Scholar George Matthews Discusses The Life & Legend Of Billy The Kid

Billy the Kid is quite possibly the most popular outlaw of the Old West. From his time as a regulator fighting against the corrupt Santa Fe Ring to his daring (and murderous) escape from the Lincoln County, NM, jail to his eventual death at the age of 21, Billy the Kid’s life and legend has remained a steadfast topic for academics and Hollywood alike. Years of research by scholar George Matthews culminated in the book, Billy the Kid: The Life Behind the Legend, which presents the first full-picture view of who Billy the Kid was before and during his life on the run. Matthews discussed his book on the latest episode of “Writing the West” podcast.  

Transcript

Cowboys & Indians: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your career up until now?

Matthews: Well, for a long time I was a director of athletics and a teacher of history. I have two master of arts degrees, one in physical education and one in history. My Master of Arts degree in history is from New Mexico State University and I've written four previous books and Billy [the Kid]. [Billy the Kid: The Life Behind the Legend] is my fifth.

C&I: What is your first memory of Billy the Kid? 

Matthews: Almost everyone else: TV. My earliest recollections were Clu Gulager playing Billy the Kid. And of course, coming out to New Mexico a long time ago, Lincoln, New Mexico, is the site of the Lincoln County War. So, if you live in New Mexico, you got to know about Billy the Kid.

C&I: What about his life stood out to you?

Matthews: He stands out because he's not your typical outlaw really. He was a horse and cattle thief as far as being an outlaw goes. [There was] his involvement in the Lincoln County War with the killings that went on both sides. Of course, that was considered a war. And Billy was indicted for the killings for the assassination of Sheriff William Brady. But what makes Bill unique is that his dealings with the governor of New Mexico and then of course his great escape. After the Lincoln County War, the new governor of the territory, Lew Wallace, granted amnesty to everyone involved in the Lincoln County War except for those who had already been indicted. So, Billy had already been indicted as well as some others for the assassination of William Brady. Then Lew Wallace promised Billy a pardon, even though he'd been indicted. Billy then testified against a Santa Fe Ring member who had been involved in the killing of an attorney in Lincoln. And that testimony should have given Billy that pardon. Billy did testify, but then the governor failed to follow through with his pardon. Billy is convicted and sentenced to hang by a judge back in Lincoln. And Billy then makes this tremendous dramatic escape from the Lincoln jail by killing two deputies. If he had not escaped, we would never have heard of Billy the Kid.

C&I: Billy’s story rings true in that American ideal of Man wronged by the system. Were people in his own time sympathetic to that?

Matthews: Absolutely sympathetic. He was admired by almost everyone except for those who were members of the Santa Fe Ring. That's most of the people in Lincoln County. The Hispanics in Lincoln County adored Billy, and he often said that to the governor, Lew Wallace, “You can ask any of my friends in Lincoln County for as far as my character goes.” When he was negotiating for his, pardon, Lew Wallace was probably then influenced by the Santa Fe Ring who really had control of the judicial system, the political system, the media, the newspapers. They were almost all Santa Fe Ring affiliates. Billy didn't rob banks stagecoaches and didn't kill people just for the fun of it, like other outlaws like Jesse James. So, in the traditional sense, he really wasn't an outlaw but was wronged by the system. And you could say, I think that’s what makes Billy unique is that most people or a lot of people consider him a martyr for personal freedom. I think that's what makes him an American icon.

C&I: Did his eventual killing at the hands of Pat Garrett, somebody who he at one point was friends with, solidify his legendary status at that point?

Matthews: Oh, absolutely. No question about it. I might say as far as Pat Garrett being a friend of Billy, he was not a good friend of Billy. He was an acquaintance. They had both been in Fort Sumner, that's where they met. Pat Garrett at the time was a bartender in Fort Sumner. When Billy met him, Billy was much closer friends with his fellow regulators than he was with Pat Garrett. They did know each other and that certainly has become part of the legend.

