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TravelTravel m| Planning this year’s driving trip, we have ' to go to Virginia. Do you have any about what to do there? We willik-If decided! suggestionshave two weeks, including driving time to and from Florida. AIscl we’d like to stay at some bed and breakfasts.,— I^S., Miramar, Fla.MThis is a good)fcrson. The state hasisit Virainia planned to celebrate * l bl Thomas mk “lef-IhilJ*the birththis yearer as sppsmarv, architect, con-11-ro^’gtnhis affectedtheJefferson, ferson homes and president of make me deci to revisit all thoah places Jefferson’s career aervationist and all-pait of the state, so this tnul over Virginia, from the “Tidewjuer. Eleven homes from Virginia are still open % tours . If you Vernon, yen can crbs* the Washington, D.C.Everyone should vjJefferson designed ant ___most of his adult life. WlBtcft ftp area, visit the Thomas Jefferson Visitors CcAter, two miles from his home, as well as nearby Ash Lawn-Highland, home of Jtones Monroe; Montpelier, home of James Madison; and Richie Tavern, a hangout of the three presidents.In Charlottesville, visit the University of Virginia, whfcfc Jefferson designed and where he served as prident,WilI||Mpfft is another center of Jefferson lore. He afonded Wilting and Mary College, lived thereto the end of coMd days, and is said to have personally planted the'rows of huge trees that flank die approach to the governor’s mansion. The old restored taverns that are now popular dining rooms for Colonial Williamsburg visitors were once the haunts of Jefferson, Patrick Henry and others who met to discuss resistance to the latest outrage from their British rulers.I likely wouldn’t make it to all 20 stops on thetour, but I would be sure to go back to Lynchburg, (an interesting old city) to see how much restoration lias been done at Poplar Forest.This is a home built by Jefferson as a retreai: Me would sneak off here to get away from the constant stream of visitors at Monticeilo. 1 sidetracked to Lynchburg on a trip several years ago to see. it, but restoration was just getting under way.In addition to the Jeffersonian events, the Civil War Battlefield Parks of Virginia are wonderful places to visit. Sixty percent of Civil War action took place in Virginia, and key battles are reenacted at the battlefields on their anniversary dates.A free publication listing bed and breakfast homes and country inns is available to those who call the state’s toll-free bed and breakfast information line at 1-800-262-1293, Callers will also receive a brochure compiled by the Bed Breakfast Association of Virginia, a state high • map and a copy of the state guidebook, Virginia Is for Lovers.”For information on the Jefferson Country Tour with a spotting map, a list of the 1993 events, specifics on events at the battlefield parks, and other information about the state, contact the Virginia Tourism Development Group at 1021 E. Cary St., Richmond, Va. 23219, phone 1-804-786-4484.Ql’ve been hearing so much about Arkansas that we might drive up this year just to see what’s there. What shall I see? — B.A., Hollywood, Fla.A| There is quite a bit to see in Arkansas, but ■■ the best sights are on the scenic highways through the Ozark and Ouachita mountain ranges. It is a very pretty state where people are not the rustic rubes jokesters try to make them out to be — not that you can’t find some Snuffy Smith-type cabins up at the ends of dirt roads.In Hope, the town of 10,000 where William Jefferson Clinton was bom and lived until he was 7, the locals have produced a guide/map that pinpoints the home of Clinton’s grandparents (where he lived as a young child), another house where he lived for a time with his mother and stepfather, and a cemetery and school associated with the family. The city is planning to turn the abandoned railroad depot of the Union Pacific Railroad into a visitor center and museum.Hope, located in southwestern Arkansas on Interstate 30, is described by the state’s Department of Parks and Tourism as a place with “quiet streets lined with two-story frame houses with large front porches and swings, shaded by towering oak and magnolia trees.” It’s not far from Crater of Diamonds State Park near Murfreesboro, where tourists dig for diamonds on a finders-kecpers basis.Hope is not exactly bursting with hotels and motels, although it has drawn fair-sized crowds for its big event of the year, the Watermelon FHitvai in August.Tlt; learn more about Hope, write to the Hope Advi -rising and Promotion Commission, P.O. Box 96, Hope, Ark. 71801, phone 1-501-777-6701O .cr Arkansas places the tourist folks hope will become popular include Little Rock with the Old State House in Greek Revival style, where Clinton gave his victory speech; and Hot Springs, where Clinton lived as a child from age7. #Hot Springs, in northwestern Arkansas, has iti own fame as a hot-spring spa that once attracted « the rich and