An Elusive Outlaw : Tall Tales and Legends Sidetrack Scholars in Search of Facts on Billy the Kid

The nation was stunned in spring, 1881, when a 21-year-old condemned outlaw blew away two deputies at the old courthouse here, stole a horse and rode off into the rugged Capitan Mountains.

Just three months later, Henry McCarty, a.k.a. Billy the Kid, was dead, shot down by Sheriff Pat Garrett in the darkened bedroom of a Ft. Sumner ranch house.

The Kid has yielded none of his claim on the popular imagination 109 years after meeting his violent end. Yet he remains as elusive to would-be interpreters as he was to the lawmen of his day.

Scholars in recent years have sought to set the record straight, separating the historical Kid from the extravagant legends that grew up around him.

But serious historians must contend with a multitude of movies and novels that continue a long, if tarnished tradition of using the Kid’s exploits as the basis for spinning a profitable yarn.

“He’s very much alive, much more so than most of us will be after we’re gone,” says Paul Andrew Hutton, a history professor at the University of New Mexico who has studied books and films about the Kid.

More than 50 films somehow have included the Kid, including the likes of John Wayne’s “Chisum”; “The Outlaw,” with Jane Russell, and “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” in which time-traveling high school students meet the outlaw to prepare for a history quiz.

Recent novels on the subject include Larry McMurtry’s “Anything for Billy” and N. Scott Momaday’s “The Ancient Child.”

While interest in the Kid has waxed and waned over the years, his cinematic and literary portrayals tend to reflect the times in which they are produced, Hutton says.

The first films about the Kid, made in the 1930s, rendered him a Depression-era, monopoly-busting idealist. By 1972, when “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” debuted, the Kid had become a violent, if charming anarchist.

More recently, the films “Young Guns” and the soon-to-be-released sequel, “Young Guns II,” starring Brat Pack actors Emilio Estevez, Kiefer Sutherland and Lou Diamond Phillips, have breathed new life into the Kid’s legend, even as they have cast him in a new light, Hutton says.

“During our own time, he’s sort of a hip young gang leader--the Crips come to New Mexico,” Hutton says.

Historian Robert M. Utley, whose 1989 book, “Billy the Kid: a Short and Violent Life,” has sold briskly, counts the Kid among those “rare flexible characters who can be whoever you want them to be.” Indeed, there is not even agreement about the Kid’s real name, which many had believed to be William Bonney but which Utley has established through records to more likely be McCarty.

Utley has sorted through the myths about the outlaw, whom he has come to view as a likable, clever post-adolescent who easily lost his temper and acted impulsively. The Kid’s resort to violence was not unusual for the times, Utley says.

“He was not the premiere outlaw he has been portrayed in legend,” Utley says. The Kid, like other rootless drifters living on a lawless frontier, made do primarily with gambling and occasional cattle rustling, Utley says.

By Utley’s count, the Kid definitely committed only four killings and may have joined in up to six others. Legend has long held that he killed 21 men.

The Kid found notoriety during the brief, bloody Lincoln County War of 1878, which had its roots in a contest between Englishman John Tunstall and local businessmen J. J. Dolan and L. G. Murphy for the right to sell provisions to a nearby Army post and Indian reservation.

Tunstall’s murder led to a series of revenge killings between his followers, known as the Regulators, and the Dolan-Murphy forces.

In following months, the Kid joined other Regulators in the ambush slaying of Sheriff William Brady and led a daring escape from a burning house following a five-day siege.

Eventually caught and convicted of Brady’s murder, the Kid was jailed on the second-floor of the courthouse, awaiting execution, when he shot down two guards and made his getaway on April 28, 1881.

Garrett, an acquaintance of the Kid’s, ran him to ground at Pete Maxwell’s ranch a few months later, on July 14.

The Kid’s legend began to take shape when territorial newspapers dubbed him Billy the Kid in the wake of his jailbreak.

A year after the Kid’s death, Garrett and ghostwriter Ash Upson published an “Authentic Life of Billy the Kid,” a heavily embroidered tale that tainted most subsequent writing about the outlaw.

In 1926, Chicago newsman Walter Noble Burns revived interest in the Kid when he wrote “The Saga of Billy the Kid,” portraying him as an Old West Robin Hood.

In Lincoln, where descendants of Sheriff Brady and other participants of the war still reside, questions about the Kid’s conduct and who wronged whom during the deadly conflict are of more than academic interest.

The village’s three dozen or so adobe buildings, lining a quiet, juniper-studded canyon along the Rio Bonito, are little changed since the last century. Through the Lincoln County Heritage Trust, residents have established a walking tour and several museums that explore the area’s rich history.

Unlike Ft. Sumner, a ranching town on the Pecos River 90 miles to the northeast, no garish billboards advertise the Kid’s exploits. In fact, Lincoln has established an historical district that restricts all home remodeling and construction in the interest of authenticity.

“There’s a lot of fraud in this business,” says trust director Robert Hart. “There are lots of people trying to sell something.”

In the wake of “Young Guns,” and seeking to promote serious scholarship about the Lincoln County War, Hart got the trust to sponsor a computer study of old photographs thought to be of the Kid. The trust holds in its collection the only authenticated photo of the outlaw, an 1879 tintype taken while he was at Ft. Sumner.

The project, scheduled for completion in 1991, has already demolished the late Ollie “Brushy Bill” Roberts’ claim to be the Kid. Roberts, who died in 1950 in the West Texas town of Hico, maintained Garrett had shot the wrong man. A computer comparison of Brushy Bill’s and the Kid’s facial features found few similarities, but that hasn’t persuaded a small number of Brushy Bill die-hards, Hart says.

Hart agrees with Utley’s explanation for the public’s continued fascination with the Kid: “You’ve got 180 degrees here,” Hart says. “You’ve got Billy the angel and Billy the demonic killer.”