| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
|
 |
|
Ollinger would torment Billy on the way back to Lincoln, hoping Billy would give Ollinger an excuse to kill Billy. He would torture Billy, poking him with a loaded shotgun. Bell did what he could to stop Ollinger from tormenting Billy.
One day in Lincoln Ollinger left Bell to guard Billy and went out to get a drink. Billy was shackled and Bell was enough to hold Billy. From the hotel across the street Ollinger heard a gunshot from the courthouse and decided to investigate. As he approached the courthouse, he heard a pleasant, 'Oh, hi, Bob!' He looked up to see Billy training a shotgun on him. The manacled Billy had managed to get a gun and Kill Bell.
With exaggerated slowness, Billy cocked the shotgun. The sadist Ollinger waited for the inevitable. Eventually it came and most of Ollinger was blown halfway into the street.
Billy had a handyman find an axe and cut apart the leg irons. Billy grabbed a horse and headed out of town, shouting, 'Adios, compadres!' to the witnesses. Garrett had been made to look foolish. Now he wanted Billy dead in the worst way. Acting on a tip that Billy would be at the Maxwell Ranch, he brought a huge posse. Garrett himself waited in Billy's darkened bedroom. Bily entered and died. Garrett claimed self-defense, but many doubted it. But Billy the Kid was finally dead. He was age 21.
For years Billy has been a controversial figure. Just about every killing seems to have been either self-defense or in some sense someone who was 'asking for it.' Most of his killings were avenging a murder in a time when legal justice was at best uncertain. But there is also the suspicion that anyone who finds good reason to kill an estimated twenty-one people is in some way looking for good reasons.
Many of the scenes of Billy's story are either on the road into Lincoln or in Lincoln itself. You pass a road marker that tells you near here was Blazer's Mill, where Billy and three of the regulators trapped Buckshot Roberts in a latrine. Roberts was a Murphy enforcer. From his 'stronghold' he killed one regulator and wounded two others, but Billy got him in the end. Further on you see the spot where John Turnstall was murdered, setting off Billy's violent revenge.
Lincoln itself is just one street and you can still see Turnstall's store that started the hatred. Next to it is a field where McSween's mansion was (a rather narrow mansion it must have been) which Murphy's law officials and the United States Cavalry with cannon could not capture Billy, though they did kill Turnstall's partner McSween. About a five-minute walk down the road is the Murphy store which--and this I'd never heard before--was also the courthouse where Billy killed Bell and Ollinger. It seems the store was turned into a courthouse. We were here on a Monday so the courthouse was the only building open. It has been turned into a museum. Where Billy shot J. W. Bell there is a hole in the wall with a plastic flashmark around it to call attention to it. Perhaps what is most interesting is to see photographs of what the principals really looked like. It is generally well-known what Billy looked like from one photo that shows up in most of the sources, but I'd never gotten much of an impression of either Murphy or Turnstall. (An interesting commentary on this is we dropped into a book and souvenir store for Evelyn to see if there were postcards. A boy about seven asked who somebody was in a picture on one of the books. 'That's Billy the Kid,' an older brother said. 'No, it isn't. I've seen Billy the Kid on TV.' Actually I kind of wonder what version he saw.)
Bidding a fond farewell to Lincoln, we headed for Roswell. New Mexico has an interesting system for encouraging tourism. They have a whole series of messages explaining the importance of each of the major tourist attractions. They are broadcast on short range AM radio near each attraction. You see a road sign telling you to tune to 530 AM on your radio. When you do, Ricardo Montalban is telling you all about the local attraction. Here he was explaining about the Lincoln County War. It is a very clever idea.
Next we went into Roswell to see the art museum. Actually this is the catch-all museum. There is a section on art and another on Robert Godard, including a reconstruction of his workshop. Another section has Spanish and Italian armor and swords. Then there are two sections, one on the history, clothing, and weapons of the Indians from the Roswell area, and a similar room on the uniforms and weapons of the cavalry. The latter room is also decorated with bear skins and other hunting trophies. Now this can have all sorts of interpretations from the most politically correct ('See, the Anglos had no respect for anything alive but their own kind') to the settlers' actual vision of themselves ('We European-Americans have always been great sportsmen who could enjoy the abstract meaning of killing, understanding death, skinning your kill, and bathing in the blood. But notice that we kept no Injun skins as trophies, at least not the ones we show in public. After all, what are we-- barbarians?').
You see a lot of open territory between places here. There are lots of trailer parks, trailers being the new version of the great (and not-so-great) wagons of the West. They used to pull up around the chuckwagon and a fire. These days they all have chuckwagon sections but they still pull up around other utilities and form trailer camps. When Indians were no longer a threat, God invented tornados.
