Billy The Kid
"So richly detailed, you can almost smell the gunsmoke and the sweat of the saddles."--Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author
From Spur Award-winning author Mark Lee Gardner, his classic dual biography of Billy the Kid and Sheriff Pat Garrett, detailing Garrett's riveting chase of the notorious bandit--now updated with a new afterword covering new developments in the Billy the Kid story.
Billy the Kid--a.k.a. Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim, and William Bonney--was a horse thief, cattle rustler, charismatic rogue, and cold-blooded killer. A superb shot, the Kid gunned down four men single handedly and five others with the help of cronies. Two of his victims were Lincoln County, NM, deputies, killed during the Kid's brazen daylight escape from the courthouse jail on April 28, 1881. After dspensing with his guards and filing through the chain securing his leg irons, The Kid danced a macabre jig on the jail's porch before riding away on a stolen horse as terrified townspeople--and many sympathizers--watched. For new sheriff, Pat Garrett, the chase was on . . .
To Hell on a Fast Horse recreates the thrilling manhunt for the Wild West's most iconic outlaw. It is also the first "dual biography" of the Kid and Garrett, two larger-than-life figures who would not have become the stuff of legend without the other. Drawing on voluminous primary sources and a wealth of published scholarship, Mark L. Gardner digs beneath the myth to take a fresh look at these two men, their relationship, and what they would come to mean to a public enamored of a violent national past.
But who were the real men behind the legends, and what forces drove them to their final, fatal encounter?
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:
Supplementing the text are 132 photos, including many photos never published before.
In The West of Billy the Kid, renowned authority Frederick Nolan has assembled a comprehensive photo gallery of the life and times of Billy the Kid. In text and in more than 250 images-many of them published here for the first time-Nolan recreates the life Billy lived and the places and people he knew. This unique assemblage is complemented by maps and a full biography that incorporates Nolan's original research, adding fresh depth and detail to the Kid's story and to the lives and backgrounds of those who witnessed the events of his life and death.
Here are the faces of Billy's family, friends, and enemies: John Tunstall and John Chisum, Sheriff Pat Garrett and Governor Lew Wallace, Jimmy Dolan and Bob Olinger, Alexander McSween and Paulita Maxwell, and many others. Here are Santa Fe and Silver City as Billy the Kid saw them, Lincoln, Las Vegas, and Tascosa. Recent photographs show the Kid's haunts as they appear today.
It's possible that Billy the Kid escaped the gunfire from Pat Garrett's pistol. And, under the name of John Miller, he could have lived the rest of his life as a cattle rancher and horse breeder in the Zuni mountains of Western New Mexico, and as a farm worker in Buckeye, Arizona. His adopted son, Max Miller, said so. So do most of the Indians and the Mormon pioneers who knew John Miller. Could this be? Our book presents some convincing evidence. You decide.
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