Author: David G. Thomas Publisher: ISBN: 9781952580024 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
This book is about Billy the Kid's trial for murder, and the events leading to that trial. The result of Billy's trial sealed his fate. And yet Billy's trial is the least written about, and until this book, the least known event of Billy's adult life. Prior biographies have provided extensive - and fascinating - details on Billy's life, but they supply only a few paragraphs on Billy's trial. Just the bare facts: time, place, names, result. Billy's trial the most important event in Billy's life. You may respond that his death is more important - it is in anyone's life! That is true, in an existential sense, but the events that lead to one's death at a particular place and time, the cause of one's death, override the importance of one's actual death. Those events are determinative. Without those events, one does not die then and there. If Billy had escaped death on July 14, 1881, and went on to live out more of his life, that escape and not his trial would probably be the most important event of Billy's life. The information presented here has been unknown until now. This book makes it possible to answer these previously unanswerable questions: Where was Billy captured? Where was Billy tried? What were the governing Territorial laws? What were the charges against Billy? Was there a trial transcript and what happened to it? What kind of defense did Billy present? Did Billy testify in his own defense? Did Billy have witnesses standing for him? Who testified against him for the prosecution? What was the jury like? What action by the trial judge virtually guaranteed his conviction? What legal grounds did he have to appeal his verdict? Was the trial fair? Supplementing the text are 132 photos, including many photos never published before.
Author: David G. Thomas Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform ISBN: 9781542404723 Category : Languages : en Pages : 154
Book Description
"Quien es?" The answer to this incautious question - "Who is it?" - was a bullet to the heart. That bullet -- fired by Lincoln County Sheriff Patrick F. Garrett from a .40-44 caliber single action Colt pistol -- ended the life of Billy the Kid, real name William Henry McCarty. But death - ordinarily so final - only fueled the public's fascination with Billy the Kid. What events led to Billy's killing? Was it inevitable? Was a woman involved? If so, who was she? Why has Billy's gravestone become the most famous - and most visited - Western death marker? Is Billy really buried in his grave? Is the grave in the right location? Is it true that Pat Garrett's first wife is buried in the same cemetery? Is Billy's girlfriend buried there also? The Fort Sumner cemetery where Billy's grave is located was once plowed for cultivation. Why? What town, seeking a profitable tourist attraction, tried to move Billy's body, using a phony relative to justify the action? These questions -- and many others - are answered in this book. Over 60 photos, including many historical photos never previously published.
Author: Robert M. Utley Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300216688 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 317
Book Description
Two famous 19th century outlaws from opposite sides of the world are brought to rollicking life in the acclaimed historian’s “marvelous dual biography” (Douglas Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior). The legendary exploits of Billy the Kid and Ned Kelly live on in the public imaginations of their respective countries, the United States and Australia. But the outlaws’ reputations are so mythologized, the truth of their lives has become obscure. In Wanted, Robert M. Utley reveals the true stories and parallel courses of the two notorious contemporaries who lived by the gun, were executed while still in their twenties, and remain compelling figures in the folklore of their homelands. Utley draws sharp portraits of both young men, offering insightful comparisons of their lives and legacies. Billy was a fun-loving sharpshooter who excelled at escape and lived on the run after indictment for his role in the Lincoln Country War. While Ned, raised in the bush by his Irish convict father, was driven by outrage against British colonial authority to steal cattle and sheep, kill three policemen, and rob banks for the benefit of impoverished Irish sympathizers. Recounting their exploits, differences, and shared fates, Utley illuminates the worlds in which they lived on opposite sides of the globe. “Robert M. Utley displays the gifts that have made him a storied interpreter of the nineteenth-century west.”—T. J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The First Tycoon
Author: Randy Russell Publisher: ISBN: 9780964447639 Category : Outlaws Languages : en Pages : 71
Book Description
During the late 1870s, the Lincoln County War raged in the southeastern part of the New Mexico Territory. The most notorious character in this saga was a young man called "Billy the Kid." Much has been written about his short, turbulent life & the part he played in this war. These stories have grown over time, obscuring factual information & resulting in a legend based on widely conflicting versions of his life & times. Born in New York City in 1859 as Henry McCarty, he was later to become known as "Billy the Kid." The historical debate has always centered around whether or not Billy the Kid was an unrepentant bandit or an impressionable teenager caught between powerful factions in a war in which he was destined to become the scapegoat. IN ADDITION TO THE STORY OF THE KID'S EXPLOITS IN THE LINCOLN COUNTY WAR...Contained in this book are copies of the original court documents which record the events which transpired during the Lincoln County War. The author discovered these documents in 1969 stored in a small, dusty cardboard box at the Dona Ana County Court Clerk's office in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where they had been misplaced since the 1881 trial.
Author: Michael Ondaatje Publisher: Vintage Canada ISBN: 0307370801 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 130
Book Description
Not a story about me through their eyes then. Find the beginning, the slight silver key to unlock it, to dig it out. Here then is a maze to begin, be in. (p. 20) Funny yet horrifying, improvisational yet highly distilled, unflinchingly violent yet tender and elegiac, Michael Ondaatje’s ground-breaking book The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a highly polished and self-aware lens focused on the era of one of the most mythologized anti-heroes of the American West. This revolutionary collage of poetry and prose, layered with photos, illustrations and “clippings,” astounded Canada and the world when it was first published in 1969. It earned then-little-known Ondaatje his first of several Governor General’s Awards and brazenly challenged the world’s notions of history and literature. Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid (aka William H. Bonney / Henry McCarty / Henry Antrim) is not the clichéd dimestore comicbook gunslinger later parodied within the pages of this book. Instead, he is a beautiful and dangerous chimera with a voice: driven and kinetic, he also yearns for blankness and rest. A poet and lover, possessing intelligence and sensory discernment far beyond his life’s 21 year allotment, he is also a resolute killer. His friend and nemesis is Sheriff Pat Garrett, who will go on to his own fame (or infamy) for Billy’s execution. Himself a web of contradictions, Ondaatje’s Garrett is “a sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane assassin sane” (p. 29) who has taught himself a language he’ll never use and has trained himself to be immune to intoxication. As the hero and anti-hero engage in the counterpoint that will lead to Billy’s predetermined death, they are joined by figures both real and imagined, including the homesteaders John and Sallie Chisum, Billy’s lover Angela D, and a passel of outlaws and lawmakers. The voices and images meld, joined by Ondaatje’s own, in a magnificent polyphonic dream of what it means to feel and think and freely act, knowing this breath is your last and you are about to be trapped by history. I am here with the range for everything corpuscle muscle hair hands that need the rub of metal those senses that that want to crash things with an axe that listen to deep buried veins in our palms those who move in dreams over your women night near you, every paw, the invisible hooves the mind’s invisible blackout the intricate never the body’s waiting rut. (p. 72)
Author: David G. Thomas
Author: Pat Floyd Garrett
Author: Bobby E. Hefner
Author: David G. Thomas
Author: David G. Thomas
Author: Theodore Taylor
Author: Jannay Valdez
Author: Robert M. Utley
Author: Randy Russell
Author: Michael Ondaatje