The historical archive yields almost nothing. A few legal documents. A handful of newspaper accounts. A photograph. Everything else, nearly everything we think we know, comes later.
Billy the Kid is one of the most famous figures in American history, and one of the least documented. We do know that, for a time, likely when he was 13-15 years old, he lived in Silver City. To those who don’t live here, the one historical fact they likely associate with Silver City is Billy the Kid.
Any history of this region must necessarily include Billy the Kid, but there isn’t enough information for any kind of traditional historical account.
In 1881, Billy the Kid was described as a “cold-blooded murderer” in the New Mexico press. By the 1920s, he had become a tragic boy-outlaw. By the late twentieth century, he was a victim of corruption. Billy the Kid has been many things through the years. Consistent has never been one of them.
In his introductory section to Chapter 8 in “Unlocking Silver City,” historian Jim Smith captures the essence of his research of the Kid. It’s not a documented factual history of the Kid’s life, it’s a study of how the legend, the myth of Billy the Kid has changed over time.
“In stories about Billy the Kid, we can see who we once were and who we are today,” Smith wrote. “The people of the 1890s, for example, were open to accepting different legends and myths than the people of the 1930s, the 1960s, and the 2020s. The Kid's legend is dynamic, ever changing, and often contentious, and what we think about the Kid reveals more about who we are at different times in history than it reveals about the Kid himself. As stated in the Talmud, ‘We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.’"
The chapter is titled, “The West in Popular Culture: Silver City and the Enduring Legend of Billy the Kid."
Pat Garrett
What we think we know for sure about the Billy the Kid story begins on July night in 1881 when Pat Garrett shot and killed the Kid and ended the violent life of a notorious outlaw. It actually all started two decades earlier.
“As a subject for academic historians, the Kid's biography is a limited topic for research,” Smith writes in the book. “He died young (age 21, possibly only 19), and he left little documentary evidence of his life. We know nothing about his father and little about his mother. We don’t know the date of his birth (possibly 1859), the age of his brother (most-likely younger), the name given to him at birth (probably Henry McCarty), or the source of his name at the time of his death (William H. Bonney). As Frederick Nolan wrote in ‘The West of Billy the Kid,’ ‘It is almost as if he decided at birth to leave behind as little documentary trace as he could of his entry into, and passage through, the world.’”
The Growing Legend
Today, what we “know” about Billy the Kid comes from a countless, and still growing, number of movies, songs, television shows, plays, comic books, documentaries, and books. There are more than 1,000 books (both fiction and non-fiction) based on the life of the Kid.
We do know about his participation in the Lincoln County War of 1878, but not because he played any significant role in the conflict. He died a few years later, and that’s where the myth that is the legend of Billy the Kid really began. The fascinating part is that the story keeps changing over time.
“The myth kind of fits the time in which we live and Silver City's role in that myth is that it's the origin of the myth,” Smith said. “There are a lot of myths about him killing somebody in Silver City, but that's not true, about him beheading a kitten in Silver City, which he didn't do. Walking around in women's clothing in Silver City, which he didn't do.”
Historians can document that he lived in Silver City with his mother. He probably moved there when he was 13 years old, and we know his mother died of tuberculosis there because that was recorded in the newspaper. There are also records that he was arrested in Silver City and escaped from jail. After that, Smith shares that we are left to memories and interpretation after the passage of time.
Starting With a Question
Smith believes the study of history begins with a question, and when it comes to the Kid, there are so many questions and so few answers.
“I think Billy the Kid creates a whole lot of questions about the whole historical process,” he said. “There's so little to answer, and there's all these historians writing books about them, and you wonder where they got that. A lot of it's just conjecture. A lot of it is trusting oral history and I think that creates a big question for me. Oral history is fascinating, but you always question the veracity of it.”
Smith’s curiosity about Billy the Kid started when he was a high school history teacher at Mayfield High School and came to life after he retired and went to work as an education consultant. Much of that work involved training teachers and the story of Billy the Kid was a useful study for that purpose.
“He was an excellent example of the historical process,” Smith said. “All history begins with a question, and then you research that question. Also, as a historian you very much have to be aware of how history changes over time. My presentation on Billy the Kid was to talk about what we actually know about him. and then what they were saying about him in the 1920s and how what they were saying in the 1950s was different than what they were saying in the 20s and how the Billy the Kid that they're writing about in the 80s is different than previously. And it just keeps changing over time.”
All About Perspective
At the center of all of this is the origin myth in Silver City. It's not that the historians were making things up, but the perspective from which they approached the stories they heard was quite different, generally influenced by their own life experience.
