HOW MANY BILLY THE KIDS WERE THERE?
DEADLY GUNSLINGER LIVED IN RAMAH
G
eorge Armstrong Custer and William (Billy) Bonny are the most prolific subjects of all time for writers of books and magazines, dime novels and the like. The stuff would fill a library for each. Why? Because they became folk figures and their biographies became corrupted by all sorts of nonsense. Billy runs away with the honors in my opinion. Strangely enough, they were contemporaries. Jan Brunvand, famous for his books on Urban Legends (poodle in the microwave stuff), told me once that Billy the Kid wasn’t a folk figure because he didn’t fit the definition— stories didn’t spread orally among the people. I beg to differ. Billy the Kid, also call him William Bonny and a bunch of other names most certainly does fit the description. Why don’t we know if his real name was William Bonny, Henry Antrim, William McCarty, Henry McCarty or something else? We don’t know where he came from but it might have been New York. Did he kill his first man at age ten or twelve or something else? Did he even exist as an individual? He was a principle figure in the Lincoln County Range War in central New Mexico, around Ruidoso. Supposedly a cattle war over range, but complicated by a cabal of crooked lawyers in Santa Fe: but it is not clear what they had to do with it or why. What was he doing in Colorado? How could he have a girlfriend in Fort Sumner where the Navajo were held for four years? It’s not much of a place. I started hearing stories about John Miller when I first came to Gallup. My question has always been, why are the details of his life so confusing and debatable when he lived in the late 1900s when journalists were a dime a dozen and active everywhere? They were
THE MOST FAMOUS PICTURE OF BILLY especially interested in the goings on in New Mexico—the Lincoln County range war, a governor spending his
time writing the biblical novel Ben Hur, all sorts of Santa Fe corruption and the like.