C&I: You’ve done such a great amount of research into Billy for this book, and one of the things that stood out to me was that, for the first time, have this true full image of him as a person from his early upbringing. And there's so much about his mother and his early life in this book and before we ever get to New Mexico. Now that you've been able to assemble that kind of real three-dimensional view of Billy the Kid as a person, how would you describe him to somebody who's never met him before?

Matthews: Young, obviously, [having] died at 21 years of age. Great sense of humor. I think that was his greatest attribute. He was a ladies’ man, no doubt about that. Paulita Maxwell in Fort Sunner in the 1920s would say that she wasn't in love with Billy, but she sure liked him a lot and that he had girls all along the Pecos River. He was charismatic. He was considered handsome at the time by people and with his buck teeth appearance was just one facial deficiency you'd say, but didn't seem to be a problem at the time. Gregarious, outgoing, a party guy who loved to sing and dance. 

C&I: Had Billy been given different circumstances, he probably would have been successful in a lot of different ventures. After doing so much research about him and his life, how much of what happened to him would you say was a result of the circumstances that he found himself in?

Matthews: No question. One hundred percent. Billy came to Santa Fe, which is where he learned Spanish, and then moved to Silver City, New Mexico. He went to school there. He arrived there when he was 12 years old in March of 1873. He was involved as an accessory to a robbery in Silver City, and was jailed. He escaped through the chimney of the jail instead of standing trial. If he'd had stayed in Silver City and stood trial for accessory to robbery, he probably would've been cleared or given some sort of a light sentence. And he probably would've gone on all the other of his fellow students in Silver City, who were all very successful in life and never became outlaws. And I think Billy would've done the same.

C&I: Was there any reason that Billy had such a strong sense of self-preservation?

Matthews: I think it was a matter of fact that he was light, agile, and athletic. He was 15 years old and thought, “I don't want to be in jail.” So, instead of standing trial, he got scared and left the situation.

C&I: Like everybody else at his time and his age, fear probably drove some of those decision making.

Matthews: Of course. His escape from the Lincoln jail was that he had been sentenced to hang. He knew what was coming. No choice there. You either escape or you get hanged.

C&I: What are some of the new primary materials that have been found about Billy that helped to make this book possible?

Matthews: A book was written on Juan Patron, who was a resident of Lincoln and the speaker of the House of Representatives in New Mexico that was involved in the Lincoln County War. The author of that book found a document that Juan Patron submitted to the state of New Mexico to be reimbursed for jailing Billy the Kid. Billy the Kid was put in Juan patron's home, and that's where he was serenaded by the senioritas and the people in Lincoln. That's part of his legend, which happens to be true, by the way.

That document for reimbursement tells that he had “Billy Bonney” in his house for 27 days. And we know that he was there during that time and we know he was jailed with his buddy, Tom Fowler, who was also part of that reimbursement document. 

There’s another book on the Presbyterian minister in Lincoln, Taylor Eley. His diary about the Lincoln County War sheds a great deal of information on Billy. It said that Billy used to come to Presbyterian Church services where he would sing accompanied by piano. 

I realized that there are still a lot of unanswered questions, and I decided that the great unknown about Billy was where he was born, his mother, and how they got to Indiana. So I decided to research the history of Irish immigration and that revealed a great deal of information. And that's some of the new information in the book. 

C&I: A vast majority of the first section of the book is about Billy's mother, who is interesting because so many of her circumstances were a result of the time and the place in which she lived, how Irish women were treated, or what types of work they found when they came to America. What were some of the surprises in the genealogical research you did?

Matthews: The amount of material that's available. Catherine McCarty was Billy's mother. She was an Irish immigrant. And when I began the research into the history of Irish immigration, to my surprise, I discovered that the Great Irish Potato Famine between 1845 and 1855. And with hindsight, that is accurate, but at the time, one year potato famines were common in Ireland. So, in the 1820s, you'd have an 1825 potato famine, but the next year everything was fine. Then in 1832, you'd have another one, and next year was fine. In 1845, there was another one year famine.