famous. Bathhouse Row, built in the 1920s and ’30s and now on the National Historic Places, is in the j epment by the National f For tourist infi •§* the%on the trail ofLINCOLN, N.M. — The Wild West didn’t get any wilder than it did here.This was Billy the Kid country — home not just to the infamous teen-age outlaw but also to some other like-minded merchants, cattle barons and their hired gunslingers, who believed the best way to settle an argument was with the front end of a Colt .45.The violence peaked in a bloody, five-day battle in the summer of 1878 that historians of the American West have come to call the Lincoln County War — basically a fight to control the potentially lucrative commerce of goods apd cattle in the county, which at the time covered much of southeast New Mexico.Despite a lot of killing, nobody really won the war. The little town — really just a village of a few hundred that its original Hispnic settlers had named La Placita — prospered for a few decades, then slipped into obscurity when the county seat moved elsewhere.Billy the Kid, a leader in the underdog faction known as The Regulators, survived the war, but not for long. Three years later, one warm summer night in nearby Fort Sumner, Sheriff Pat Garrett caught him by surprise and got off a single shot that hit just above the heart. The Kid died at the age of 21.Some 40 movies and countless books later, Billy, like gun-related violence, is still very much with us.And so, almost miraculously, is Lincoln. The town looks much the same now as it did then — not the film image of wooden storefronts and saloons with hitching rails, but a Hispanic village of low-slung, adobe homes nestled in an upland valley of the Rio Bonito.Lincoln is the main stop along what is today called the Bitty the Kid Trail, a loosely defined route that tracks Henry McCarty — aka William H. Bonncy or Kid Antrim — from the time his widowed mother, Catherine, married a man named William Henry Harrison Antrim on March 1, 1873, in Santa Fe, to his death just a little more than eight years later.It’s a good way not only to sort out the facts from the myths in the Billy the Kid legend, but also to escape the tourist hordes and phoniness of Santa Fe and see a lot of the real New Mexico: south through the Rio Grande Valley to Las Cruces, west to Silver City where Billy spent a few of his teen-age years and where his mother is buried, then back over the Rio Grande — which is not very grand at all, but rather narrow and shallow — and into the Capitan Mountains to Lincoln.From Lincoln, the trail descends still eastward, angling north across the short-grass prairie where The Kid once rustled steers from the vast herds of cattle baron John S. Chisum, to his grave in a small cemetery near the Pecos River, outside Fort Sumner.The best companion for a journey along the Billy the Kid Trail — outside of, perhaps, a significant other — is a 1989 book named “Billy the Kid, A Short and Violent Life,” by frontier historian Robert M. Utley.It’s the most reliable and definitive work that exists in a veritable sea of verbiage ranging from as close to truth and historical accuracy as we’ll probably ever get (Utley), to mere distortions and misstatements of fact, to purposeful lies, purple prose and outright fiction.Embellish both fiction and fact with well over a half-century of Hollywood films, and it’s not difficult to understand how Billy the Kid has come to be viewed as an infamous outlaw and indiscriminate killer on the one hand, and on the other as just a misguided teen-age Robin Hood who fell in with the wrong band of thieves.The complete Jpilly the Kid Trail would begin not in Santa Fe, but in New York City (a Las Cruces tourism publication describes Billy as “a misguided New Yorker”), where he was bom Henry McCarty of Irish immigrant stock and spent his early years, before turning up in Wichita with his brother, Joe, and his mother, who ran a Iaundj7 there. From Kansas, they moved on to Santa Fe with William Antrim, perhaps seeking a healthier climate for Catherine’s tuberculosis.It’s there, or just as easily in Albuquerque, that it’s possible to pick up The Kid’s trail and take it south along present-day Interstate 25 to Las Cruces and then west to Silver City. To no small degree, the interstate follows not just the path of the Antrim family, but also a much more famous and historic trail, the Camino Real — the oolofltffl route aiougthc Kio Grande that ran all the way (di^iexifo City and was a lifeline for early Santa Fe. ’*,T ,There are justifiable paus^aleng the ttjjjy thu Kid Trail that have no rdatiofttfar whatsoever to gjrie trigger-happy Kid. W: ' A*If it’s late fall or winter, RltoLSf-slop is Bosque dy'l t Apache National Wildlife ReftMttyim'les sou(h ‘ Socorro, to see the whooping cmfefond -huge floci snow geese, as well as scores of omeYbrtd facies. Af the interstate exit that leads to the refuge, dbn’t pass by the Owl Bar and Cafe in the