William H. Bonney died on July 14, 1881, shot in the dark by Sheriff Pat Garrett in a bedroom in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. He was twenty-one years old. He had killed at least four men, possibly eight, depending on which accounts you believe. He had escaped from jail twice, the second time killing two deputies in the process. He had been the subject of newspaper stories across the country, most of them wildly inaccurate, all of them riveting. He had also been dead for less than a year when the first dime novel about him appeared. America could not stop thinking about Billy the Kid before he was buried, and it has not stopped since.

He Was Not From the West He Was From New York

Billy the Kid was born Henry McCarty in the Irish slums of New York City, probably in 1859. His mother Catherine was an Irish immigrant who moved the family west after her first husband died. She settled in Silver City, New Mexico, married a man named William Antrim, and died of tuberculosis when Henry was fourteen. The boy who would become Billy the Kid was orphaned, alone, and living in a frontier territory where the law was whatever the nearest man with a gun said it was. Western history scholars at the University of New Mexico have documented that the Lincoln County War, the conflict that made Billy famous, was essentially a business dispute between two groups of wealthy ranchers fighting for economic control of the region. Billy picked a side, the Tunstall-McSween faction, because John Tunstall was the first adult who treated him decently. When Tunstall was murdered by men aligned with the rival Murphy-Dolan faction in February 1878, Billy declared vengeance. He was eighteen. He spent the next three years in a guerrilla conflict that produced more corpses than convictions.

He Escaped From the Lincoln County Courthouse and Nobody Knows How

On April 28, 1881, Billy the Kid was being held in the Lincoln County Courthouse under sentence of death. He was shackled hand and foot. Two armed deputies guarded him. Somehow, he obtained a gun, shot both deputies, freed himself from his chains, walked onto the balcony of the courthouse, and rode out of town on a stolen horse. Research from the Lincoln County Heritage Trust has compiled multiple theories about how he obtained the weapon: hidden by an accomplice in the outhouse, smuggled by a sympathetic local, or taken from Deputy James Bell during a struggle on the stairs. The truth has been debated for over a century and will likely never be resolved. What is not debated is that Billy walked out of a building where he was supposed to die, killed the men who were supposed to watch him die, and disappeared into the New Mexico landscape with the entire territory looking for him. He lasted seventy-two more days before Garrett found him in Pete Maxwell's bedroom.

He Became a Legend Because America Needed One

There was nothing objectively admirable about Billy the Kid's life. He killed people. He stole cattle. He participated in a war that was about money, not justice. But America in the 1880s was a nation trying to mythologize its own expansion, and it needed characters who embodied the idea that the West was a place where the old rules did not apply. Cultural historians at Yale University's Western Americana Collection have analyzed the Billy the Kid mythology and found that it follows the same structural pattern as Robin Hood, Jesse James, and Ned Kelly: a young man of modest origins defies corrupt authority, lives by his own code, and dies young enough to avoid the complications of growing old. The myth requires an early death because old outlaws become boring. Dead ones become whatever the storyteller needs them to be. Over forty films have been made about Billy the Kid. Pat Garrett himself wrote a book about killing him, then was murdered under mysterious circumstances twenty-seven years later. The gun that Garrett used to shoot Billy sold at auction for over six million dollars. A kid from the New York slums who died in a dark room in New Mexico at twenty-one became one of the most famous Americans who ever lived. That says less about Billy than it does about what America chooses to remember.