The book titled Charming Little Billy, The Saga of Billy the Kid, What Really Happened is an interesting concept of the old story of the famous outlaw from New Mexico. It goes beyond the grave into a new area of history. The book titled Legends of Sam Bass, The Denton Mare and Longhorn Caverns opens new doors to this famous Texas robber and the hidden treasure of his loots.
Originally published in 1926, this biography tells the rousing tale of Billy the Kid, once of the most well known outlaws in the Old West. The Saga of Billy the Kid focuses on a period of time where two dangerous gangs tore a bloody path across Lincoln, New Mexico. After being shot to death in 1881 by the intrepid Lincoln County sheriff Pat Garret, Billy the Kid became a romanticized symbol of the wildness that laced the American west. Interest in the outlaw’s wild life grew after Burn’s initial publication, setting Billy the Kid up as one of the finest examples of the loss of the Wild West. As the US grew more industrialized, the stories of saloons, train robberies, and lone cowboys became even more important, and still remain important today. In a rousing tale that is partly truth, partly fiction, read the story that started its own wild frontier in the most influential version out there.
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)
Gale Cooper's Billy the Kid's Writings, Words, and Wit, in hardcover and paperback, 592 pages, has all written and recorded words of William H. Bonney aka Billy the Kid; with the author's newly authenticated Billy the Kid letter.
On March 9, 1878, three men were murdered in isolated Blackwater Canyon in New Mexico. The suspects were Billy the Kid and a number of his Regulators. This action, almost assuredly taken in retaliation for the death of the Kid’s friend, John Henry Tunstall, became the real catalyst in the Lincoln County War. In 2006, the author and a team of investigators searched for the remains of the men and related artifacts in the obscure canyon—the first to do so since the murders. The murders were reconstructed with the discovery of over thirty bullet cartridges. As part of the reconstruction of the crime, the author widens the scope of his investigation by examining the lives and paths of all three victims: William S. “Buck” Morton, a Virginian fleeing from his past; Frank Baker, a mystery man who hid his real name and shady career; and William McCloskey, an elderly cowboy who unsuccessfully attempted to play the peacemaker. The myths and accounts of the three men and their murders are analytically separated. Connective events where the paths of the participants intersected, such as the death of John Tunstall, are likewise examined. Legend and fact are separated in the case and its participants—both victims and suspects. Billy the Kid is justly portrayed as a human being wrought by conflicts. The Regulators and their opposition reveal character both good and bad. An investigative approach to this portion of the Billy the Kid saga corrects the record on some old assumptions and creates new avenues of insight and possibility.
