BILLY THE KID book review

The Endless Ride.

By Michael Wallis.
Illustrated. 328 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $25.95.
Book Review That Billy the Kid actually existed may surprise many today — say, the
viewers of “The Simpsons.” In 2002, the show’s Halloween special depicted his corpse
clawing out of his grave to lead a reign of terror at the head of the Hole in the Ground
Gang, a zombie posse that included the Sundance Kid, Frank and Jesse James, and a
squat carcass whom Billy introduced as “the most evil German of all time ... Kaiser
Wilhelm.” Available at: TheOldWestGallery.Com
Wilhelm the first or second? Billy didn’t say. But it’s best not to worry about details. This
was a satire — not of historical figures but of their cinematic versions. A quick search of
the Internet Movie Database shows scores of films and television programs about Billy
the Kid, the first appearing in 1911. His mass-entertainment clone has been with us since
19th-century dime novels, existing so independently of history that he is now free to go
on a zombie rampage alongside a kaiser in a pointy Prussian helmet.
In one sense, this is a good thing for Michael Wallis, the author of a new biography,
“Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride” — he needn’t worry about name recognition. But if all
those westerns have made Billy famous, they have also trivialized him. The mythical Kid
overshadows his real progenitor in American culture; some scholars even argue that the
outlaws of fiction and folklore are more significant than those of history. That leaves a
serious question hanging over Wallis’s book: What’s so important about the real Billy the
Kid?
This conundrum has befuddled observers ever since Billy roamed the West (mostly on
other people’s horses). In early 1879, for example, Lew Wallace, the governor of the New
Mexico Territory (and later the author of “Ben-Hur”), wrote to Secretary of the Interior
Carl Schurz from the town of Lincoln. “A precious specimen named {lsquo}The Kid,’
whom the sheriff is holding here in the Plaza, as it is called, is the object of tender
regard,” he marveled. “I heard singing and music the other night; going to the door I
found the minstrels of the village actually serenading the fellow in his prison.”
Schurz surely found this “tender regard” less surprising. As a United States senator from
Missouri, he had attacked that state’s partisan Democratic press for celebrating the
James-Younger gang as “rather a nice and desirable set of fellows.” Missouri, however,
was very different from New Mexico. Available at: TheOldWestGallery.Com
Context matters to Wallis; for the most part, context is all he has to work with. He
carefully follows the early life of his subject — who had nothing but early life — and
concludes that little can be known for certain. Confusion surrounds even the boy’s name.
“I am called Kid Antrim,” he explained to Governor Wallace in 1879, “but Antrim is my
stepfather’s name.” By then he was actually calling himself William Bonney. Not until
December 1880, shortly before his death, did the newspapers name him Billy the Kid.
Particular historical circumstances created the short-lived yet eternal Kid, and Wallis, the
author of “Route 66,” is best when recounting them. Even in an era notorious for graft,
New Mexico seemed unusually corrupt. The Santa Fe Ring, run by the United States
attorney Tom Catron, dominated its business and politics. Here, as across the country, a
generation of men had emerged out of the Civil War inured to bloodshed and equipped
with repeating firearms. Violence swept the high plains, dry valleys and hard mountains
— a bowlegged landscape, rugged and broken, populated by warring factions of Hispanic
herders, Anglo ranchers and Apaches.
In 1878, the Kid fought in the Lincoln County War, a bloody struggle for control of a
quarter of New Mexico. As a rank-and-file gunman, he opposed the House, an
organization tied to the Santa Fe Ring that monopolized local commerce and public
offices. The war climaxed in a five-day battle in the town of Lincoln; when fighters for
the House set fire to the last stronghold of the Kid’s faction, he escaped the flames into
the night. Available at: TheOldWestGallery.Com
The House’s victory led only to further anarchy. One very small element in that chaos
was this soft-faced young man with delicate little hands and feet. When President
Rutherford B. Hayes dispatched Wallace to restore order, the Kid wrote to the new
governor, offering to testify against some of the killers who stalked the territory. At a
secret late-night meeting, he and Wallace agreed to a deal, and he surrendered to enjoy
his serenades. Then he learned that he faced prosecution for murder despite his
cooperation, so he slipped away and led a short but famous career as Billy the Kid,
livestock thief and fugitive.
The Kid was undoubtedly an appealing figure. When Sheriff Pat Garrett captured him, a
reporter noticed Billy’s insouciance. “What’s the use of looking on the gloomy side of
everything?” said the Kid, who faced execution. “The laugh’s on me this time.” His
exploits were often truly daring, especially his escape shortly before his scheduled
hanging, leaving his two guards dead.
Available at: TheOldWestGallery.Com
Wallis’s account, though solidly reliable, is not always so compelling. He sometimes
steps on his own storytelling, referring to events he has yet to narrate and garbling what
should be dramatic scenes. He attempts to add flavor with goldurn-it, get-along-little-
dogie lingo, turning a hanging into “a neck stretching,” shouts into “hollers” and
murderers into “man-killers.” A heavy salting of clichés proves at least as distracting;
in this book, a “leader of the pack” who “called the shots” might bully “working stiffs”
on “the straight and narrow.”
This is particularly disappointing because Wallis offers limited compensation for lapses
in style or narrative verve, despite his desire to lift the Kid above the level of trivia. He
writes in his introduction that he hopes to “shed a different and fresher light” on Billy. It’s
an admirable ambition, but it demands original research or interpretation, preferably both.
Not much of either appears here. The endnotes cite relatively few primary sources,
referring mostly to recent works, as well as to interviews — unusual in a book on the
19th century — with writers, scholars and the exhibit coordinator at the Lincoln State
Monument. He mentions the historian Richard Maxwell Brown, who situates the Kid in a
systematic analysis of frontier violence, but does not critique or add to his work.
A synthesis, of course, can be useful. But the question remains: What made the historical
Billy significant? Something in his life elevated him to a place where myth could take
hold of him. Wallis, following other writers, points to Billy’s status among Hispanic New
Mexicans as a symbol of resistance to “the Anglo establishment.” The Kid literally spoke
their language — right up to the moment in 1881 when he encountered Garrett in a
darkened room and, peering at a dim shape, asked, âQuien es?” Garrett raised his
revolver and fired.
âQuien es? — “Who is it?” The question naturally delights the Kid’s biographers. It
might best be asked of the native New Mexicans who found meaning in his lawless life,
whose sympathy made him dangerous. But here, as in most accounts, they remain largely
faceless, their society unexamined.
It seems fitting that Hispanics, having adopted the Kid as their champion, should return
him to Anglo culture as its own folk hero. On the slab of frontier where he killed and
died, the many elements of American society met in raw, unmediated conflict. In this
“collision of histories” (to use Edward Countryman’s phrase), each absorbed something
from the others — including Billy the Kid. To understand him is to glimpse something of
the making of modern America Available at: TheOldWestGallery.Com