ACTUALLY, THE chalkboard said more. Someone already had edited "Elvis" and "JFK" into the pantheon of legendary gunslingers, pop singers and romantic poets who died too young. Though many of the symposium participants were dead serious about chasing Billy the Kid, there was a wild element to the crowd. After all, the symposium's subject was not a world-class historical figure, such as a Caesar or a Pharaoh or even a prime minister. He was a hell-raising cowboy adolescent, a good kid gone wrong, a screenwriter's dream. A great American archetype, in other words. Around the world today, Billy is America personified, a brazen cowboy who shoots first and asks questions eventually. America's image as a young, reckless country is personified to the world by cowboys, and the personification of "cowboy" is Billy the Kid.
But others see the wild boy we idolize as a juvenile delinquent. Frederick Nolan, a writer, researcher and Billy expert, came to the symposium from his native London. He put our Wild West heritage into the perfect world-view perspective. "In England," he said, "a cowboy is someone who comes to fix your tap and ends up wrecking your car."
But who cares about the world view? A little bit of Billy sleeps within all the citizens of a country whose leaders endorse an Oliver North or who still draw lines in sand. John Wayne is not best remembered for his work in detective movies. Ronald Reagan did not make a transition to politics straight out of the movies he made with chimps, but instead came to his leadership role from a job as host of Death Valley Days, a TV anthology of Old West stories. You still see Billy the Kid all over, in the faces of guitar players, fighter pilots and urban gangsters. Billy the Kid would approve of the current status of American handgun laws. We are all sons and daughters of Billy the Kid. "In the folklore of the nation," said Robert Utley, during his keynote speech, "Billy the Kid is a figure of towering significance."
The Billy the Kid of legend was a rebel, a lifelong opponent of constituted authority, a rugged individualist "who could not or would not conform," Utley said. He was the product of a particularly lawless time in American society, when the corruption of seemingly all public works--from Grant's White House to the bosses of New Mexico's Lincoln County--was endemic. Billy was capable of lethal, mostly remorseless violence, as were most of his fellow citizens. During his lifetime, the Kid's exploits were well known and often celebrated around the New Mexico territory. He was a living folk hero--at least a bit of a hero to the folks who knew him or knew of him, and he was often kept from danger by friends--often friends of Spanish descent. In death he has grown exponentially larger. BILLY ESCAPED from jail several times. His last break came in 1881, in Lincoln. He was hiding out in Fort Sumner, 100 miles away, when he was accidentally discovered by Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett, who had been tracking the Kid for months. They met in a dark room at about midnight. Billy never got a shot off.
His demise was celebrated, not mourned, in most of the early newspaper accounts of that event. Stories about the fatal confrontation, and retellings of Billy's own exploits with a six-gun, were reprinted in newspapers around the world. One of the local publications, the Santa Fe Weekly Democrat, captured the prevailing mood of polite society with this bit of prose, which ran a few days after Garrett's surprise attack at Fort Sumner: "No sooner had the floor caught the descending form, which had a pistol in one hand and a knife in the other, than there was a strong odor of brimstone in the air and a dark figure with the wings of a dragon, claws like a tiger, eyes like balls of fire and horns like a bison, hovered over the corpse for a moment and with a fiendish laugh said, `Ha, Ha! This is my meat!' and then sailed off through the window."
From demonic hellion, Billy's image has gradually evolved into something more angelic. Although the Billy legend began to flower immediately after his killing, the Kid spent the first phase of his afterlife as a bad guy. His image would not be rehabilitated until the times were right for the ascension of dark heroes.
By the middle part of this century, most of the popular Western-movie actors had had a chance to portray the Kid, including the decidedly nondemonic Roy Rogers and Buster Crabbe. By the 1950s and 1960s, Billy the Kid had become something of the hip antihero, a badly misunderstood, injustice-fighting hombre, the kind of guy that Kris Kristofferson, Paul Newman or Marlon Brando were likely to portray. The supernatural juvenile delinquent had become a sympathetic character, fodder for such Hollywood scramblings as The Left-Handed Gun, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Young Guns. Billy is one American hero who can be everything to everyone--and has been. The true facts of Billy's life, as presented at the symposium, show a boy well removed from the legend, a fact which does not devalue the importance of the legendary Billy one bit. "What people have agreed to believe about the facts," said Leon Metz, one of the symposium's faculty, "is as interesting as the facts themselves."