“When he died, he was portrayed in the newspapers as a really bad character, one of the most evil people,” Smith said. “He was representative of everything bad about the Old West. About all we knew about him was Pat Garrett's book which you have to assume is self-serving. He shoots this probably 21-year-old kid in the dark.
“But in the 1920s, the times changed and Billy the Kid in the 1920s and 30s starts being portrayed more sympathetically. Sort of a good guy. He may have killed people, but he was shooting at the right people.
And then in the 1950s, he becomes sort of a hippie beatnik. I think what people say about him today probably reflects more about who they are and when they're living than about Billy the Kid himself.”
Smith refers to the stories about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson that do change over time, but we know more about them. Billy the Kid is a good study because of what we don’t know. Thus, the myth and the legend.
Smith’s research isn’t about Billy the Kid per se. It’s a study about how people talked about him in the 20s, the 50s, the 80s, and now.
“The stories that kids get about the Civil War now are different than the stories they got about the Civil War in the 50s,” Smith said. “So, a real good topic of research is not the Civil War per se, but the changing stories about the Civil War, the changing view of the Civil War.”
The Billy the Kid chapter in this historical record opens with the perception from 1881-1925.
“The Kid's legend began months before he died on July 14, 1881,” Smith wrote. “Newspapers had been describing him as the leader of a dangerous gang of outlaws terrorizing the New Mexico Territory, an outlaw who represented lawlessness and violence, a symbol of everything wrong with the American West. As the ‘Grant County Herald’ stated two weeks after his death, ‘He was a low down vulgar cutthroat with probably not one redeeming quality.’”
The second phase Smith addresses covers the time period 1926-1954.
“Everything changed for Billy the Kid's legend when Walter Noble Burns published ‘The Saga of Billy the Kid’ in 1926,” Smith wrote. “Burns, a Chicago journalist and historian of the West, was old enough in the 1920s to remember stories about the Kid, and on a trip to New Mexico he interviewed people who were old enough to have known the Kid personally. Although digging into memories that were almost 50 years old, Burns heard a different description of the Kid than what he heard from the media of his youth. Rather than hearing about a black-hearted thief and killer, Burns heard the Kid described as charismatic and good-humored…a ‘Robin Hood of the West.’”
The third phase of the Kid's legend Smith addresses in this chapter began in July 1955 when a teleplay written by Gore Vidal was broadcast on the NBC network.
“With Paul Newman starring as the Kid, Vidal's play told the story of a social outcast who simply wanted to be free and live his own life,” Smith wrote. “As a young man who did not care what anyone thought of him, he became a victim of the media, destroyed by his own fame, somewhat of a Rebel Without a Cause.”
The final phase addressed is the modern, or as Smith describes it, postmodern period.
“When Phil Lesh, bassist of the Grateful Dead was asked which version of a song performed by the Dead, a song never played the same way twice, was the ‘true’ version, Lesh replied, ‘Like fairy tales or folk songs, all versions are true. The more versions there are, the truer it is,’” Smith wrote. “During the fourth phase of the Kid's legend, the tale is never told the same way twice and all versions are true-not as history, but as legends.”
The interesting thing about Billy the Kid. We know so little about him, but the legend has taken on such a larger-than-life place in pop culture that accounts of his life have been written in the United Kingdom and in places as far away as Australia.
“Billy the Kid is endlessly fascinating,” Smith said. “There is so little known about him, but we can't stop talking about him. He's more of a subject for artists than he is historians. He's more of a subject for novelists and screenwriters and songwriters. I think that's what fascinates about him. He can be a good boy gone bad, or he can be a knight out there in the Old West fighting the bad guys. There's just so many different stories you can tell about him.”
The one question to which Smith still craves an answer, the area that needs to be researched more thoroughly, is his reputation in the Hispanic community.
“A common theme running through the myth of Billy the Kid is he seems, and I stress the word ‘seems’ to have been more of a sympathetic reception in the Hispanic community than in the Anglo community. The question is first of all is that true? And the second part of the question would be, why?”
As an academic historian, Smith acknowledges there are a lot more interesting stories than Billy the Kid. There's a lot of cultural history, a lot of characters that are far more important.
“There's a thousand things more interesting to research about our area of the world than Billy the Kid,” he said. “But that's irrelevant in popular culture. If you know anything about this part of the world, you want to know about Billy the Kidd. I think for academic historians, it's frustrating but if somebody delivers a paper at an academic conference on Billy the Kid, that's going to get all the press attention.”
“One of the things I find endlessly fascinating is how enduring the myth is,” Smith said. “Long after you and I are gone, people are still going to be talking about Billy the Kid. It's a myth that won't die.”
