If this is an authentic photo, I'd say you're right!
Posted on 06/14/2003 1:46:40 PM PDT by Sir Gawain
| Which Billy did Pat Garrett get? |
| Michael Janofsky/NYT The New York Times Thursday, June 5, 2003 |
DNA tests may show Old West hero killed the wrong man
LINCOLN, New Mexico For more than 120 years, Pat Garrett has enjoyed legendary status in the American West, a lawman on a par with Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, even Matt Dillon. As sheriff here in Lincoln County in 1881, Garrett is credited with shooting to death the notorious outlaw known as Billy the Kid, a killing that made Garrett a hero. For years, a patch bearing Garrett's likeness has adorned uniforms worn by sheriff's deputies here.
But now, modern science is about to touch Garrett's fame in a way that some say could expose him as a liar who covered up a murder to save his reputation.
Officials in New Mexico and Texas are developing plans to exhume and conduct genetic tests on the bodies of a woman buried in New Mexico who was believed to be the Kid's mother and a Texas man known as Brushy Bill Roberts who claimed to be the Kid and died in 1950 at the age of 90. If test results suggest that the two were related, it would add new evidence to a long-held alternative theory that Garrett shot someone other than the Kid and led a conspiracy to cover up his crime.
Such skepticism is hardly uncommon. Disputes over major events in the Old West have engaged historians almost since they happened. The saga of Billy the Kid is one of the longest-running.
Beyond renewing interest in the Kid saga, the possibility that testing could enlarge Garrett's reputation or destroy it has even caught the fancy of Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who has offered state aid for the investigation and a possible pardon that an earlier New Mexico governor had once promised to the Kid for a murder he committed.
"The problem is, there's so much fairy tale with this story that it's hard to nail down the facts," said Steve Sederwall, the mayor of Capitan, New Mexico, who is working with Lincoln County's current sheriff, Tom Sullivan, to resolve the matter. "All we want is the truth, whatever it is. If the guy Garrett killed was Billy the Kid, that makes him a hero. If it wasn't, Garrett was a murderer, and we have egg on our face."
No matter what genetic testing may show - and it might not show much - it is hard to overstate the prominence of Garrett and the Kid in Western lore, especially here in southeastern New Mexico, where their lives converged during and after the gun battles for financial control of the region that became known as the Lincoln County War.
The Kid's notoriety grew after he and friends on one side of the conflict killed several men in an ambush, including Garrett's predecessor, Sheriff William Brady. For that, the Kid was hunted down, captured by Garrett, convicted of murder and taken to the Lincoln jail to await hanging. He was about 21.
Today, the tiny town of Lincoln, population 38, is a memorial to what happened next. More than a dozen buildings, including one that housed the jail, have been preserved as a state monument that attracts as many as 35,000 visitors a year.
Historians generally agree that the Kid, born Henry McCarty and known at times as William H. Bonney, among other names, escaped from the Lincoln County jail after it became apparent that Governor Lew Wallace had reneged on a promise to pardon him in exchange for information about other killings during the county war.
On April 28, 1881, the Kid managed to obtain a gun, kill the two deputies guarding him and leave the area on horseback. But then, stories diverge.
The version embraced here and supported by numerous books and Garrett relatives is that the Kid made his way to a friend's ranch in Fort Sumner, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) northeast of Lincoln. The ranch owner, Pete Maxwell, was also a friend of Garrett's and somehow got word to Garrett that the Kid was in the area.
After arriving, Garrett posted two deputies at the door. As the Kid approached on the night of July 13, he spoke a few words in Spanish to the deputies, who did not recognize him. But Garrett, waiting inside, knew the voice. When the Kid walked in, Garrett turned and shot him in the heart.
William Garrett, a retired lighting engineer living in Alamogordo, New Mexico, who is Garrett's great-nephew, said that years of research, including conversations with his cousin Jarvis, the last of Garrett's eight children, who convinced him there was "no question about it" that his great-uncle killed Billy the Kid at Maxwell's. Jarvis died in 1991 at the age of 86.
"He was hired to get the Kid, and he got the Kid," Garrett said. "Uncle Pat was a person of integrity who did his job. He was a law abider, not a law-breaker."
But just as the story of Garrett as hero has flourished over the years, so have others, including the tale of Brushy Bill of Hico, Texas. His trip to New Mexico in 1950 to seek the pardon he claimed to have been denied nearly 70 years earlier gave new life to an alternative possibility - that Garrett had not killed the Kid at all, but a drifter friend of the Kid's named Billy Barlow.
This story holds that Garrett and the Kid may have been in cahoots for some reason and that Garrett had stashed a gun in the outhouse at the jail that the Kid used to kill the deputies and escape. Even if only part of that is true, it would strongly suggest that Garrett killed the wrong man.
Jannay Valdez, curator of the Billy the Kid Museum of Canton, Texas, said he had no doubt that Garrett killed someone else and that Brushy Bill was the Kid.
"I'm absolutely convinced," he said after meeting with Sederwall, Capitan's mayor. "I'd bank everything I have on it."
Sederwall and Sullivan, the sheriff, decided to try to settle the matter once and for all but could do so only through scientific analysis. To justify an effort that would require much of their time and, perhaps at some point, taxpayer money, they needed an official reason. So in April, they opened the first-ever investigation into the murders of the two deputies shot at the jail during the Kid's escape, James Bell and Robert Olinger.
