“He came right at me. Before I got to the bed, I whispered, ‘Who is it, Pete?’ but there was no answer for a moment. It occurred to me that it might be Pete’s brother-in-law, Manuel Abreu, who had seen Poe and McKinney, and wanted to know what it was about. The intruder came up to me, put both hands on the bed, his right hand almost touching my knee, and he asked, in a low voice, “Who are they, Pete?” At the same instant Maxwell whispered to me. Simultaneously, the Kid must have seen, or felt, the presence of a third person at the head of the bed. He quickly raised his pistol, a self-hammer, to a foot from my chest. Backing away Quickly across the room, he called out: ‘Who is it?’ Who is that? Who is that?”) All this happened in a moment. As quickly as possible I drew my revolver and fired, threw my body aside and fired again. The second shot was useless, the Child fell dead. He never spoke. One struggle or two, a little strangling sound as he gasped, and the Kid was with his many victims.”

Pat Garrett’s testimony.

IN CONVERSATION WITH FRED NOLAN.

Fred Nolan is considered one of the world’s leading experts on Billy the Kid. His book The West of Billy The Kid is considered one of the best studies of the legend ever published. As a novelist he has written many westerns, as well as working successfully in other genres. He added five installments to the Sudden series, a western character originally created by Oliver Strange. His thrillers include The Oshawa Project, filmed by MGM and starring Sophia Loren and Robert Vaughn. In total, the author is responsible for more than 70 books.

However, when The Archive cornered the writer, we were troubled by the legend of Billy The Kid.

What is the ongoing fascination with Billy the KID?

“The answer would depend on how deeply you want to delve into the mechanics of the illusions, our hero’s place in history and reality, the implied defiance and simultaneous impossibility of solving an insoluble historical puzzle, of correctly establishing who he was, where he was born, who his father was, where he spent the first ten years of his life… but I think there are broader issues as well, having to do with our need for heroes and myths (and, oddly enough, hope), with preconceptions formed by where we grew up and who we grew up with, what we read and watched on TV or in the movies when we were of an impressionable age, Billy is truly a young man for all seasons, short and violent life, that transformation from homeless boy to immortal myth who reshapes himself anew for each successive generation”

In your opinion, have any of the film versions of The Kid come close to reality?

“The short answer is no. I think maybe if Jack Beutel, who played the Kid on The Outlaw, had been able to play the role of Kris Kristofferson on Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, we might have had the ultimate picture.”

Was Billy psychotic?

“I’m pretty sure he didn’t suffer from a mental disorder in which thinking and emotions are so impaired that contact with external reality is lost” (OED). But he knew how to stay alive in a world and a time that you and we may find ourselves unable to cope with. If you want to try it, read Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.”

There is only one authenticated image of Billy the Kid, but many others claim to be the outlaw. Do you think any of these other photographs are genuine?

“More wishful thinking: surely there must be another picture of him somewhere, something that doesn’t make him look like (as Burton Rascoe put it)” a nondescript, adenoidal, weasel-eyed, narrow-chested, shouldered, repulsive-looking creature with all outward appearance of a cretin”? Of course, I’ve seen quite a few photos that could very well be the Child, but they all lack that vital factor: a provenance, proof that they are the real thing.”

The nickname “THE KID” was a generic term in the Old West and was often given to any young man who was in trouble with the law. Obviously, there were many murders attributed to Billy that he committed now, that in fact he could not have committed. How many men, in his opinion, did he kill?

“As far as we know, he only killed four men one by one: Frank Cahill, James Bell, Bob Olinger and Red Grant. He was involved, to what exact extent we cannot be sure, in several others, essentially gang members.” murders: Morton, Baker, McCloskey, Brady, Hindman, Roberts, Bernstein, etc. It’s unlikely at this late point that evidence will ever surface linking him to others we don’t know about. And, after all, there is plenty of irony. in the phrase “he killed only four men” … only ???? “

What is your take on Brushy Bill, who claimed to be Billy the Kid and still sparks a lot of debate about his true identity?

“Oliver P. “Brushy Bill” Roberts was just a simple, sad old man who got caught up in something whose ramifications were far beyond his mental capacity; and the strain of doing so probably killed him. His family Bible shows that he was born in 1879, which means he would have been two years old when Billy the Kid was killed. He had previously claimed to be a member of Jesse James’s gang. He was just a nobody who wanted so badly to be somebody, but that hasn’t stopped thinkers desirous of illusions”.

So why are the authorities loathe to allow Billy’s grave to be dug up for DNA testing to solve the mystery once and for all?