Eighteen forty-six is when Catherine McCarty immigrated from Ireland to the United States. And at the time, she was not coming because of the Great Irish Potato Famine. She was coming to better herself. She was not Catholic, which everybody assumes all Irish immigrants were. And the document that's available to researchers says Catherine McCarty came to America in 1846 when she was 17 years old. The ship's passenger list shows all the Irish immigrants with their ages and their occupations that they're going to be when they come to America. Every man was coming to America to be a laborer. Every woman was coming to America to be a domestic servant. That's critical in knowing what Billy's mother was going to be when she came to the United States. And the Irish Immigration Society of New York was telling Irish immigrants in 1846 not to stay in New York City or any other East Coast city, but to take the Erie Canal and go to the interior cities of Indianapolis, Cleveland, and Chicago. That information tells us how she got to Indianapolis. That's all new information and critical to how she got to Indianapolis.

C&I: When you were setting out to write this book and you wanted to focus more on his mother and her arrival and how Billy got to New Mexico and all of the different stops along the way, was it kind of like a geographic hunt or did you have a sense of the overall trajectory? 

Matthews: We knew that Billy was in Indianapolis as a young child. We knew that he went to Wichita, Kansas, and we knew he came to New Mexico, first to Santa Fe and then Silver City and then Lincoln County. So we knew that kind of geographical history. What we didn't know was exactly when and how he got to those different places. The sheriff in Silver City that arrested Billy the first time said that he was born in Anderson, Indiana, in an interview in 1902. And that's been largely neglected by a lot of researchers. I felt that if I could find out where Billy the Kid's mother was when he was born, that would pretty much tell us where he was born. The research into the details were important more so than the geographical trail.

C&I: Why has there been a delay in uncovering some of these new documents? Is there anything that you've found that's really held some of that research back before now?

Matthews: The research peeling back the layers of legend began in the 1950s. There have been a lot of new books coming out in recent years that have shed a lot more light on Billy the Kid. The first real new documentation occurred in the 1950s with the discovery of a marriage certificate in Santa Fe between Billy's mother and William Henry Antrim, and that had not been known before. So all the legends created by Walter Noble Burns in his book in 1925 slowly began to be peeled away starting in the 1950s. And then the letters and diaries that people found, court records, military records for all those other books on other people involved in Lincoln County — Billy's contemporaries — added to the new information. What I've done is add further information based upon research. I picked two areas. One was Irish immigration, which revealed a tremendous amount of Billy's mother, which in turn gave a lot of information about Billy, of course. Billy was known to be a reader of dime novels, so I decided to research what dime novels, for example, would Billy have been reading at time and a great deal of new information surfaced from researching all the primary documents that other people had talked about earlier. And there were some discrepancies. So that helped my research as well.

C&I: When you undertake a research project of, not only this magnitude, but also on a topic that's so well known, you almost have to start at the old research because some of that might need to be corrected along the way.

Matthews: Absolutely. There's no question of that. [Here is] one example of a legend that needed to be corrected: Walter Noble Burns in his book said that, during the Lincoln County War, when Billy and the regulators were in the McSweeney’s house and under siege, that Susan McSweeney played the Star Spangled Banner and Billy beat with the butt of his pistol on some hardwood to the tune. Susan McSweeney later refuted all of that, and it turned out that Walter Noble Burns made it up. Stuff like that was a pleasure to really shed new light on the real story of what happened with Billy.

C&I: Have there been any new photos of Billy the Kid, aside from the original tintype?

Matthews: There's only one original, authenticated photo of Billy the Kid. All the new ones — the croquet Billy — has not been authenticated. None of the others have been authenticated. Everyone wants there to be another photograph, of course. There are several Billy the Kid Facebook groups, and everybody's always submitting new photographs of Billy. He would've been a very popular subject, I guess. At any rate, there's only one. That's the bottom line. 

