"Quien es?" The answer to this incautious question - "Who is it?" - was a bullet to the heart. That bullet -- fired by Lincoln County Sheriff Patrick F. Garrett from a .40-44 caliber single action Colt pistol -- ended the life of Billy the Kid, real name William Henry McCarty. But death - ordinarily so final - only fueled the public's fascination with Billy the Kid. What events led to Billy's killing? Was it inevitable? Was a woman involved? If so, who was she? Why has Billy's gravestone become the most famous - and most visited - Western death marker? Is Billy really buried in his grave? Is the grave in the right location? Is it true that Pat Garrett's first wife is buried in the same cemetery? Is Billy's girlfriend buried there also? The Fort Sumner cemetery where Billy's grave is located was once plowed for cultivation. Why? What town, seeking a profitable tourist attraction, tried to move Billy's body, using a phony relative to justify the action? These questions -- and many others - are answered in this book. Over 60 photos, including many historical photos never previously published.
The answer to this incautious question - "Who is it?" - was a bullet to the heart.That bullet - fired by Lincoln County Sheriff Patrick F. Garrett from a .40-44 caliber single action Colt pistol - ended the life of Billy the Kid, real name William Henry McCarty.But death - ordinarily so final - only fueled the public's fascination with Billy the Kid.What events led to Billy's killing?Was it inevitable?Was a woman involved? If so, who was she?Why has Billy's gravestone become the most famous - and most visited - Western death marker?Is Billy really buried in his grave?Is the grave in the right location?Is it true that Pat Garrett's first wife is buried in the same cemetery?Is Billy's girlfriend buried there also?The Fort Sumner cemetery where Billy's grave is located was once plowed for cultivation. Why?What town, seeking a profitable tourist attraction, tried to move Billy's body, using a phony relative to justify the action?These questions - and many others - are answered in this book.To supplement this history are 65 photos and illustrations. These include photos of the different memorials that have marked Billy's grave over the years, including a photo of Billy's previously unknown second grave marker; pictures of the men - friends of Billy - who re-located the grave in 1931; pictures of Billy's most likely girlfriend, Paulita Maxwell, and her parents; and a historic 1906 Fort Sumner cemetery map showing the location of Billy's grave.
Many years after the death of Billy the Kid, Deputy John William Poe, who was just outside the door when Sheriff Pat Garrett killed Billy, wrote out the whole story, which was published in a small edition. While certain statements made in the book by Poe are controversial, his account is a valuable document for anyone interested in Billy the Kid.
Not a story about me through their eyes then. Find the beginning, the slight silver key to unlock it, to dig it out. Here then is a maze to begin, be in. (p. 20) Funny yet horrifying, improvisational yet highly distilled, unflinchingly violent yet tender and elegiac, Michael Ondaatje’s ground-breaking book The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a highly polished and self-aware lens focused on the era of one of the most mythologized anti-heroes of the American West. This revolutionary collage of poetry and prose, layered with photos, illustrations and “clippings,” astounded Canada and the world when it was first published in 1969. It earned then-little-known Ondaatje his first of several Governor General’s Awards and brazenly challenged the world’s notions of history and literature. Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid (aka William H. Bonney / Henry McCarty / Henry Antrim) is not the clichéd dimestore comicbook gunslinger later parodied within the pages of this book. Instead, he is a beautiful and dangerous chimera with a voice: driven and kinetic, he also yearns for blankness and rest. A poet and lover, possessing intelligence and sensory discernment far beyond his life’s 21 year allotment, he is also a resolute killer. His friend and nemesis is Sheriff Pat Garrett, who will go on to his own fame (or infamy) for Billy’s execution. Himself a web of contradictions, Ondaatje’s Garrett is “a sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane” (p. 29) who has taught himself a language he’ll never use and has trained himself to be immune to intoxication. As the hero and anti-hero engage in the counterpoint that will lead to Billy’s predetermined death, they are joined by figures both real and imagined, including the homesteaders John and Sallie Chisum, Billy’s lover Angela D, and a passel of outlaws and lawmakers. The voices and images meld, joined by Ondaatje’s own, in a magnificent polyphonic dream of what it means to feel and think and freely act, knowing this breath is your last and you are about to be trapped by history. I am here with the range for everything corpuscle muscle hair hands that need the rub of metal those senses that that want to crash things with an axe that listen to deep buried veins in our palms those who move in dreams over your women night near you, every paw, the invisible hooves the mind’s invisible blackout the intricate never the body’s waiting rut. (p. 72)
This tour de force of western scholarship, a revised and expanded version of Tuska's Billy the Kid: A Bio-Bibliography, adds ten year's worth of scholarship to the earlier effort. Tuska provides a carefully documented biography of the Kid; bibliographical essays on historical scholarship, fiction, films, and cultural criticism; and a chronology of his life and death. Tuska's careful scholarship and analysis of sources refutes the mythical embellishments that have surrounded Billy the Kid. He concludes that in order for such a legend to arise, it is necessary for a historical character to have qualities that permit ambiguous interpretations of his behavior. "A model for others who would study legendary heroes of the American West". -- Choice "Anyone interested in Western outlaws will find this handsomely illustrated volume indispensable". -- Los Angeles Herald Examiner
Tales Behind the Tombstones tells the stories behind the deaths (or supposed deaths) and burials of the Old West's most nefarious outlaws, notorious women, and celebrated lawmen. Readers will learn the story behind Calamity Jane's wish to be buried next to Wild Bill Hickok, discover how and where the Earp brothers came to be buried, and visit the sites of tombs long forgotten while legends have lived on.
“So richly detailed, you can almost smell the gunsmoke and the sweat of the saddles. ” —Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers No outlaw typifies America’s mythic Wild West more than Billy the Kid. To Hell on a Fast Horse by Mark Lee Gardner is the riveting true tale of Sheriff Pat Garrett’s thrilling, break-neck chase in pursuit of the notorious bandit. David Dary calls To Hell on a Fast Horse, “A masterpiece,” and Robert M. Utley calls it, “Superb narrative history.” This is spellbinding historical adventure at its very best, recalling James Swanson’s New York Times bestseller Manhunt—about the search for Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth—as it fills in with fascinating detail the story director Sam Peckinpah brought to the screen in his classic film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
