Billy, the Missionary, and Me-- i

The only known picture of  Billy the Kid

Okay, it's a stretch, but what the heck. I'm lovin' it. 

Once upon a time, in true Western lore, Sheriff Pat Garrett plugged Billy the Kid, a notorious outlaw/gunfighter, after hunting him down in Fort Sumner, NM. Billy'd been tried and convicted for the murder of a man (his sixth, I think) and was sentenced to hang when he escaped from jail and killed two more men--lawmen--on his way out the door. The night he died, the Kid was just a kid--only 21 years ago.

He carried the burden of a perfectly awful childhood, as you can imagine. That he went bad couldn't have been entirely unpredictable. He was born and baptized as Henry McCarty in New York City in 1859, where he was orphaned at 13. He was 16 when he was arrested for the first time--for stealing food. Then, just ten days later, he robbed a Chinese laundry, was tossed in jail but escaped two days later. 

Out west, he ran with cattle rustlers, killed a blacksmith, and became a wanted man, a fugitive, a man regarded by the law as a dangerous criminal. Consider him the quintessential Western tough guy, even bad tough guy. The problem is, somehow we like tough guys, maybe especially if they're just tough kids, like Billy was. 

Here's part of the stretch I'm talking about. Billy didn't really die. He went on to live in the Western lore of dime novels. Just exactly how many people today know the Billy the Kid story is a good question, but just about everybody has heard the name. Billy's yet another Wyatt Earp or Will Bill, one of those, something of an icon. Human beings can keel over right quick, but icons don't die so easily.

What's more, some of that icon's fans didn't really want him to be gone either. Reports of his death were, so people argued, both premature and exaggerated. The day after Garrett shot him, they put his kid body in the ground. What's more, Billy was shot and killed in a room so dark Sheriff Garrett recognized him only by his voice, filled the Kid with lead before he even had a good look at who'd just then walked through the door. 

The myth of the Kid lived on, but so did the mythical Billy, two or three or four of them, in fact. One of his postmortem manifestations lived around Zuni, NM, a great place to hide out since hardly anyone other than the Zuni themselves ever visited in the late 19th century. Just down the road sits a little Mormon town name Ramah, a place full of religious ranchers who stuck to themselves, as Mormons did back then. If you had to choose a place to go incognito in the earliest years of the 20th century, out there in the New Mexico desert between Zuni and Ramah wouldn't have been a bad choice.

(To be continued.)

Corn Mountain, Zuni, NM