From Upson’s inventions sprang the roots of the two dominant images of Billy the Kid—hero and antihero. Upson’s portrayal of a happy, likable youth who was also a merciless killer laid a solid foundation for the rise of two towering and contradictory figures. The vicious murderer ruled for a generation, only to be challenged and overpowered by the engaging boy in the next generation. Ultimately the struggle between the two reached an uneasy equilibrium.
If the pulp writers of the early decades perpetuated the satanic Billy, Walter Noble Burns fixed the saintly Billy firmly in American popular culture. In The Saga of Billy the Kid, a best seller for years following its publication in 1926, this Chicago newsman created an American reincarnation of Robin Hood, who perpetrated criminal deeds in behalf of righteous causes and who was idolized by the simple Hispanic herdsmen of the Southwest, as English peasants idolized Robin Hood.
Burns fixed in legend for all time the image of Billy the Kid as “social bandit,” a concept devised in the 1950s for English history and later applied to the American experience as well. The test is not whether the social bandit, like Robin Hood or Jesse James, robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, but rather whether people thought he did and thus accorded him the status of folk hero. In his own time, however undeservedly, Billy the Kid won this accolade from the Hispanic plowmen and herdsmen of New Mexico. Burns, writing in the 1920s, never heard of social bandits, but he transformed Billy into a social bandit treasured not only by a narrow Hispanic world but by the entire world.7
Burns appealed to popular sensibilities on two levels, the personal and the societal. Each of his characters—the Kid, Chisum, McSween, Tunstall, Murphy—personalized historical forces guiding the transformation of the wild and free frontier into settled civilization, of rural America into the industrial age. The Kid embodies youth, nobility, humanity, romance, and tragedy. He is a symbolic transition between the old and new, driven to violence by injustice, his guns blazing in protest against corruption and greed, and at last his life an essential sacrifice in the rise of the human condition.
Neither the Kid nor any other of Burns’s major characters faithfully mirrored their historic counterparts. But they captured and simplified unsettling currents of history that were as pertinent in the 1920s, a period of postwar social upheaval, as they had been in the 1880s. Masquerading as history but singing with the vivid writing of a novel, Burns’s Saga ranked a close second to the Authentic Life in its decisive impact on the legend of Billy the Kid.
Motion picture and television producers found the Kid irresistible. In more than forty Hollywood films, such stars as Johnny Mack Brown, Buster Crabbe, Robert Taylor, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, and Kris Kristofferson depicted him in a wide range of personae. Throughout the 1930s, years of depression-induced escapism, the saintly Billy prevailed. By the 1970s, years of protest and cynicism, the satanic Billy had reasserted himself. With Young Guns in 1988, the more sympathetic Kid began a comeback. “From western Robin Hood to tormented adolescent and from degenerate punk to a martyred symbol of freedom,” writes a noted film historian, “the Billy the Kid story has been manipulated to satisfy new audiences.”8
Similar depictions found their way into drama, verse, and music. Seeking the meaning of the Kid, poets bp Nichol and Michael Ondaatje plumbed murky philosophical depths. Balladeers celebrated both saint and satan, and in 1938 composer Aaron Copland elevated the Kid to an improbable musical pinnacle as the star of a widely acclaimed ballet. Like the principal movies of the time, the ballet was conceived in the shadow of Burns’s Saga of Billy the Kid and thus presented the tragic and the saintly in the framework of larger historical forces.
