West by Southwest Ernie Bulow

HOW MANY BILLY THE KIDS WERE THERE?

DEADLY GUNSLINGER LIVED IN RAMAH

George 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 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.

THE MOST FAMOUS PICTURE OF BILLY

Ernie Bulow

West by Southwest

by Ernie Bulow

Eventually, I found out there were more Billys. One of them in southern Colorado, Arthur Pond aka William Leroy was known as “the Kid.” A writer of “penny dreadfuls” named Richard Fox sensationalized him, a common practice of the day. “Penny Dreadfuls” are just what they sound like—cheap publications with sensational subject matter.

Now the “real” Billy’s biography is complicated beyond belief. While the range war he was part of was raging in central New Mexico he was apparently robbing stagecoaches in Colorado—except that might be the other one. He did, however meet Sister Blandina who is currently moving toward sainthood. That was in Trinidad, CO, or maybe Las Vegas, NM, or someplace up there.

At that time how could a man’s life be so complicated— and mysterious, especially if he were flesh and blood? Perhaps that is why so much has been written about him. Virtually nothing is provable, not even the supposed tintype image. For many years that picture was used to prove he was left handed, but recently it occurred to someone that tintypes reversed the image, so he was actually right handed.

The picture we have shows a goofy, rumpled, bucktoothed fellow of indeterminate age. I have long been of the opinion that there was, in fact, no actual person behind the name “Billy the Kid.” He was a construct. For our purposes the man called John Miller, from the Ramah area, is the most interesting. After his arrival there, he

became a major cattle owner and was a friend of the Zuni leader Jesus Eriacho, whose own story becomes legend. The biggest problem with this thread is that he arrived in the Ramah area almost immediately after being “killed” by Sheriff Pat Garret? It appears that he convinced the Mormons in the area of his identity with some extremely fine gunplay, something Billy was not known for. For example, shooting holes in a flying hat with all six bullets from his revolvBRUSHY BILL SISTER BLANDINA er. Who needs six holes in their hat? In recent times. They tried to prove his identity by matching Miller’s blood with some recovered from the site of Billy’s death, without success. But where did that blood come from? At Fort Summer there has been a movement to exhume his body without success. Is there really someone else in that grave? In the end, the whole thing is rather humorous, unless you are a true believCOMIC HELEN AIRY’S BOOK er. ON JOHN MILLER PAT GARRET, BILLY’S FRIEND