C&I: You have the original, authenticated image in your book. Is there anything that we can divulge from that photo that might not be obvious to a passerby?

Matthews: Actually, Paulita Maxwell, his sweetheart in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, said she hated it. She said it did not portray Billy [as he was] at all, and that he was much better looking in that photo, and he never dressed that way. He was always well dressed. So in her view, that image gives a completely distorted image of Billy the Kid. That was posed to give the idea that Billy was an outlaw. It does not reveal anything about Billy.

The photo, of course, when it was taken, was a reversed image. So when you see the original photo, and it hasn't been reversed to be a true photograph, it shows him being left-handed and that gave rise to the myth that he was left-handed. And of course, in Paul Newman's movie, the left-handed gunfighter contributed to that legend, but he was not left-handed, and you needed to reverse that photograph.

C&I: Do any of the portrayals of Billy the Kid — Paul Newman, Val Kilmer, Emilio Estevez – hit the mark?

Matthews: Young Guns certainly is the best. There is no question. Emilio Estevez did the best job of capturing the personality of Billy the Kid. Paul Newman was a great actor and he captured what he was told to capture in the way of Billy the Kid, which was totally inaccurate. Val Kilmer and others are fine actors and did good jobs. But as far as actually portraying Billy the Kid as he was in true life, Emilio Estevez did the best job.

C&I: New Mexico plays such a large role in Billy's legend. How gratifying has it been for you as a researcher to be in those places where Billy once traveled?

Matthews: Anyone who's interested in Billy the Kid needs to visit Lincoln, New Mexico. It's a state historic site. The building from Billy the Kid's escape is still there. You can walk the stairs up to the jail where Billy was held in Lincoln, where he made his great escape. Much of the landscape in New Mexico is largely intact from his days. You can go hike into the site where John Henry Tunstall was murdered, for example.

You cannot write a Billy the Kid book or understand Billy the Kid without visiting Lincoln County, New Mexico. That's just not possible. You can read all you want, but when you walk up those stairs, for example, and know where Deputy Bell was running down for his life, that's a special experience. And it was critical. It gave me a much greater understanding for writing the book. I dedicated the book to Frederick Nolan, and he always regretted that he never had the opportunity to come to New Mexico for an extended period of time to do research on Billy. He had great researchers who did research for him, but he always regretted that. And that was a great advantage I had. He set the gold standard for Billy the Kid research, but to be able to actually hike and bike and walk in those buildings, it really gives you a better sense of building the Kid's history.

C&I: Has there been a spot that for you was just the landmark place in your Billy the Kid travels?

Matthews: I mentioned the Tunstall murder site. That's certainly a spot that needs to be visited. There's the Whiskey Trail, for example, that goes from Lincoln over to the Ruidoso Valley. You can still walk that. There's Fort Stanton in New Mexico, and you can hike and bike from Fort Stanton to Lincoln, which Billy did many times. People take horseback rides from Lincoln out to Fort Stanton today. The landscape has obviously changed, but there's a lot still intact. I might add that Billy is buried in Fort Sumner. Anyone interested in Billy the Kid needs to visit Fort Sumner. Another site is Silver City, New Mexico, where he went to school.

C&I: Why has Billy the kid just remained such an icon in that area?

Matthews: I think Billy is unique in his role because he was wronged by the system. His dealings with the governor of New Mexico makes him totally different. And then you add on to that, his dramatic escape from the Lincoln County jail and then his killing by Sheriff Pat Garrett. There's no other outlaw that fits those criteria. It truly makes Billy unique. And of course, Billy was so well liked by everyone in New Mexico everywhere he went. And when Walter Noble Burns published his book in 1925, it further enhanced Billy's legend. There's probably more writing about Billy the Kid as an American icon than George Washington.