On the New Mexico Trail of Billy the Kid

A Kid Road Trip is the best thing for your soul.

- JOHNNY D. BOGGS

I'm not driving to Utica, New York, to start this Renegade Roads trip—or anywhere else Billy the Kid was supposedly born that isn’t within the New Mexico boundaries.

Utica is the latest potential birthplace—following New York City (the most commonly cited) and, in no particular order, Indiana, Kansas, Ireland, Ohio, Missouri—and there's a lot of evidence to back up that Utica claim. But it's still just circumstantial.

I'm starting in New Mexico, because that’s where his legend was born. And, yeah, you can even find some theorists who say the Kid was born here, too.

The first stop is First Presbyterian Church in Santa Fe, and not because it’s just a 23-minute drive from where I live and write or because my son was baptized there 23 years ago.

The church was organized on January 6, 1867; the ruins of a failed Baptist church and two acres were bought two months later; and on March 1, 1873, the widow Catherine McCarty married William Antrim in the church. Her two sons, Billy and Joseph, were witnesses. The family briefly moved into the Exchange Hotel.

The City Different

While the current First Presbyterian Church is located on the same property as the original, the Exchange Hotel was torn down in 1919 and replaced with La Fonda on the Plaza in 1922. Three years later, the hotel became one of Fred Harvey's Harvey Houses, and today, just offthe Santa Fe Plaza, remains a popular hangout for tourists and locals—and walking distance to the New Mexico History Museum, Palace of the Governors, Loretto Chapel, The Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi and O'Farrell Hat Company, where hatmaker Scott O'Farrell is always asking me to bring Bob Boze Bell for a visit to talk history and hats.