Billy the Kid by Robert M Utley

Author:Robert M Utley [Utley, Robert M]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / United States
ISBN: 9780803295582
Publisher: UNP - Bison Books
Published: 2013-10-07T19:33:55+00:00

This army of outlaws, concluded Koogler, “is under the leadership of ‘Billy the Kid,’ a desperate cuss, who is eligible for the post of captain of any crowd, no matter how mean and lawless.”16

Other newspapers took up the refrain, spreading Billy’s name and stories of his alleged exploits throughout the territory. His reputation even leaped beyond New Mexico, for on December 27, 1880, the New York Sun, drawing on the Gazette, ran a long story about the amazing outlaw chief. And no longer was he just “Kid”—the outlaw West was full of Kids. Now he was the much more personal and glamorous “Billy the Kid.”

In most respects the newspaper stories were essentially accurate. Forty or fifty outlaws, or even more, had in truth imposed a reign of thievery and terror on New Mexico from Las Vegas to Seven Rivers and from the Sierra Blanca to the Staked Plains. But they did not operate as a single gang, and they did not accord allegiance to a single chief, certainly not to a youth of twenty-one. Yet within a matter of two weeks, all New Mexico came to look on “Billy the Kid” as the premier outlaw of the Southwest.

The Gazette’s article undermined Billy’s campaign for release from the murder charges against him. In particular, it prejudiced Governor Wallace and discouraged him from extending the help he had promised in Lincoln almost two years earlier.

In a long letter to the governor, Billy denied that he captained an outlaw band. “There is no such organization in existence,” he wrote. “So the gentleman must have drawn very heavily on his imagination.” He conceded that “Billy, ‘the Kid,’ is the name by which I am known in the Country,” but added that he had not followed a life of crime at the Portales. That was a tale, he said, “put out by Chisum and his tools.” Instead, “I have been at Sumner since I left Lincoln making my living gambling.”

Billy also told the governor about the recent shootout at the Greathouse ranch. He had gone to White Oaks at the summons of Ira Leonard, “who has my case in hand. He had written to me to come up, that he thought he could get Everything Straigtind up.” But Leonard was not at White Oaks, and before Billy could follow him to Lincoln the possemen jumped him at Coyote Springs, shot his horse from under him, and then cornered him at the Greathouse ranch. He refused to surrender to them because they had no warrant for his arrest, “so I concluded that it amounted to nothing more than a mob.” The posse itself, not he, shot and killed Carlyle.17

Whatever the mix of truth and fiction, Billy’s letter shows that he wanted Wallace to believe him to be an innocent victim of a malevolent John Chisum and that he still hoped for the governor’s help in avoiding the murder charges facing him. The letter, however, failed to move Governor Wallace, who gave it to the Las Vegas Gazette to print and ridicule.

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