White Oaks, where the Kid frequently gambled and hung out. After a drink at the No Scum Allowed Saloon, we headed south to Blazer&amp;#039;s Mill, site of a famous Kid gunfight near Mescalero, New Mexico, on the Mescalero Apache Reservation. In this fight, a feisty old character named Buckshot Roberts singlehandedly shot it out with the Kid and his recently deputized posse of Regulators, killing two and hitting one in the belt buckle, shearing off his gun belt. The bullet ricocheted off the buckle and took the trigger finger off a fourth Regulator. (Try to film all that in one take.) Roberts, also shot during the battle, hid out at the house at the mill and slowly died of his wounds. What we found at this site was old adobe ruins, cut in half by a four-lane highway and rotting in the trees behind a few lengths of chain-link fence. The collapsing house where Buckshot Roberts died is filled with old tires, empty oil cans, and a broken TV stand. No volunteer guides or historical plaques here. &amp;quot;Maybe the local Apaches aren&amp;#039;t that interested in the arcane history of violent white men,&amp;quot; I suggested. Our last holy site was the graveyard where Buckshot Roberts and Billy&amp;#039;s good friend Dick Brewer are buried, supposedly right near the mill. We combed the area and couldn&amp;#039;t find it, but Liz finally located it with the help of map coordinates from the Internet and a GPS app on her cellphone. Yes, these are the days of miracle and wonder. And there were the graves, up in the brush on a nearby hill. Two enemies killed on an April day in 1878 and buried side-by-side, almost exactly 135 years before we got there. And both of them would be lost to history, like the crumbling mill below, if they hadn&amp;#039;t run into an excitable boy named Henry McCarty. He outshone them by cheating death for just three more years. Life was indeed fleeting and provisional in Lincoln County. Looking back on it now, the Kid&amp;#039;s whole era seems to have passed into history very quickly, like a cloud shadow moving across the plains. The wildest and woolliest times in America&amp;#039;s Old West really only lasted a few decades after the Civil War, and then they were gone, along with the buffalo, the teepees, and the open range. After that, there&amp;#039;s not much left but the stories. And, of course, all these wondrous and haunted places to go. If you see the movies, read the books, and listen to the music, you never run out of them. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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