I don't remember when I first discovered that my childhood namesake wasn't actually a William, Bill or Billy after all. His real name was Henry McCarty and he was born exactly 100 years before me, in 1859.
William H. Bonney turns out to just be one of his many aliases, in a life in which fact and legend have competed ever since the man who reputedly shot him down, Sheriff Pat Garrett, co-authored a book with M.A. Upson called The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid. Then as now, whenever you hear the word authentic, you'll probably do well to assume it means just the opposite.
His story, or whatever version of it the teller chose to tell, has been the fodder for countless books, pulps, magazine stories, movies and television shows throughout the 20th century. King Vidor, Roy Rogers, Robert Taylor and Buster Crabbe were just a few of the film artists who brought their own interpretation to the myth in the early days of talkies. Not to mention Howard Hughes who made marketing history when he featured Jane Russell as The Kid's love interest in "The Outlaw".
Like every legend, time leads to revisionism and reinterpretation. Two of the more interesting later Billy the Kid films are Arthur Penn's "The Left Handed Gun" starring Paul Newman, and Sam Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" featuring Bob Dylan in a supporting role and writing his haunting song "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" for the soundtrack. Unfortunately for the Penn film, most scholars today seem to agree that Billy the Kid aka William Bonney aka Henry McCarty was actually right-handed!
This oversize children's book from 1958 really just used the excuse of featuring The Kid on the cover as a lure, as the content was chock-a-block with all kinds of other Western-iana.
Stereotypes like the Mexican bandito (above) and the savage Apache (below) are celebrated in both photographs and paintings within, but it was the fifties, after all!
Notorious outlaw or beloved folk hero?
The Kid and his exploits belong to a time gone by, and the mythic resonance that his story had for the imagination of generations of kids holds little purchase today, an analog story in a digital universe. But it was fun to come across this mid-century picture book dedicated to his exploits and a celebration of the Western genre.
william