As Sederwall said, "There's no statute of limitations on murder."
The goal now, he said, is to compare genetic evidence of Catherine Antrim - the woman believed to be the Kid's mother, who died in 1874 and is buried in Silver City, New Mexico - and of Brushy Bill, who is buried in Hamilton, Texas.
The Kid - or the man said to have been the Kid - was buried at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, although the whereabouts of the grave are uncertain. The Kid has no known living relatives.
But solving the mystery might not be so simple. For one thing, Valdez said he was certain that the woman buried in Silver City was not the Kid's mother but "a half aunt." And even if tests disqualify Brushy Bill as the Kid, other "Kids" have emerged over the years, including a man named John Miller, who died in 1937 and is buried in Prescott, Arizona. Sederwall said efforts would be made to exhume his body, as well.
The New York Times
If this is an authentic photo, I'd say you're right!
Matt Dillon?
As I understand it the "left handed gun" came from a reverse print of a photo of Billy with his favorite rifle in his arms and pistol on his left hip, thus he "must have been" left handed. However, examining the rifle shows that the breech is mirror imaged, something never produced by that gun maker (winchester?) prooving that the picture is flipped.
My favorite tidbit surrounding the Billy the Kid / Lincoln County Wars is the true source of fame of the governor mentioned in the story, Lew Wallace. He was world famous as the author of the single most successful book in the US in the 1800s: Ben Hur. He wrote most of it while governor, living in Santa Fe. General Lew Wallace was also a civil war hero (he held off the advancing rebel troops with volunteer militia when they could have captured Washington and ended the war) as well as one of the judges at the trial of the Lincoln Assassination conspirators. After leaving New Mexico he went on to be ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and prooved very influential in affairs at the end of the century in that part of the world. Fascinating gent. People just lived bigger lives, I guess.
Democrats seem to love pardoning criminals. It makes them feel good to be bad.
As I remember Pat Garrett was a Republican.
It seems to me that half the old men of dubious ancestry in the Southwest in the 30s claimed to really be some famous outlaw or another. There were at least 6 who claimed to be Butch Cassidy. Acording to his sister, one of them actually was.
So9
Governor of The New Mexico Territory 1878 - 1881
In September 1878 Gen. Wallace was appointed Governor of the New Mexico Territory. Described by some as thanks for his support for President Hayes, it was not a "favor." His job was to clean up the "Lincoln County Wars."
On November 14 he issued an Amnesty Proclamation, a pardon for all misdemeanors and crimes committed in Lincoln County from Feb. 1 until Nov. 13, 1878. It excluded those indicted or undergoing punishment for crimes.
A secret meeting with William Bonney (a.k.a. Billy the Kid) led to an arrest (actually protective custody) while Billy testified against those involved in the killing of Huston Chapman.
Billy would be granted amnesty in return for his testimony, but he was still supposed to stand trial for previous crimes. He did testify but chose to then escape from jail and return to a life of crime. Gen. Wallace refused to grant his amnesty.
In December of 1880 Billy the Kid was arrested and charged with murdering three men. At his trial in 1881 he was exonerated of two of those killings, but convicted of one. He was sentenced to hang, and his official death warrant is in Gen. Wallace’s handwriting. However, as Billy was prone to do, he escaped from jail to be ultimately shot down by Sheriff Pat Garrett in July of 1881.
In the spring of 1879 the Apache chief Victorio left the reservation and started raiding. Gen. Wallace said of Victorio that he "was an enemy not to be despised." Among the things New Mexico must surely appreciate about Lew’s time as Governor is his salvaging of the archives of the territory.
My guess is that Brushy Bill is just some old eccentric.
That, my friend, is a New Mexico specialty.
Though I know the existence of the Spencer Carbine, the inventor is someone I've never learned about. Now you've given me some Googling to do (g). Thanks
If you enjoy that sort of stuff, check out the interelationships of Robert Todd Lincoln (the only child of Abe Lincoln to live to adulthood, member of three administrations as well as present at the deaths of three presidents from assassination), Edwin Booth (John Wilkes Booth's brother, who, according to the story told by Robert Lincoln, saved the president's son from accidental death about a year before the assassination), Lew Wallace, General Grant, Sam Clemens, Nikolai Tesla, and George M. Cohen to name only a few of the lives that I've stumbled across when researching only one of the above names at a time.
Of course, in keeping with this thread, you would have to say the area where Booth was supposedly killed. I believe that he was supposed to have gotten away and lived out his life in Texas. There was then a mummified corpse of that alleged John Wilkes Booth that made the rounds of carnivals and side shows for many years.
I guess he and Jesse James met up with Billy the Kid and holed up down in Texas for a few years. There are alot of Texans who might not reject the heritage of some or all of those folks, even today (I'm safe in saying that as I'm a native born Texan, though I now live in Tennessee).
By the way, the photo on your about page is a dead link.
the far left is the .41 Colt Short and the next is the .41 Colt Long.
Do you think that there was such a variety of cartridges to fit certain purposes, the way we have numerous different loadings of a single cartridge today? Although it may not be the best example, the multiplicity of loads for the 12 Ga, as opposed to the popularity of 16 and 14 Ga guns (What my Great Grandfather hunted with) Did cartridges tend to be more or less proprietary then?
My thoughts,exactly. Does the N.Y. Times reporter think Matt Dillon of "Gunsmoke" TV fame was a real western hero?
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