Books and articles continued to pour off the presses. Fiction competed with history, while scholars analyzed the significance of the public’s continuing fascination. They saw the shifting popular vision of Billy the Kid, like that of other giants of folklore, as symbolic of shifting popular attitudes and values. What society made of the Kid told more about society than about the Kid.9
Not uncharacteristically for folk figures, Billy the Kid periodically materialized in the flesh. The “Billy Rides Again” syndrome appealed to people’s gullible fondness for conspiracy and cover-up as historical determinants. Garrett shot the wrong man, or faked a killing in a pact with the Kid, or conspired in some other secret maneuver that set the young man free to disappear into another life. Years later, the Kid surfaced to reclaim his true identity. Citizens of Hico, Texas, still emotionally defend their own “Brushy Bill” Roberts, who died in 1950, as the true Billy the Kid.10
The true Billy the Kid, of course, was not any of the personifications of legend. Yet he possessed traits that in varying measure appeared in them all. He was a killer and an outlaw, though hardly on the scale represented by legend. And he had distinctive personal qualities that are to be glimpsed in some of the Billies of legend. These qualities in fact equipped him to be much more than he was, whether killer, outlaw, or something more admirable. He might even have lived up to the legend.
Those nearest him acknowledged his talent. “He must have had good stuff in him,” declared John Meadows, “for he was always an expert at whatever he tried to do.” “With his poise, iron nerve, and all-round efficiency properly applied,” contended Dr. Henry Hoyt, “the Kid could have made a success anywhere.”11
“The Kid” well described Billy. Not until his final months did anyone know him as Billy the Kid. Whatever his name or alias at the moment, people always called him Kid. He was not only younger than most but also looked it. With a boyish face, medium stature, and slight build, he prompted the label as soon as he started running with men.
Yet the label could be misleading. He boasted strength and endurance, lithe and swift movement, and a suddenness of physical response that revealed an unusual quickness of mind. His intellect rested on a solid grammar-school education that made him literate though not literary, and it drew on a native intelligence that in resourcefulness, ingenuity, cunning, and mental agility and acuity lifted him above his peers.
Inextinguishable good humor marked the Kid’s disposition, even in the most discouraging circumstances. He continually smiled and laughed, sang and whistled, and bantered with both friends and enemies. Gloom never seemed to dilute his cheerfulness. “Happy go-lucky all the time,” commented Will Chisum. “Nothing bothered him.”12
Consistent with his lighthearted temperament, Billy loved a good time. Unlike most frontier types, he did not need liquor to fuel his merriment. He frequented saloons and dance halls but seems to have drunk little or not at all. He excelled at poker and monte and was fond of the vigorous bailes of the Hispanic population.
Hispanics idolized the Kid. He spoke their language fluently, cultivated their friendship, and, unlike most Anglos, never condescended. At any sheep camp on the plains or in the mountains, he could be sure of food, shelter, and help. In particular, Hispanic women found the happy youth irresistible.
The bright exterior could be deceptive, for it hid a steely, calculating steadiness that never faltered, no matter how intense the stress. In a crisis he always kept his head. With a disarming smile, he could pursue devious or deadly aims with a fixity of purpose that one resisted at peril. “When he was rough,” observed John Meadows, “he was as rough as men ever get to be. . . too awful rough at times, but everything in the country was rough about then.”13 Gradually many in his wide circle of admirers came to recognize the anomaly and to fear the inner Kid as much as they prized the outer Kid.
In a society that placed high value on gunmanship, the Kid excelled. Guns obsessed him. He practiced constantly with both Winchester rifle or carbine and six-shooter. His dexterity with both impressed those who watched him perform. “He could whirl his gun about on his finger and then shoot,” remembered Deluvina Maxwell. “A boy from Vegas tried to act like him once and shot and killed himself.” Pat Garrett thought him no better than most practiced gunmen. “He shot well, though,” Garrett conceded, “and he shot we
ll under all circumstances, whether in danger or not.”14
Killer he was, but not the cold-blooded killer of one of his stereotypes in legend. “He done some things I can’t endorse,” commented Meadows. “But Kid certainly had good feelings.”15 In two killings, he regretted the deed but, to himself, easily defended the necessity.
In fact, one of his dominant characteristics was self-justification. He rationalized everything he did as right, or at least as necessary even if unfortunate. In his mind, all his killings could be excused as self-defense or the demands of war.
