Discovering a kinder, gentler Billy the Kid

FOR a guy who probably didn’t live to see his 22nd birthday, never had a steady job and spent most of his post-pubescent life on the run, Billy the Kid hasn’t done too badly.

In the 126 years since his death, he has never stopped inspiring works by our foremost litterateurs, including fiction from Larry McMurtry (“Anything for Billy”) and N. Scott Momaday (“The Ancient Child”), poetry from Michael Ondaatje (“The Collected Works of Billy the Kid”) and Jack Spicer (“Billy the Kid”), and drama from Michael McClure (“The Beard,” in which Billy mates with Jean Harlow in the afterlife) and Gore Vidal (“The Death of Billy the Kid” was the basis for the Paul Newman vehicle “The Left Handed Gun). Aaron Copland wrote a ballet about him, and he’s been the subject of more films than all the presidents of the United States combined, including “Billy the Kid vs. Dracula” (1966) and the recent French film “Requiem pour Billy the Kid.”

Perhaps no other figure in American lore has generated so much fiction and fancy from so little fact. Michael Wallis’ “Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride” pursues his life and legend as doggedly as Pat Garrett once chased the real Billy, and with drastically different results: Garrett ended up killing Billy, while Wallis becomes the first biographer to really bring him to life.

The actual facts of the life of Billy the Kid -- a.k.a. William H. Bonney, a.k.a. Henry McCarty -- are sparse. Catherine Antrim, his mother, died of tuberculosis when Billy, or Henry, as most people seemed to know him, was only 14. He drifted to Lincoln County, N.M. -- at the time the largest county in any U.S. state or territory, with a homicide rate 47 times the national average. Henry got mixed up in the Lincoln County War, the name of the area’s political and economic disputes (which, with participants named Antrim, Murphy and Garrett, seems like a page out of an Irish mob war), revenged the killings of his pals and was killed in 1881. Just about everything else concerning his life is in dispute.

Much more than previous Billy the Kid chroniclers, including Robert Utley and British historian Frederick Nolan, Wallis has succeeded in filling in the background on the enigmatic Billy. (Swarms of researchers -- amateur and professional -- have failed to pinpoint even the date and place of his birth.) Period witnesses claim he “was a good boy, maybe a little ... mischievous at times,” of slight build but blessed with great energy and sharp reflexes and that his “eyes were full of fun” -- clearly his mother’s Irish lad.

Gradually, through Wallis’ deft brush strokes, 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 history’s impressions of him.

The frontier of the late 1870s was filled with “Kids” -- the Apache Kid, the Texas Kid, even the Pockmarked Kid -- but Billy stood out. Far from being the common outlaw of countless B movies, Billy’s crimes, except for a handful of misdemeanors such as cattle theft, were killings to avenge the murders of his friends. 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 -- “they deliberately used him as a target bad boy in order to divert the adverse public attention coming to them.” 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 has survived in American cultural memory for so long is due in no small part to his popularity with the Latino population of Lincoln County: “While the Anglo establishment ... 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.” (Unlike many current day Anglos, Billy, whose true love was rumored to be a Mexican girl, had no objection to bilingualism.)

Every generation resurrects Billy and recasts him in a new light (in the “Young Guns” movies he was marketed to misunderstood teenagers). No matter how the story is told, though, “Billy the Kid lives on. Whether he is described as El Chivato, champion of the oppressed, or a Satanic psychopath, he remains irrepressible, mysterious, and lethal. His ride across our popular imagination will never end.” At least not while we have this definitive biography..

Allen Barra is the author of “The Last Coach: A Life of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant.”