Trying to Know Billy the Kid: An Interview with Michael Wallis
Michael Wallis’s new book, Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride (W. W. Norton, 328 pages, $25.95), is the closest anyone has come to a definitive biography of the most mythical figure of the American frontier. On July 14, 1881, Billy the Kid was shot and killed by Pat Garrett in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. That is one of the few hard and concrete facts of his life—and even it has been challenged by generations of mythmongers.
Beyond that we know little. His mother, Catherine Antrim, was Irish and died of tuberculosis when he was scarcely a teenager. He drifted into New Mexico, got caught up in the swirl of personal, political, and economic clashes known as the Lincoln County War. Nearly everything else said about his life—including when and why he went by the surnames McCarty and Bonney—is open to question. It’s probably a safe bet that he has inspired more books, movies, and controversy per known fact than any other figure in American history. A dime novel hero in his own lifetime, he was the subject of a “biography” by Pat Garrett—or at least with Garrett’s name on the cover—that transcended the dime novels only in length, and his legend generated a small library of pulp by the end of the nineteenth century.
Because he was so famous in the years following his death, and because he is a household name today, it’s difficult to realize that in the 1920s Billy the Kid was in danger of fading away. In 1925 Harvey Ferguson, writing in H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury magazine, began an essay on his childhood idol—Fergusson had grown up in New Mexico—by asking, “Who remembers Billy the Kid?” Apparently not many still did, and probably not many would remember him today if not for the work of a Chicago-based crime journalist named Walter Noble Burns, who was on Billy’s trail for some time.
Late in 1925, Burns’s hugely entertaining but fanciful The Saga of Billy the Kid was published, and it proved to be the best-selling and most influential expounding of frontier legend ever written. It has seldom been out of print—you can currently purchase a copy from the University of New Mexico Press—and it has sold millions of copies all around the world. In 1932 it provided the basis for King Vidor’s The Saga of Billy the Kid, starring the University of Alabama football star Johnny Mack Brown as Billy. Including Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, from 1973, Billy has been the star of more than 300 feature films and serials, from Billy the Kid Meets Dracula to this year’s French release Requiem Pour Billy the Kid.
He has fueled more fiction, poetry, and drama than any other Old West legend, 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, a book-length poem) and Jack Spicer (Billy the Kid), and drama from Michael McClure (The Beard, in which Billy in the afterlife mates with Jean Harlow) and Gore Vidal (The Death of Billy the Kid was the basis for the Paul Newman film The Left Handed Gun). He even inspired a classic ballet and orchestral suite, Billy the Kid, by Aaron Copland. Can anyone imagine Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, or Jesse James being portrayed in a ballet?
Reliable nonfiction about him, though, is mostly limited to the British historian Frederick Nolan’s The Lincoln County War (1992) and The West of Billy the Kid(1998), in which Billy is largely a supporting character. The closest thing to an actual biography before Wallis’s book is Robert Utley’s earnest but undernourished Billy the Kid, A Short and Violent Life, of 1989.
From his home in Oklahoma, Wallis answered some questions about Billy and his endless ride.
Every American, along with quite a few people around the world, knows the name of Billy the Kid—but we hardly know anything about him. How is it possible to write a biography of someone about whom so little is known?
Although many people claim they know about Billy the Kid, they do not. Most of them have swallowed hook, line, and sinker the plethora of myths and half-truths that surround the Kid. As a boy I, like so many others, feasted on the tales and legends told about Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, Belle Starr, and Billy the Kid. I believed that the Kid’s given name was William Bonney and that he was a psychotic who killed a man for each of his 21 years. Of course I later found out that I was dead wrong on both counts, but still the majority of folks never learn the truth about the Kid or any of the other much-mythologized figures from the American West. And that is one of the main reasons I wanted to write this book. I wanted to clear up some of the major misconceptions and lies and help set the record straight. That was no easy task, but thankfully I found enough credible new paths to follow, and developed other sources of information, and I was able to forge my own take on the Kid. I tried my best to respond to the challenge.
When you speak of your new take on the Kid, I assume you refer in large part to his participation in the Lincoln County War, in New Mexico. Your perspective on this is different from any I’ve previously seen. If I understand you, you’re not saying Billy was a scapegoat . . .
