In New Mexico History, who was Henry McCarty? A SALUTE TO HERMAN WEISNER RWM Herman B. Weisner died at his home in Williamsburg, New Mexico on January 13, 2003 following a long illness. He was 81. He served his country in the U.S. Coast Guard, including during World War II in the Asiatic and Pacific theaters. He spent four years in Alaska, and the rest in the Pacific Theatre when the Coast Guard was placed under the Navy Department. A member of Disabled American Veterans and Veterans of Foreign Wars, he was interred in the Santa Fe National Cemetery. Weisner was a soft-spoken gentleman, and a western – primarily of southern New Mexico – historian extraordinaire. Herman had been a resident of Organ, New Mexico, near Las Cruces, for 35 years. Many of those years he worked as an electronics technician at the White Sands Missile Range. He was a writer of countless published factual articles of southwestern history and author of a book, The Politics of Justice: A.B. Fall and the Teapot Dome Scandal, A New Perspective. After reading the manuscript that became that book in 1988, Hugh H. Milton II wrote him: “You know, Mr. Weisner, I was Under-Secretary of the Army in President Eisenhower’s administration. … Mr. Weisner, I have some knowledge of Albert Fall’s case. This manuscript on Albert Fall is one of the most interesting manuscripts I’ve read, and I’ve read many of them. I started reading it in the afternoon and did not put it down until I finished it after midnight.” That man who commented on Herman’s research and writing of that book was, among other things over a period of more than 3 decades, president of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces and President of the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell. Leon C. Metz, western writer and historian, wrote in a letter in 1992 to a Mr. George Hicks in Walnut Cove, North Carolina, “I’ve known Herman [Weisner] for over 20 years, and have been proud to call him a friend and colleague. His research dealing with southern New Mexico has been nothing short of superb. Herman is what the late C. L. Sonnichsen would have called a Grass Roots Historian. He seeks out historical material wherever it might be found, and from it he draws perspectives that frequently change the historical world in which we live.” Herman Weisner was a writer, but he was much more than that. More importantly, he was a doer … he personally went out and gathered the history himself instead of relying upon and repeating what others wrote. Many historians relied upon the information Weisner dug out of old dusty and moldy boxes and courthouses, using it in the books they subsequently wrote. The names of most of those historians probably became better known than his, but many of those writers of western history certainly knew his name and relied upon the integrity of his research. Digging through those moldy documents harmed Hermans lungs and overall health, and eventually he had to leave his beloved New Mexico. Several years ago, he and his wife, Augusta Kay, moved to the moister climate of Walnut Cove in North Carolina. However, because of his failing health, they returned to New Mexico, settling in Williamsburg in July 2001 to be closer to their grown children. I first became acquainted with Weisner in the early 1990s when he came to Roswell to visit my mother and me. He had a theory and came seeking information because he heard my mother knew something about an Englishman named James Bonney. Karl Laumbach, anthropologist and New Mexico historian, brought Herman to see her in Roswell to find possible ties between Billy “The Kid” Bonney and James Bonney, a thought that had never before occurred to her. As Bob Boze Bell wrote in his book, The Illustrated Life and Times of Billy the Kid, “Two-thirds of the Kid’s life is unknown. Legend and myth have filled in the gaps.” According to that legend and myth, Billy was born to an Irish lass mother in a slum area of Manhattan in New York in 1859. That, however, is only speculation and no facts to substantiate that – place or date of birth – have ever been found. And there has never been a plausible reason why Billy adopted the name Bonney in the last years of his life. James Bonney, a blue-eyed Englishman, settled in Missouri and there had a wife and family. One of his daughters was named Catherine. For several reasons, Weisner believed it possible that Catherine was the mother of Henry McCarty, alias William Henry Antrim, alias William H. Bonney. Among other things, on the 1880 census, the year before he died in July 1881, Billy claimed he was born in Missouri. Also, Catherine had relatives in Denver at a certain period of time as did James Bonney. When the Santa Fe Trail opened, James’ wagon train traveled between Missouri and Santa Fe. He abandoned his Missouri family, established a trading post on the Santa Fe Trail at a place then called La Junta in northern New Mexico. There he began another family with another woman, the daughter of a Mora Land Grantee. They had three children. Later, he had a child, Ramon, with another young woman shortly before Indians killed him in October 1846. That young woman, named Bibiana Martin, the daughter of another Mora Land Grantee, was my great-great-grandmother. (She later had more children, one of whom became my great-grandmother.) In New Mexico are many descendents of James Bonney. Although I am not one, his story has long fascinated me. Besides by his descendants, James Bonney was immortalized not long before he had died by travelers on the Trail, and by U.S. soldiers-journalists accompanying Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny and Gen. Alexander W. Doniphan in 1847 on their conquest of the West for the U.S.A. Those long-ago journalists wrote of the gentlemanly James Bonney, a handsome and charming man with blue eyes and red hair. Some of his own scholarly letters also survive him. For several reasons, Herman Weisner believed that James Bonney was possibly Billy’s grandfather, and the source of his adopted name. However, because of his failing health, Herman was unable to fully prove his theory. Over several decades, Herman made many discoveries. Among them was the handwritten court transcript of the trial of the man accused of the murder of Patrick Garrett, which had been lost for more than 100 years. A few years ago, Herman Weisner donated a sizeable collection of research, photographs and other historical memorabilia to the New Mexico State University. Without the tireless efforts of Herman Weisner, New Mexico might have missed some valuable pieces of history. And without the tireless efforts of his typist and beloved wife, Augusta Kay, we might have never known what we might have never known.
Posted on: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 04:11:49 +0000
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