British Writer Shoots Holes in the Legend of a Gunslinging Billy the Kid

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —  His name wasn’t really Billy, and he wasn’t “The Kid.”

He didn’t seek vengeance for his fallen mentor, and he wasn’t a champion of the downtrodden during one of New Mexico’s bloodiest conflicts, the Lincoln County War (1878-1881).

Much of what people hear about Billy the Kid is wrong. And, says British writer Frederick Nolan, much of that bad information can be traced back to one source--a book published the year after Billy was killed. It was partially written by the man who shot him, Sheriff Pat Garrett.

“Pat F. Garrett’s the Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid” has been reissued in an annotated format by the University of Oklahoma Press.

It’s now two books in one--schismatic, self-lacerating, funny, thanks to Nolan, who has been tracking Billy the Kid, or BTK, for almost 50 years.

On one side of the page is the original rambling, flowery yarn mostly ghostwritten for Garrett in 1882 by former Roswell postmaster Marshall Ashmun “Ash” Upson. Reminiscent of a W.C. Fields narrative style, it intersperses ill-fitting quotes from Tennyson, Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott in a Wild West literary butchery worthy of the war.

Right beside it on the other half of the page are the austere, biting corrections of the exasperated Nolan.

“Frankly, I don’t think Garrett’s book is a worthwhile document at all,” Nolan said by phone from his home in Chalfont St. Giles, between London and Oxford. Garrett’s version of Billy’s death “may have been the biggest lie of all,” he says.

But you can’t just read Nolan’s half of the book; both halves are needed to make sense of nonsense. It’s a fine kettle of pickles he’s gotten himself into.

Nolan’s BTK journey began in the 1950s as he scoured the London phone book for people named Tunstall who might be related to the young Englishman whose murder started it all. Since then, Nolan has written several books about the conflict.

John Henry Tunstall, who had overseen his father’s business in British Columbia, headed south seeking new opportunities around 1876. In Lincoln County, which then nearly filled the southeastern quadrant of New Mexico Territory, Tunstall found a vulnerable monopoly supplying beef to the Mescalero Apaches and offered what he thought would be healthy competition.

It turned out to be unhealthy--for him.

Tunstall, with BTK among his employees, was up against the Santa Fe Ring, which ran the territorial government. The ring was headed by U.S. Atty. Thomas B. Catron, an investor in the monopoly. After it became clear that legal machinations wouldn’t shut him down, Tunstall was shot in 1878.

Among the Tunstalls whom Nolan found listed in London in 1955 was Tunstall’s sister, Mabel, then in her mid-80s, who had her brother’s documents, diaries and voluminous correspondence. Tunstall had sent home dozens of pages every week.

In all that, Nolan says, “not one mention of our Bill; no, not one.”

The scraggly lad--born Henry McCarty, later called Henry Antrim, then Billy Bonney--has been romanticized beyond all recognition. Garrett’s shooting him certainly did not hurt BTK’s image, either.

Nolan has a theory about how Garrett knew where to find and kill BTK on July 14, 1881, in Ft. Sumner.

Pete Maxwell, scion of the vast Maxwell Land Grant dynasty and brother-protector of Paulita Maxwell, did not want his 17-year-old sister eloping to Mexico with Billy, Nolan suggests.

“The whole relationship was utterly unacceptable, and Maxwell determined a way to ensure that it did not continue. He sent a messenger to Garrett telling him where the Kid was,” Nolan says in his introduction.

The fugitive BTK had killed two Garrett deputies three months earlier while escaping from the Lincoln lockup.

Nolan identifies myths traceable to or perpetrated by the Upson-Garrett collaboration, including:

* The name Billy the Kid. “Billy” was an alias, and BTK objected to being called “the Kid,” as though he were the only one.

* Early killings. Nolan suggests that several killings reported by Upson are fiction, filling blank spots in BTK’s life.

* Mentor loyalty. Tunstall was 24 when he died, not the graying father figure often portrayed. A more likely motive for BTK’s violence was the loss of income Tunstall’s death meant for him.

* BTK’s supposed leadership of the gunslinging “Regulators.”

* Birth. Billy was given Upson’s own birthday, Nov. 23, and an arbitrary birthplace, New York, for which there was no documentation.

“Little could he [Upson] have realized how firmly these myths would fix themselves in the public consciousness,” Nolan writes.

All those books and movies . . . all those actors who played Billy--Johnny Mack Brown, Paul Newman, Kris Kristofferson, Peter Deuel, Emilio Estevez, Val Kilmer. . . .

While Upson wrote most of the book, Garrett dictated the calmer final chapters and commented on criticism against him for shooting Billy in Maxwell’s darkened bedroom.

“It is said that Garrett did not give the Kid a fair show,” Garrett wrote.

The book, he hoped, would improve his image and yield some of the bounty that other writers enjoyed from BTK dime novels. But the abuse only intensified, Nolan says.

Loren D. Estleman, whose novel “Journey of the Dead” deals with the post-BTK haunting of Pat Garrett, says there was a real effort to elevate Billy to mythological status.

“There’s everything to be celebrated about an attempt to set the record straight,” Estleman said of Nolan’s effort.

The Lincoln County War was a small-time business dispute that got out of hand because of ethnic and political bigotry, still-smoldering Civil War hatreds, macho vanity, greed and liquor.

“The Lincoln County War proved nothing and established nothing,” Nolan says. “Practically everyone who shouldered arms ended up either dead or dead broke.”

But it did light a path toward better law enforcement.

When the war started in 1878, Nolan said, “Lincoln County was as big as Ireland, and it had one sheriff [William Brady], and he was a drunk.”

Once they cut Lincoln County into several smaller counties, it began “to make social sense and become civilized,” he said.