Legend would credit the boy with twenty-one killings, one for each year of his life. The actual tally fell far short of that count. For certain he shot and killed four men—Windy Cahill, Joe Grant, Bob Olinger, and Jim Bell. In the Lincoln County War he shared with others the slaying of five more men—Billy Morton, Frank Baker, William McCloskey, Sheriff Brady, and Manuel Segovia (“Indian”). Finally, in the shootout at Greathouse ranch, Jim Carlyle died from a bullet that the Kid may or may not have fired.
Except in the last fatal encounter with Pat Garrett, the Kid took other men’s lives with instinctive suddenness and untroubled abandon. This casual attitude toward violent death, however, was not unique. The Kid reflected the values of the frontier society that nurtured him. Nearly everyone carried firearms, and few shrank from using them when they thought someone needed killing. In a milieu full of suffering and death, the extinction of a life aroused only fleeting compassion or sorrow. Usually the killer went free, uncondemned and often even excused by his peers, rarely brought to trial, even more rarely convicted by the crude system of frontier justice.
As killer, so as outlaw the real Billy failed to match any of the Kid’s personae of legend. While still a teenager, he stole some horses in Arizona. Later, he ran for a month with the outlaw gang of Jesse Evans but quickly dropped out and laid plans to take up ranching. The Lincoln County War of 1878 dashed those plans.
That violent clash of selfish interests gave the Kid a cause in which he could fight as a soldier rather than an outlaw. The fighters on both sides could kill, injure, destroy, and steal under the guise of legitimate war and thus avoid the taint of criminality. Looking back from his later notoriety, even wartime comrades tended to refer to “Billy the Kid’s bunch.” But he was never chief of the Regulators, however daringly and effectively he performed. He did not change the course of the war; it would have turned out the same if he had never taken part. Had he been incinerated in the blazing McSween house on July 19, 1878, the world would not remember him today.
In the Lincoln County War, the Kid reached his peak of excitement and adventure. Afterward, he wavered between going straight and returning to outlawry, at length slipping into crime without ever wholly giving up the quest for a life of respectable toil. For a year, 1880, he pursued an erratic course of cattle rustling and horse theft—not a heinous offense in the values of the time and place. He was never a large-scale rustler, although the pace of his depredations quickened as the months slipped by.
Nor did the Kid captain a big gang of outlaws, or even a little gang. The outlaw temperament did not lend itself to a formal command structure, and few organized gangs existed. When the Kid outlawed, he did it with a few buddies. By force of personality, he probably dominated them. But they did not form “his gang,” instantly obedient to his orders.
Except in its final months, therefore, the Kid’s career did not measure up to his reputation. Although a superb gunman and arresting personality, he was a quite ordinary outlaw, of uncertain commitment, narrow practice, and ambiguous purpose. In truth, he seems to have had no particular purpose at all, but rather youth’s penchant for submerging long-term goals in the pleasures of the moment. After the Lincoln County War, during the months of his reputed outlawry, he was a drifter psychologically as well as geographically.
Even so, in the flesh and in legend, Billy the Kid embodies the frontier’s affinity for violence. He also stands for much more, however, as evinced by his steadfast appeal to generation after generation. His life both reflects and reproaches not only frontier society but the entire nation. The Gilded Age that blossomed as the nation industrialized in the last years of the frontier featured attitudes and values that the Kid would have clearly recognized and that embedded themselves in the ethic of American society.
All around him the Kid saw corruption, both personal and institutional. As the Lincoln County War so vividly dramatized, the institutions of government, law, and business served selfish interests and personal ambitions. Governors, prosecutors, judges, sheriffs and marshals, army officers, Indian agents, attorneys, cattle barons, mercantile czars—all perverted political, legal, and economic systems for individual benefit. If Billy took what he wanted without regard for the rights of others, so on a much grander scale did Murphy, Dolan, Chisum, and Tunstall. And so in the territorial capital did the malodorous Santa Fe Ring.
In New Mexico as elsewhere on the frontier, such pillars of the establishment provided the examples of success. Billy’s actions mirrored their muddy ethics.
