New Mexico: Billy the Kid Rides Again

Posted on 18. Aug, 2009 by Kerry Banks in People

For someone who died at age 21 and left behind few traces, Billy the Kid continues to exert a powerful and mysterious hold over the popular imagination. At last count, 48 movies have been made about the legendary outlaw. He has also been the subject of dozens of books, plays, poems and documentaries. Such diverse musicians as Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Ry Cooder and Marty Robbins have written songs about him and composer Aaron Copland created a ballet based on the Kid’s life. Even his Fort Sumner tombstone is a source of fascination. Since it was erected in 1940, the grave marker has been stolen and recovered three times (in one case it went missing for 26 years before being found in Texas). To prevent any more thefts, the gravesite is now enclosed by a steel cage.

courtesy Loving Earth; flickr.com

The long-dead gunslinger is also a big tourist draw in New Mexico, the state where he spent most of his life. Each year, New Mexico stages a Billy the Kid Pageant in Lincoln from August 7 to 9. And to meet the needs of Wild West aficionados who can’t make the trip, the New Mexico Tourism Department recently created a new website, (www.newmexico.org/billythekid) featuring biographical information and maps and tours of Billy the Kid territory that allow visitors to retrace his history.

Judging by the only authenticated photo of him, Billy the Kid did not resemble Paul Newman, Val Kilmer, Kris Kristofferson or any of the other actors who have portrayed him in the movies. That photo, a two-by-three-inch ferrotype or tintype, taken outside Beaver Smith’s Saloon in Fort Sumner, in late 1879 or early 1880, depicts the Kid at age 20. An earlier version published in 1907 in the first volume of G. B. Anderson’s History of New Mexico: Its Resources & People, remains unaccounted for; speculation endures that it may have been lost in a fire.

Billy the Kid; courtesy wikimedia.org

The image reveals, as the Las Vegas Gazette reported on December 28, 1880, “… a young man about five feet eight or nine inches tall, slightly built and lithe, weighing about 140; a frank and open countenance, looking like a school boy, with the traditional silky fuzz on his upper lip; clear, blue eyes, with a roguish snap about them; light hair and complexion. He is, in all, quite a handsome looking fellow, the only imperfection being two prominent front teeth slightly protruding like squirrel’s teeth.”

Tintypes are reverse images. Unfortunately, publisher after publisher of countless books, magazines and newspapers over the decades produced copies of the halftone from the Anderson book without telling readers that they were seeing a reverse image. As publication of the reversed image multiplied, it created the myth of the Kid as a left-handed gun. That fallacy is only one of many about Billy the Kid.

According to the popular legend, Billy was a homicidal maniac who killed 21 men, one for each of his 21 years. In truth, he shot four by himself and perhaps five others in concert with others, and each of his killings was either committed in self-defence or as an act of war. Rather than a cold-blooded killer, he seems to have been a product of his times. New Mexico was a violent place in 1880: the state’s murder rate was 47 times higher than the national average.

He was also not named Billy, though he did assume the alias of William H. Bonney. His real name was Henry McCarty and he was born in 1859 in New York City, the son of Irish immigrants. His father vanished from his life at an early age and Henry moved west with his mother, first to Indiana, then to New Mexico, where she remarried and died of tuberculosis in 1874. Abandoned by his stepfather, the teen drifted into petty crime before moving to Arizona and getting involved in cattle rustling.

The saga of Billy the Kid emerged from the debris of the Lincoln County War, a complex and bloody feud that erupted in New Mexico in 1878, pitting the area’s ranchers against the town merchants. Billy fought on the side of the ranchers, who lost the conflict, and was later charged with murdering Lincoln County sheriff William Brady, even though Brady died in a hail of bullets fired by numerous gunmen. Many found it strange that the Kid was the only one tried for the murder, and most agree it was a crooked trial. In fact, the Kid was the only person successfully charged with a crime as a result of the Lincoln County War.

Lincoln County jail; courtesy wikimedia.org

Billy was eventually captured by Sheriff Pat Garrett and jailed in the town of Mesilla. His trial was held in a building that still stands at 2385 Calle de Guadalupe, and is now called the Billy the Kid Gift Shop. Here, on April 9, 1881, Billy was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death by hanging. But on April 28, 1881, after being returned to the Lincoln County jail, he escaped custody by slipping out of his handcuffs and shooting two of Garrett’s deputies. A few months later, Garrett tracked down his nemesis and killed him, ambushing Billy at a ranch near Fort Sumner on July 14, 1881.

Pat Garrett; courtesy wikimedia.org

Ironically, Billy the Kid was not a well-known figure during his life. He was catapulted to legendary status after his death by the publication of a rash of dime-store novels and Pat Garrett’s own sensational book, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid: The Noted Desperado of the Southwest, Whose Deeds of Daring and Blood Have Made His Name a Terror in New Mexico, Arizona, and Northern New Mexico by Pat F. Garrett, Sheriff of Lincoln County, N. Mex. By whom He was Finally Hunted Down and Captured by Killing Him.

His legend got another boost in 1926, when author Walter N. Burns published his bestselling novel The Saga of Billy the Kid, heralding the rebirth of the boy as America’s own Robin Hood. Adding further weight to the renaissance was the emergence of several old men claiming to be the real Kid, having survived Garrett’s bullets. The controversy would ultimately result in a 2004 court battle to exhume the remains of Billy and his mother to extract DNA to compare with that taken from the corpses of two of the men who purported to be Billy. This challenge was successfully opposed by the mayors of Fort Sumner and Silver City, who realized that the result had the potential to dry up a major source of tourism revenue.

Maybe the Kid can now finally rest in peace, wherever he is buried.

(Lead image by Shanissinha; flickr.com)

Tags: Billy the Kid, Fort Sumner, New Mexico, U.S.