Speaking of Indians, there was a discussion on NPR about why it was that the Indians were so badly defeated by the Europeans and they came up with an unlikely answer ... pets. Europeans lived very closely with their animals; Indians had domesticated animals but did not really have in their culture the close contact that Europeans did. Sound nutty? Not really. Only about 10% of the loss of the Indians was due to fighting between the cultures. Gunpowder and technology very often proved no match for the excellent warriors and tacticians that the Indians were. 90% of the Indians who died, died by disease, as most people are or should be aware. Of that 90%, a small percentage died because of germ warfare, the Europeans' policy of giving to the Indians the effects of the European smallpox victims. 85% or so of the Indians died because of unintentional contagion. But it was the Europeans who were in the alien land with alien people. They seem to have just not picked up very much disease. (Experts are unsure about syphilis. The first European outbreak was in 1494 and that is the only evidence that it was a New World disease. But the Europeans were making a lot of new contacts at that time and it may well have come from some place like the Middle East.) So why did so much more disease go in the other direction? Smallpox is a cattle disease that survives in humans. Measles is a pig disease but it also attacks humans. Indians did not live in close proximity (like within a few feet) of a lot of animals. Europeans lived around more diseases and to some extent had immunity to them. They certainly carried more. The vast majority of the death of the great Indian nations was accidental and probably was done by people who didn't know they were doing it. And by this theory it was just by how much contact they had with their own animals that made the difference.
I should say more about the art. There was a whole room full of pictures done by someone who does all his art by putting little dots of paint on five-foot square canvasses. Any color television does exactly the same thing, only better. When his style works, this is probably pointillism; when it doesn't, it is disappointillism. They claim to have a Georgia O'Keeffe collection. I guess you can call it a collection, but being that it consists of only one painting, whether that is the right word or not is open to some question. I guess if you have collected one painting, that makes it a collection. Her piece is called 'Ram's Skull and Leaves.' I think it is a really good name for the work of art. It really suits the painting, which is a picture of a ram's skull and two leaves. That is always a nice surprise in a painting to find out the title and the subject matter are the same thing. But, no, if O'Keeffe says that's what the painting is, there isn't any baiting and switching about it. That's just exactly what she delivers. Now in the documentary about her she said she had been using skulls in her paintings for a long time before she realized that skulls might be symbols of mortality. She just liked the shape, color, and texture. She apparently thought they just fell off the ram skull tree. Of course, psychology tells us that there are people who like skulls for their color, shape, and texture, but who'd not pick up that these are really parts of once-living things. There was a whole family like that in Texas CHAINSAW MASSACRE. The fact that O'Keeffe could channel the same impulses in socially constructive ways should be an example for sociopaths everywhere.
There is a nice mural by William Goodman. It is a colorful fantasy that is like Hieronymous Bosch without all the unpleasantness. Well, that was about it for Roswell, a nice town, and after seeing the local museum it doesn't surprise me at all that there is a best-selling book claiming there was a UFO crash in Roswell. I am surprised it was only one crash.
Returning to our car, I was surprised to see somebody had smeared his handprints on the backup lights. At the time it struck me as odd. Well, I later figured out who'd done it. I did. I put my hands on the taillights getting into the trunk. My hands were clean at the time, but not clean enough. Road dust in New Mexico is like the dust police use to make fingerprints visible.
But we could not tarry long. We had to get to Carlsbad for a bat exodus. There are many millions of bats in Carlsbad Caverns. For many nobody is sure where they exit. But at dusk about half million bats fly out of the main entrance to feed. Up until this point there were swallows flying in and out of the cave. They come to nest in the cave and fly out less systematically in the morning. Of course, when the swallows want to return, they have to fight the tide of outcoming bats. They don't--they just fly around and swear at the bats in bird language.
People gather around the cave entrance in a sort of amphitheater waiting for the smoky-looking serpentine trail that is a cloud of a half million bats looking for insects to eat. The swarms are much better in the summer. Right now, a large proportion of the bats have migrated down to Mexico for the winter. Even now, the bats came out in swarms of 5000 a minute. The rangers can never be sure exactly when the bats will come out. They have a rough idea it will be about a half hour before sundown. But even then the bats can come out a half hour early or late. It must start with some bat's stomach growling and she--they are mostly females--flies out and that starts the exodus. As they come out of the cave, they are flying in counter-clockwise circles. Bats and mathematicians instinctively prefer counter-clockwise. Close up it is hard to tell the bats from small birds swarming in circles. Further away they look like a huge swarm of bees cork-screwing into the sky. Then they disperse. Of course, this variability of exit time means the park ranger has to have a variable length speech. It is a talk of at least thirty minutes about bats that s/he is prepared to stop at any moment if the bats start coming out. After about fifteen minutes the amphitheater starts to empty. Only about a tenth of the audience stays through the whole exodus.
When the bats had flown, we checked into our motel and asked where to get good barbecue. Our first surprise was when they recommended the Dairy Queen down the road. Our second surprise was when we tried their barbecue. I think we were surprised someone recommended it. Nat actually bad, but somewhat lackluster. We finished the day writing. |
|
| Copyright © - "Mark R. Leeper" |
|
 |
| Other travelogues by the same author: |
|
|
|