Despite his superior abilities, however, the Kid met failure at almost every turn. He failed because he lacked powerful friends and because he did not shed the wartime habits of open rebellion. Dolan, Mathews, the Coes, even Doc Scurlock and John Middleton, eventually donned the mantle of respectability.
For the Kid, Governor Wallace briefly held forth the promise of a pathway to respectability. If a pardon or other form of clemency had been forthcoming, a ranch on the Peñasco or a similar enterprise might well have provided Billy with a base for legitimate prosperity. But those hopes collapsed either in the governor’s contempt for the brash young desperado or simply in his preoccupation with other matters.
Another difference distinguished Billy from many of his wartime friends and enemies. Although the newly respectable did not suddenly acquire scruples and cleanse society of its iniquities, they did rely less on violence to advance their fortunes. But Billy remained a gunman, coiled to defend himself or project his will through violence.
Failing in his bid for respectability, the Kid remained the consistent rebel. His criminal escapades, especially as they began to gain him notoriety, affronted and challenged the establishment. In contrast to Dolan, Riley, Mathews, and the others who had initially created such turmoil, Billy continued to make trouble. Perhaps men like Bristol, Rynerson, and even Governor Wallace saw in the Kid’s contempt for conventions and defiance of authority a disquieting reminder of their own pliant ethics and questionable actions. Whatever their motives, they singled him out for special treatment and ultimately, together with his comrades Bowdre and O’Folliard, saw that he paid for his insolence with his life.
Billy the Kid died as America enthusiastically plunged into the Gilded Age. The transformation of an agrarian nation into an industrial giant launched a frenzy of material acquisitiveness that corrupted national institutions with the same ethical laxity so conspicuous on the frontier. Jimmy Dolan and his friend District Attorney Rynerson would have felt entirely at home in Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall or even in U. S. Grant’s White House. Only in a quick reliance on violence did the frontier differ from the nation as a whole in the relentless quest for power and wealth, and then it was largely a difference of degree.
The twin specters of corruption and violence remained embedded in American culture, periodically to surface separately or in tandem. Whether originating in the frontier experience or in some dark stain in the American character, they continue to find ambiguous expression in the legend of the youth who lived both. More than a century after his death, Billy the Kid still rides boldly across America’s mental landscape, symbolizing an enduring national ambivalence toward corruption and violence.
For a life that ended at twenty-one, that is a powerful and disturbing legacy.
Abbreviations
AAG Assistant Adjutant General
ACP Appointments, Commissions, Promotions
AGO Adjutant General�
�s Office
AHS Arizona Historical Society, Tucson
BIA Bureau of Indian Affairs
CO Commanding Officer
DFRC Denver Federal Records Center
DM Department of Missouri, Fort Leavenworth, KS
DNM District of New Mexico, Santa Fe
HHC Haley History Center, Midland, TX
HL Huntington Library, San Marino, CA
HQ. Headquarters
IHS Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis
LR Letters Received
LS Letters Sent
LSM Lincoln State Monument, NM
NARA National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC
NMSRCA New Mexico State Records Center and Archives, Santa Fe
PHPHM Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, TX
RG Record Group
TANM Territorial Archives of New Mexico
UAL University of Arizona Library, Tucson
WPA Works Progress Administration
NOTES
1. THE KID
1. Among students of Billy’s roots, the pioneers are Philip J. Rasch and Robert N. Mullin, who, despite the demands of professions unrelated to history, devoted their lifetimes to the pursuit. Mullin is now dead, but his collection of historical materials may be consulted at the Haley History Center in Midland, Texas (hereafter HHC). Rasch, who resides in California, donated his collection to the Lincoln State Monument in Lincoln, New Mexico. Pertinent here are Rasch and Mullin, “New Light on the Legend of Billy the Kid,” New Mexico Folklore Record 7 (1952–53): 1–5; Rasch and Mullin, “Dim Trails: The Pursuit of the McCarty Family,” ibid. 8 (1954): 6–11; and Mullin, The Boyhood of Billy the Kid, Southwestern Studies Monograph No. 17 (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1967): 7–10.
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