Few American lives have elicited
more tales, rumors, and folklores than that of Henry McCarty. I would go so far
as to say that of all the famous Americans who have lived such a short life
span—two meager decades—McCarty has the most amount of words written about him.
He perhaps has also influenced more authors than any other old west figure. And
despite all this, he remains one of the most elusive figures of the old west.
So who is Henry McCarty? History knows him as one Billy the Kid. The foremost
scholar of Billy the Kid, Frederick Nolan, claims “Few American lives have more
successfully resisted research than that of Billy the Kid.” (Nolan 3). Evidence
for this lies in the fact that The Kid did not receive serious scholarly attention
until nearly 100 years after his death.
Why
is that? What makes Billy the Kid so fascinating that for the better part of
the 20th century his life has resisted serious research and remained in the
mainstream arena of folklore and myth? No scholar of the Kid seems to have a
definitive answer to that question. It might simply be that facts are not as
exciting as the mysterious. Regardless, from the late 1950s to the present day
reliable research, scholarly articles and books have been written and new
historical documents uncovered. Granted, the mythos remains and makes for
wonderful movies and exciting novels but we now live in what should be
considered a more enlightened era with regard to our understanding of The Kid.
There
was a long period of time where scarcely a word was written or spoken about
Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County Wars. This span occurred between the death
of the infamous sheriff (Pat Garrett) who killed Billy the Kid in 1908 until 1925
when Harvey Fergusson raised the question in an American Mercury article, “Who remembers Billy the Kid?”
Apparently, the Kid’s reputation had faded and Fergusson wondered why (Nolan
295). All this would soon change in 1926 when Walter Noble Burns published The Saga of Billy the Kid, and the Kid would once again be thrust
into the limelight of folklore and myth. This was the very book that sparked
interest in the mind of a young boy who would later become the premier scholar
of Billy the Kid studies, Frederick Nolan. Moreover, Walter Noble Burns, with
his flamboyant style and highly exaggerated account of Billy the Kid, would
also influence a series of western writers of the early to mid twentieth
century. One in particular was a popular pulp fiction writer from Cross Plains , Texas
It is no secret to
Robert E. Howard aficionados that Howard had a serious interest in the Old
West. This interest became so predominant toward the latter years of his life
he shifted his writing career in the direction of publishing western stories
and even proclaimed in correspondence to August Derleth:
“I’m seriously contemplating
devoting all my time and efforts to western writing, abandoning all other forms
of work entirely; the older I get the more my thoughts and interests are drawn
back over the trails of the past; so much has been written, but there is so
much that should be written.” (Howard Letters
2: 372).
In studies about
Robert E. Howard’s western writing career there is no definitive time frame or
specific cause that pushed Howard in the direction of western tales. Howard had
written westerns in his earlier years and sporadically throughout his fantasy
and action adventure years, but what made him tell Derleth that he wanted to
devote all his time to western writing? There was likely no single factor or
date, rather a series of events that hinged upon at least one thing—Walter
Noble Burn’s book The Saga of Billy the
Kid.
Walter Noble Burns
was born October 24th, 1872. As a teenager he became a junior
reporter for the Louisville ,
KY New Mexico to interview various people who were still alive during the
Lincoln County Wars and the days of Billy the Kid. This research would ultimately
end up in Burns’ book The Saga of Billy
the Kid (from here on referred to as SBK).
SBK was the
definitive book about Billy the Kid’s life until the late 1950s and early 1960s
when scholars took pen in hand and began seriously researching the Lincoln
County Wars. Today SBK is considered nothing but a novel work on the Lincoln
County Wars. It has all but been dismissed as exaggerations, myths, and fun
folklore. Regardless, from 1926, the year SBK was published, to the early
1960s, Burns’ work set the tone for movies, western pulp stories, dime novels,
and even magazine articles about Billy the Kid.
When SBK was published it quickly
became a national best seller, rivaling the sales of other popular books of its day. In just a few short months Nolan
explains,