No, a scapegoat is innocent, and I don’t argue that Billy was innocent. I say that he was singled out. There were more than 50 individuals indicted for shootings in the Lincoln County War, and Billy was the only one ever convicted. The Lincoln County War was big, and Lincoln County was big—it was and I think still is the largest county in America—and the stakes were big. There was much to fight over. It began, as most wars do, as an economic struggle, between different factions trying to control the cattle trade and the various businesses that catered to that trade and fed on it. That was on the higher level, of course. But by the time it filtered down to Billy and his friends, it was all personal. They were fighting to avenge the deaths of their friends. Just about all the violence that can be traced without question to Billy was revenge. I’m not advocating that kind of violence, I’m just saying that with the kind of violence that men on the frontier understood, there was nothing exceptional about what Billy did, except that he was better at that kind of warfare than most and he had a talent for escaping from jails, which made him into a national celebrity.
To put Billy and the Lincoln County War in perspective, the New Mexico Territory was sparsely populated and through the late 1870s accounted for, at least by one estimate, 15 percent of all homicides in the country. By 1880 the murder rate in New Mexico was 47 times higher than the national average.
When you read period accounts of the Lincoln County War, Billy seems to be just one of the participants. Yet, like Jesse James—who was just one of a well-known group of outlaws including his brother, Frank, and Cole Younger—he has lived on long after any of the other participants, and long after people forgot the Lincoln County War. Why is Billy the one we still remember?
Billy the Kid’s endless ride continues because of all the books, articles, and films—good, bad, and some a little bit of both—that have appeared ever since he was shot and killed by Pat Garrett in 1881. For the most part, the Kid was a likable young man, and undoubtedly his youth, personality, and various activities, both nefarious as well as upright, have ensured his place in history. The Kid was memorable, and he still captures our popular imagination. He always will.
Some historians, particularly Robert Utley in Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life, tend to be rather harsh in their assessment of Billy. To some he is the quintessential young psychotic killer. What’s your assessment of his character?
I have an unabashed fondness for the Kid. That does not mean that I excuse his high crimes and misdemeanors, and I certainly have not romanticized him in my mind. Still, my portrait of the Kid is sympathetic, and I feel I am telling the truth, or at least as much of the truth as I could find, about the Kid and more important about the time in which he lived. There were not many heroes in what we now refer to as the Old West. The line separating law officers and the lawless was often crossed. Writers prone to hyperbole with overly active imaginations have placed most of the heroic figures on pedestals. I did not want to do that in presenting yet another look at the Kid. I did my best to remain objective. I hope my readers agree.
Like Jesse James and James Dean, Billy has been the source of numerous survival legends. It seems there’s a new story every decade or so about how he lived through being shot by Pat Garrett at Fort Sumner. Why has he spawned so many of these myths?
Native Hispanic villagers and herdsman revered Billy in the same way English peasants had adored Robin Hood. For them and others the Kid became an avenging angel, a symbol offering them hope in their struggle against powerful and corrupt forces that threatened to rob them of their land and often their lives. Such a hero can never die for those who keep his story alive and pass down the myths and tales to future generations. The Kid was tailor-made for legend. He embodies youth, nobility, humanity, romance, and tragedy. The Kid was the symbolic transition between the old and the new, with a blazing six-gun in hand.
One thing you emphasize more than previous books on Billy is his appeal to the Hispanic population. I know that he was popular among the Spanish-speaking people of Lincoln County, and we all know the stories about his Mexican girlfriend. But do you feel Billy was a Robin Hood figure to these people?
I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. The power brokers of the Anglo establishment—and I guess we should say Anglo-Irish, since so many leading players in the Lincoln County troubles were either Irish-born or second generation Irish—had a genuine stake in propagating the myth of the demonic Billy the Kid. And in this, I must say, they were certain abetted by the sensationalist media of the time, the journalists and dime novelists. But to the Hispanic community Billy was a hero—“El Chavato,” or their little thief. They saw him as a “social bandit,” a champion of the poor, a courageous boy who wasn’t afraid to take on the powerful politicians and cattle ranchers who were out to make an example of him in order to show the country that law and order had finally come to New Mexico. Billy was bad for New Mexico’s image, and that was bad for the people who were pushing for New Mexico statehood.
More than any other frontier figure—more than Davy Crockett, Jesse James, or even Wyatt Earp—Billy has been an inspiration for novelists, poets, and filmmakers. He never seems to be dated. What is it about him that makes us want to see him reinvented for every new generation?
Much of the Kid’s appeal comes because of his youth, his personality, and the exaggerated stories about him that were told even during his fleeting lifetime. He stays alive in hearts and minds because so many questions about him were left unanswered. The Kid is like quicksilver. Just when we think we understand his story and have him figured out, he jerks the reins and disappears in a cloud of dust. He is like Elvis in some ways, and he has become a profitable industry even in death.