IT IS NOT FOR nothing that so much action in Hollywood Westerns is set in saloons. The citizens of the Old West drank often and drank hard. Then they would shoot one another. This is a problem for historians, one of many problems in assembling data from the era. Memories and accounts of the Old West were formed at a time when everybody was either roaring drunk, or sober but terrified that some drunk was going to start shooting at any minute. Alcohol-fueled horror--not a good atmosphere for accurate anecdote formation. Though historians place much faith in their tools--letters, documents, written or tape-recorded interviews with participants or friends and relatives of the participants, and ancient newspaper accounts of events of the day--doubt begins to creep in every time the reader is reminded of the booze 'n' buckshot context. On the topic of the Old West, historian Robert Utley's books are as close as the reader can get to gospel. His works include an analysis of the Lincoln County War (an extended shooting match between hired guns--the Kid among them--working for rival merchants in Lincoln, New Mexico), the life and times of George Armstrong Custer and, of course, the brilliant Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life, considered the current state of the art in Billy bios. It was not always so easy for would-be Billy followers to get at the Billy truth. The Kid's story has been told dozens of times, in degrees of accuracy tapering downward from Utley through Walter Noble Burns (The Saga of Billy the Kid, 1930) to Pat Garrett's ghostwritten book, published only a year after the sheriff killed the Kid in a dark bedroom in old Fort Sumner. Garrett's title says a lot: The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, the Noted Desperado of the Southwest, Whose Deeds of Daring and Blood Have Made His Name a Terror in New Mexico, Arizona and Northern Mexico. The Billy bibliography is rife with references to his beginnings, none particularly documentable. Typical of such guesstimates is Garrett's claim that Billy was born in New York City. He even claims to know Billy's birthday. That the birthday is the same as the birthday of Garrett's ghostwriter--a rambling journalist, printer, postmaster and drinker named Ashmun Upson--probably speaks to its authenticity. We do know that Billy the Kid, who used the surnames Bonney, Antrim and McCarty during his short and violent life, first appeared to history on March 1, 1873. Not yet a teenager, he was recorded as a witness to his mother's marriage in Santa Fe. His mom died the next year, and Billy was orphaned. From 1873 Santa Fe, Billy has been traced to Silver City, New Mexico, then to the eastern Arizona mining area for a stay of about two years, then to New Mexico's war-torn Lincoln County, then back and forth to the Texas panhandle, then to his final blind date with flying lead in Fort Sumner. Along the way he rustled cattle, shot and killed several people (though almost certainly not the legendary figure of 21 men--one for every year of his life), repeatedly escaped certain death, sang and danced (his favorite song: "Turkey in the Straw"), and romanced numerous women.
Until almost the very end of his life, he wasn't known as "Billy the Kid," but just "Kid." In the Lincoln County War, he fought on the side fighting injustice, yet he casually rustled cattle as if they were wildflowers. He was about five-foot-seven, right-handed, quite literate, a natty dresser, a cheerful scamp and/or a cold-hearted assassin, depending on which of the experts you're reading at the time. FOR THE MOST PART, the men who've written the books on Billy the Kid and his time are not young ones. Few of the historians/panelists at the Kid symposium appeared to be younger than 60. The Billy elders include, along with Utley, Leon Metz of El Paso, who has made Pat Garrett his specialty; and Frederick Nolan, an Englishman who has been working for years on the definitive text about the Lincoln County War (which will be published this fall). Among the next generation is Jerry Weddle, a 34-year-old researcher from Tucson. Weddle, who got hooked on the Billy story after seeing Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid at age 16, has spent the past five years sifting through Billy evidence and is considered the premier authority on the Kid's two-year Arizona interlude. He spoke to the audience about research he had done into photographs that were at one time believed to be of the Kid. "There are no mysteries in this business," said Weddle, "only facts we haven't learned yet, or information we haven't found. It's getting harder. We're at the end of another century, and the story is already over a hundred years old." As time advances, descendants of the participants in Billy-era events become less reliable as sources. Still, they exist, and must be mined for old letters, photographs and dim memories. This is one of Weddle's specialties. "There's been a lot of exploitation," he said. "People who enjoy Billy the Kid will take everything that comes into their path. The descendants are still here, in Lincoln, in Fort Sumner, but they're sick and tired of it and they don't always cooperate. It's a lot of work for a serious researcher to get on their good side. It takes awhile to earn their trust, but if you're patient enough to earn it, then you're the one who deserves it." WEDDLE, WHO'S neither a college professor nor a full-time writer-researcher, straddles the boundary between expert and buff--the category of Billyphile who has graduated from reading books about the Kid to maybe thinking about writing one of his own. According to the experts, part-time researchers play a key role in opening up the history of the American West. "I think the buffs are vitally important to the field of Western history," said Utley, dean of Billy professionals. "They are willing to invest the time and effort digging out grubby little details that don't make all that much difference in the overall scheme of things. I am not willing to spend the rest of my life trying to find out where Billy the Kid was born. I would be delighted to know, but I'm sure not going to pore through census records and church records and baptismal records to find out. Yet there are buffs for whom this is their life's passion. Bless 'em. They are essential."
One such essential buff, granted panelist status during the symposium weekend, was Herman Weisner, a self-described "hillbilly from North Carolina," who has been tracking Billy's roots for several decades. Many of the prof types who lectured wore neckties and suit coats. Weisner wore a ball cap and retiree-style coveralls, and delivered one of the symposium's few bombshells. Weisner had come across some records he believed linked Billy by family to the Lincoln area. This was a fine revelation, humbly delivered, and caused some eyebrow flapping among the crowd. Before Weisner, nobody knew what motivated the Kid to come to New Mexico after leaving Arizona. Weisner believes he had family in the area, that one of Billy's running buddies in Lincoln County, Yginio Salazar, was actually the Kid's first cousin. Weisner also revealed some research that may place the Kid's family roots in Missouri--the first real inkling anyone has had of where the young Bill Antrim, McCarty or Bonney spent his childhood. Last, Weisner revealed research that questions Billy's age at the time of his death, long accepted to be 21. The old hillbilly believes the Kid died younger, perhaps as young as 18 or 19. MOST BILLY BUFFS are less rabid than Weisner, perhaps for good reason. Near the end of his talk to the symposium, Weisner said that he suffers from lung damage which he believes was caused by spending too much time breathing old dust from historic documents. And most of the symposium audience comprised buffs below the Weisner/Weddle degree of commitment. Among others present were an El Paso judge, the chair of a university English department, several retired gents, an auto-parts retailer, a few journalists, a zoo administrator and a cartoonist for a free weekly newspaper in Phoenix.