When the unarmed Henry McCarty--alias William H. Bonney and Billy the Kid--was killed by Pat Garrett in Pete Maxwell's bedroom on the night of July 14, 1881, the youthful outlaw had killed four men and participated in the killing of five others during his travels in New Mexico and Arizona after a boyhood spent in New York City, Indianapolis, Wichita, and Colorado. Newspapers in territorial New Mexico congratulated Garrett for his achievement in ending the Kid's bloody reign of terror, and one commentator hoped that the Kid would have the good sense to cooperate and be good enough to "stay dead."
Yet as we know full well now, over a century after the Kid's death, the gaps in our knowledge of his biography, the mystery surrounding his decision not to head for Mexico after his dramatic jailbreak in early 1881, and the controversies engendered by Garrett's summary justice have provided dramatic narrative opportunities for the creative imaginations of numerous novelists, short-story writers, playwrights, journalists, historians, and filmmakers. The bibliography of items devoted to Billy the Kid's legendary life and death now contains around one thousand references, a figure that supports the widely held notion that the Kid represents one of the West's two most significant contributions to American mythology (Custer is the other).
McMurtry's Postmodern Billy
Interest in the Kid has ebbed in the wake of the 1981 centennial celebration of his passing, but in the past year two new historical interpretations of the Lincoln Country war that spawned the Billy the Kid legend have been published (Robert Utley's Violence in Lincoln County and John Wilson's Merchants, Guns, and Money). The 1877-78 range war began when rival cattle brokers began fighting over the right to fill lucrative beef contracts with the U.S. Army. Billy the Kid was one of several cowboy-gunmen hired by one of the warring brokers, British-born John Tunstall. Following Tunstall's murder, the Kid joined other hired hands who tried to avenge their boss's death, killing Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady in the process. The skirmishes between the two factions culminated in a five-day siege of a house sheltering the Kid and his fellow gunmen. When the house was set on fire, William Bonney made a narrow escape. McMurtry's version of the Lincoln County war plays off these facts, but his novel Anything for Billy recalls a typical dime-novelist interpretation of the conflict: A grasping cattle baron sheds any amount of blood to possess the entire territory.
A large-budge Hollywood commercial film recites the key events of this range war (Young Guns, starring Emilio Estevez as the Kid). McMurtry's novel, which represents the first major functional treatment of the Kid's story in at least a decade, is narrated by the aging Ben Sippy, who in 1908 recalls from his vantage point as a successful screenwriter for the Greasy Corners Stories ("featuring that young Galahad Billy the Kid") the past "time when I would do anything for Billy."
During the era three decades earlier when he rode the bloody trail with Billy, Sippy had made his mark as a prolific dime novelist, famous primarily fro his serials Orson Oxx, Man of Iron, and Sandycraw, Man of Grit, and for the most popular dime novel ever penned, What the Butler Knew. Indeed, according to Sippy, his later dime novel account of Billy Bone's life and death, Billy the Kid; or, the Wandering Boy's Doom,
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