Michael Wallis' "Billy the Kid-The Endless Ride"

Even though I read snippets from lots of magazines, these days, it's hard to find the time to read books. I took advantage of my recent weekend in Arizona to read Michael Wallis's new book, "Billy the Kid-The Endless Ride".

Billy The Kid's short life has been treated in a number of books and movies, many quite lurid, exploitative, and often quite wrong. The extremely-thin written record of his shady life has given license to many Western History aficionados to speculate on his genealogy and the various contradictions in oral accounts of the people who knew him.

In contrast, Wallis' book is curiously schematic, and almost deliberately dry. Just the facts ma'am, even if those facts are nearly bare.

Several impressions linger. One observation is how the bare-bones population of the Old West was often pressed to carry out several functions, nearly at once, depending on necessity. For example, Miles Wood was the owner of the Hotel de Luna near Camp Grant in Arizona (the new Camp Grant, opened in 1872, after the unfortunate massacre at the old Camp Grant on Aravaipa Creek scandalized the posse composed of the leading citizens of Tucson and forced the Camp's closure). Wood was also the justice of the peace and waited tables in his restaurant. He served Billy the Kid food, hired him as a cook, arrested him, and even introduced the Kid to his first victim, 'Windy' Cahill, the man who made Billy's shackles. Wood had also been a cattle herder, a butcher, and a notary public. A jack of all trades!

I wish Wallis had put a little more 'color' in his book. In the 80's, I remember standing on the summit of Mt. Graham, high above the ruins of new Camp Grant. I gazed down the steep mountainside at the bare foundations far below and wondered what it must have been like in the old days. This book helps a little, but really, one needs a filmmaker - a John Ford - to tell the story. More maps would have helped.

Another impression is just how hard life was in the Old West, yet how mobile, for those who owned a horse, or who could steal one. Billy The Kid traveled far and wide, as a horse thief with Mackie's gang in southern Arizona, or as part of Kinney's gang in southwestern New Mexico, or in the Lincoln County War along the Rio Hondo, or towards Ft. Sumner on the Pecos River, where Sheriff Pat Garrett finally caught up with him. These locations are all pretty-far apart, yet he hit them all and left vivid impressions in all of them in just a few years.

In the 19th Century, people were often quite mobile, pulling up stakes to follow the frontier. Billy the Kid's Irish-born mother had lived in New York City, where Billy was apparently born, then Indianapolis IN, Wichita KS, Denver CO, Santa Fe NM, the mining town of Georgetown NM for about a minute, and finally Silver City NM, before finally dying of tuberculosis.

Billy The Kid had a natural flair for picking up Spanish, and unlike nearly all norteamericanos, went native very fast. He also danced and sang remarkably well. These talents won him many Hispanic friends, and greatly aided his numerous escapes, particularly after the Kid began fighting against the oppressive Murphy House tyranny in Lincoln County.

Nevertheless, the Kid's ease in New Mexico also hobbled him. Billy The Kid would not leave the territory, period: he was too attached to the place. Too many girl friends, for one thing. But when you are a fugitive, you must relocate. He would not flee to Mexico. He would not follow when his fellow Regulators retired after the Lincoln County War and moved to Colorado, Texas, and elsewhere. After escaping from prison in Lincoln NM, in one of the West's most mythic jail breaks, he stayed in the area! Whether it was love, complacency, or stubbornness, his outlaw career was doomed to be short.

Billy The Kid died at age 21. His entire criminal career extended from September 23, 1875 to July 14, 1881: less than six years, only the last three effectively in the public eye.

Here is a portion of a favorable review of this book:

Gradually, through Wallis's deft brushstrokes, an image begins to take shape. Dime novels, he writes, particularly appealed to "working class men and boys" such as Billy and his brothers, who were "eager to read about the perils of frontier life ... the pulps featured brigands, renegades, and rogues and transformed them into heroic criminals, driven to their lawless ways by social injustice and the need to defy an oppressive and corrupt establishment."

It appears the soulful young Billy might well have been influenced by the pulp fiction of his time and, in turn, such literature may have colored his contemporaries' impressions of him.

Far from being the common outlaw of countless B movies, Billy's crimes and other killings all seem to have stemmed from personal loyalties.

Wallis finds little evidence for the psychotic killer image depicted in countless fantasies; rather, the Kid became "a convenient target for the Santa Fe Ring and the Dolan Faction," who murdered his friends.

A rather startling fact is that "among the more than fifty individuals indicted for crimes in the Lincoln County War, only the Kid was ever convicted."

That Billy the Kid, under any name, has survived in American cultural memory for so long is due in no small part to his popularity with the Hispanic population of Lincoln County:

"While the Anglo establishments ... propagated the demonic Billy the Kid, many in the Hispanic community cheered him as their hero. To them, he was not a ruthless killer but he was their El Chivato, their little Billy, a champion of the poor and oppressed. He became both the ultimate underdog and a true social bandit."