little village of SanAntonio without pausing to sample their green-chile cheeseburger — a hamburger of sorts, but far from the ordinary variety.For true chile pepper lovers, the town of Hatch — which calls itself the Chile Capital of the World — is less than two hours farther down the road. The best time to visit is during the annual Hatch Chile Festival, over Labor Day weekend, but just off the interstate there’s a place called Chile Express that’s open year-round and sells ’em all, from the merely spicy to the firecracker hot. Many of the chile strings, or “ristras,” that you se^decorating restaurant and shop walLgin New Mexico come from the fertile flat-lands of the Rio Granule in and around Hatch. lt;Thirty miles south of Hatch is Las Cruces, a city of about 60,000 with a dramatic setting in the foothills of the Organ Mountains.It’s a convenient base for a long day-trip to Silver City (about a two-hour drive), or a very short jaunt to the village of Mesilla^ adjacent to Las Cruces, which dates to Spanish colonial times and has its own relationship with Billy the Kid.Mesilla, on the banks of the Rio Grande, was once the seat of Dona Ana County and with its fertile river valley was considered the heart of southern New Mexico in Billy’s day. The low, adobe buildings surrounding its small plaza are filled now with tourist shops and restaurants, with one side of the square dominated by the restored San Albino Church.But with a little imagination, it’s possible to wipe the modern let-[ring from the Billy the Kid Gift Shop and see it as it gn April 13, 1881: The jail and county courthouse ►Billy was sentenced to ”be hanged by the neck iis fcody be dead” for one of the killings in the Lincoln County War.■ THE INSTANCES: The Bitty the Kid TraR can ba lone, especially K you follow at toast some of its branches. Study a map. H time is limited, you may want to confine your visit to Lincoln, and perhaps Fort Sumner.■ QCTTfNG REA0Y: Robert M. Utley's 1989 book BHfy the Kid, A Short and Violent Ufa” (University of Nebraska Press). Is a highly readable account of William H. Bonney s short Hi, and s great help in following the trail. Thtra’i also a brochure that details sties along ths Btty the Kid Trail. Contact the Bitty the Kid Outlaw Gang. Inc., P.Q. Bor 1881, Tatiwn. N.M. 88134. Phew 505-355-9935. They also seM tin Obey book if you can’t find K N your local bookstore, as wet! as other Bitiy boo*.■ THE FOOO: This to, after aH, New Mexico. In Socorro, a possible overnight slop for those visiting Bosque del Apache National mm Refuge, try B Sombrero. In Las Cruces. News's Cafe is a must-stop, i only to sample tip*: The Intestates have m the city of r tow Hilton tor the view i Inn for Its Mexican decor; m Lincoln, r* the Wortey or Casa de Patron Bed and Breakfast; In ft, Sumner ... weti ... you may want to drive north to the new Pays toi at the Santa Rou exl of Mandate 40■ MORE MF0: Contact the tow Mexico DMston of Toutom wid TraveL Modoya Bttg, 1108 St Frendf St. Santa re, NJML 87503. PI 2040, or 505-827-7400In addition to its Billy the Kid connection, Mesilla also figured in the ratification in 1854 of the Gadsden Treaty, which formalized the purchase of the area from Mexico and set the current border between Mexico and the U.S.There’s a little museum a few blocks from the plaza that bears the treaty name, and it’s worth a visit for its esoteric collection of 19th-century memorabilia. The tour guide will probably be Mary Veilch Alexander, who owns and runs it and is a direct descendant of Albert J. Fountain — noted 19th-century New Mexico lawyer and the court-appointed defender for Billy the Kid in his Mesilla murder trail.The museum has a barber's chair where one of the Kid’s victims supposedly had the misfortune to find himself one fateful day. But there’s no historical evidence that Billy ever plugged anybody while they were ftftffiy a shave or a hairfcut. ArCftley points out, the Kid has at times been credited with fictitious killings, as well as with actual ones that he didn’t commit. It’s definitely known that he killed four men, says Utley, but hardly one for each year of his life, as is sometimes claimed.Travelers will find the Kid’s trail relatively cold in Mesilla, and in Silver City as well. The most tangible evidence of the McCarty/Antrim family in Silver City is the grave of his mother in the town cemetery on Memory Lane, just off Route 180. She died of TB in 1874, aware of none of her son’s infamous deeds, real or imagined.The headstone is engraved with her name and dates of binh and death, along with the words “Mother of Billy the Kid.” On a recent visit, there were some plastic flowers on the grave. Sanchez Canuto, the Bible-quoting caretaker, says the gravesite gets fre-Flease see BILLY/I IF
Newspaper Details
Odessa American
Odessa, Texas, US
Sun, May 02, 1993
Page 354
Full Page
Clipped by
Rich R.
USA 09 Mar 2024
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