The mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved in a tornado.
- Mary McCarthy
At Fort Sumner, N.M., just beyond the town's main intersection in the middle of town, we stopped to stretch our legs a bit. I walked out into the middle of the quiet street and took a panoramic shot with my camera of the highway behind us.
It was still early enough in the morning that none of the businesses on Main Street were open. I crossed over to the west side of the street and, shading my eyes from the morning sun with my hand, peeked into the window of an antique store.
Along one side, long shelves were lined with orderly rows of glass insulators. There were a few antique toys, a cast-iron corn planter and an oak display case with dozens of smaller items - campaign buttons, souvenir spoons, thimbles and the like.
Antiques tend to trigger the mind to wonder about the people who have handled them over the years. Looking through the windows, it was as if a remnant of the spirit of all those people still hung around the things they owned and that there might be an uncanny whispering going on inside the plate-glass window, but so low I couldn't hear it from out here on the sidewalk.
The town itself is an antique, too, of sorts, sitting in the middle of nowhere. I knew only one thing about the place, a fact furnished by a sign outside of town as we were driving in: Somewhere in town there was a museum devoted to Billy the Kid, who is buried in Fort Sumner.
William H. Bonney - an alias for Michael Henry McCarty - was born in New York City and moved to Silver City, N.M., as a boy. Convicted of several murders throughout New Mexico, he was sentenced to be hanged in April 1881 in Lincoln City. But on April 28 he broke out of jail, killing two deputies in the process. Pat Garrett, the sheriff of Lincoln County, found him in July in a house near Fort Sumner and killed him.
Too bad, I thought, as I looked back up Main Street, to have the image of your town determined by the reputation of an infamous murderer. Then I saw the plaque.
Apparently, the citizens of Fort Sumner have been concerned, as well, about passers-by having a stilted view of the town, for embedded in a brick wall next to a bowling alley near the intersection is a flat, stuccoed niche, on which is written the following (beneath the drawing of the skull of a cow resting against a cactus):
Our Heritage
Before the Fort into a bright future
1541 Coronado's army visited here
1830s Open range use begins with sheep
1842-1868 Bosque Res. & military Ft. Sumner
1865 Goodnight and Loving bring in longhorns
1870 Lucien B. Maxwell Era. Bosque sold again
1874-1881 Billy the Kid
1880-1906 We are cattle trail hub
1906 Rails across our Pecos
1917 De Baca County start, new high school, also Ft. Sumner irrigation D(istrict).
1930s Court House. U.S. 60. Two dams on river CCC, WPA proj(ect)s.
1942-1945 Local Capt. Bill (W.S.) Parsons rigs A-bomb for Hiroshima, Japan
1946 Dedicated effort & millions in $ improve Life Quality
1991 NASA balloon staging facility 1986-1991
Suddenly, it wasn't just imagined whispers from the inside of an antique store, but the more animated voices of an entire community that echoed off the buildings of Main Street - remnants of the rich lives of thousands of people who had lived in or passed through Fort Sumner over the years, with all their hopes, passions and fears.
Billy the Kid was only a passing legend, an insignificant passer-through who was unfortunate enough to become cornered by Pat Garrett in a house outside town.
Historically, local folks just happened to get caught in the crossfire.
Dennis Smith is an artist and writer living in Highland, Utah County. "Meanderings: A Place to Grow," a compilation of his Deseret News columns, is is available in local book-stores.