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Billy the Kid, His Life & Legend
Henry McCarty's place and date of birth remain conjectural. He may have been born in New York City, perhaps on the lower East Side of Manhattan near the present-day Brooklyn Bridge, sometime in 1859.
Details of his early life are sketchy. He and his older brother, Joe, moved with their mother, Catherine, to Indianapolis in 1865, where she apparently met the younger man who eventually became the boys' stepfather. The four moved to Wichita in 1870, then possibly to Denver, then to Santa Fe, where the couple was married in 1873.
Soon the William H. Antrim family moved to Silver City, where they lived in a modest cabin on Main Street.
Bright and literate, Henry loved books and music. After Catherine died of tuberculosis in September, 1874, the family disintegrated. Placed in foster homes, Henry worked in a butcher shop, then in a hotel, where he washed dishes and waited on tables. Eventually he ran afoul of the law. Arrested for a second petty theft in September, 1875, and jailed, Henry shimmied up the chimney and ran off to southeast Arizona.
He returned to New Mexico in September, 1877, an itinerant ranch hand turned horse thief drawn to rifles and pistols, who had killed a blacksmith and fled. Henry sported an alias, "Kid" Antrim.
Slim but wiry, the Kid rarely (or perhaps never) drank liquor, didn't smoke, and enjoyed singing and dancing. He loved to gamble and became adept at cards, dealing monte. The Kid spoke fluent Spanish, and easily befriended Hispanics. He charmed young women, especially the senoritas. But while exuding an affable cheerfulness and a love for laughter, the Kid masked a quick temper that sometimes drove him to a reckless boldness.
The Kid never killed 21 men. He was solely responsible for the deaths of just four, two of them his jailhouse guards, and helped dispatch five others.
Yet shortly before a startled Pat Garrett shot and killed him in rancher Pete Maxwell's darkened bedroom at Old Fort Sumner in the moonlit, earliest hour of July 14, 1881, the young outlaw the Las Vegas Gazette first dubbed "Billy, the Kid" in December, 1880, had already achieved a degree of recognition in tabloids near and far.
His bold escape from the second-floor jail of the Lincoln County Court House enscribed his name in the annals of the Old West. But his obscure past, combined with his good and evil traits, his daring exploits, and his sudden, violent death at so young an age, seemed to elevate him to legendary immortality.
Ironically Garrett's own failed book, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, the Noted Desperado of the Southwest, Whose Deeds of Daring & Blood Have Made His Name A Terror in New Mexico, Arizona & Northern Mexico, blazed the way. Its 1882 imagery fed the pulp fiction of the late 19th Century, the popular dime novel and nickel comic, whose issues reached the newly educated masses back East and made the Kid a household name.
The fiendish Billy who bedeviled the pages of those crude, earliest efforts eventually yielded to a romantic cavalier who burst forth in Walter Nobel Burns's best-selling Book of the Month The Saga of Billy the Kid in 1926.
Hollywood embraced Burns's interpretation in a King Vidor-directed film entitled Billy the Kid, starring ex-college football star Johnny Mack Brown, in 1930. It was the first of what has become more than 50 films that were to portray him first as a romantic hero, then as a social outcast, then again as a symbol of savagery, and again as a tragic hero.
Directors like Howard Hughes, Andrew McLaglen, Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpaugh, and actors like Roy Rogers (in 1938), Robert Taylor (1941), Jack Beutel (1943), Lash Larue (1949), Audie Murphy (1950), Paul Newman (1958), Kris Kristofferson (1973), and Emilio Estevez (1988 and 1990), in the starring role, found him irresistable.
Television introduced the Western to millions of homes in the 1950s, and with that genre, the Kid. Countless series' characters invoked his name. Hollywood's Westerns also found a home on the tube. NBC-TV teamed Barry Sullivan and Clu Gulager as Garrett and the Kid in the series "The Tall Man" in 1960-61, and Turner Network Television featured Val Kilmer as the young outlaw in Gore Vidal's "Billy the Kid" in 1989.
Today artists, writers and musicians, and the vast entertainment and mass communications industries continue to draw from the Kid, and keep shaping him as a convenient American icon. Arlo Guthrie, Tex Ritter, Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder, Billy Joel, and Billy Dean have sung about him. O. Henry, Zane Grey, Gore Vidal and Larry McMurtry have written about him. Even Aaron Copeland has swept him into ballet.
"In the folklore of the nation," summarized Bob Utley, author of the best-selling biography Billy the Kid: A Short & Violent Life (1989), "Billy the Kid is a figure of towering significance."
Eminently adaptable and endlessly fascinating, the Kid will always be with us, as anything we want him to be.
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