“The authorities (and many historians, including myself) were not so much against the idea of ​​taking DNA samples as they were against the proposition that (a) pinpointing the exact spot where the Kid is buried is not possible and (b) there is no way to be sure that even if the grave were dug up, the remains, if any, would be Kid, or Bowdre, or Folliard, or just someone else who had been buried there before they were. And (c) what would the DNA be compared to? The Kid’s mother in her grave in Silver City? But precisely the same problems exist there: there is no certainty about the location of the grave, or whether she is in it or not. just close. So (d) what would be the point?”

Hypothetical: Garrett didn’t kill the Kid, what happened next?

“Okay, let’s unleash our imaginations and proceed with your hypothesis. Garrett kills someone in Pete Maxwell’s room. He/they claim it was the Kid and rush him into a coffin that’s sealed so no one can see the body and then they bury him quickly next to him”. Now everyone has to take Garrett and Maxwell at their word that it was the Kid, and none of the families living in Fort Sumner, nor any of their descendants for the next hundred and twenty years, will question it or tell anyone that it was. this was what they were told/agreed to do. Hard to believe, right? (We don’t take into account for a moment that none of this is what Garrett and Poe said happened, or that a coroner’s jury saw the body and certified it to be the Kid.) The same must be true of the proposition that someone else, a “Billy Barlow,” say, was buried and Billy the Kid got away. he could silence everything about them and all their relatives (then and in the future) so completely that no one, not a single one, ever told or even hinted at the secret. I once made a list of families who were on record as having known Billy and whose relatives and descendants would have had to uphold this vow of silence and now it would have involved over a thousand people. You know the rule: two people can keep a secret as long as one of them is dead.”

Legend has it that when Garrett killed The Kid he was only 21, but mainstream opinion these days seems to think he was around 26. What’s your take?

“I always thought Billy was younger, not older than 21, and I based that proposition on our inability to find a record of his birth, or even his existence, in the census and other records. Lately, I’ve been wondering if that theory should be abandoned. The Kid was at Fort Sumner in 1881 when the census was taken and at the time he said he was 22 and was born in Missouri. Why shouldn’t that be true, because we don’t like it? There are Bonney families in The Missouri Records he might have fit in, and there’s at least one McCarty family in there that could have been his mother’s. But like everything else related to Billy, it can’t be proven and it’s unlikely ever will. “.

Will the mystery of The Kid ever be cleared up?

“What mystery did you have in mind? The mystery of his birth? The mystery of his father’s identity? The mystery of where he grew up? The mystery of what he really was like? The mystery of why he was killed? ( Hypothetical Question: Garrett had two armed officers standing behind Billy and he had the opportunity, why didn’t he just arrest him?).

SELECTED WORKS OF FRED NOLAN:

novels

* The Oshawa Project (released in the US as The Algonquin Project, a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, later filmed as Brass Target)

* The Mittenwald Syndicate: Another best-selling thriller about the robbery of the Reichsbank in Germany at the end of World War II.

* Carver’s Kingdom: A Historical Novel About the Building of the American Transcontinental Railroad

* White Nights, Red Dawn – A historical novel set amid the turmoil of the Russian Revolution.

* A Pledge of Glory: A historical novel about an American family during the Revolution.

* Blind Duty – A historical novel about the same family during the Civil War.

* Field of Honor – A historical novel about a family during the Spanish–American War

Wolf Trap – a thriller about the murder of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942.

* Red Center – A high-tech spy thriller.

Proceedings:

* Sweet Sister Death: A prophetic thriller featuring a terrorist attack in New York

* Alert State Black – Charles Garrett fights terrorism in Germany.

* Designated Killer: This time the terrorists are Irish.

* Rat Run: Garrett fights against a group planning the biggest ecological disaster in history.

Like Christine McGuire:

* Until proven guilty

*Until justice is done

* Until death do us part

As Frederick H. Christian:

* Sudden counterattacks

* Sudden in the bay

* Sudden, Apache Fighter

* Sudden – Troubleshooter

* Sudden, dead or alive!

Like Daniel Rockfern:

* Showdown in Liberty

* Ride to Vengeance

* Ambush in Purgatory

* Long journey to hell

*Ride of Daranga

* Bad day in Agua Caliente

* Massacre in Madison

* Showdown in Trinidad

* Gunfight at Fischer’s Crossing

* Hunting in Quemado

* Duel in Cheyenne

Non-fiction works:

* The life and death of John Henry Tunstall

* Rodgers & Hammerstein: The sound of their music

* The Lincoln County War: A Documentary History

* Lorenz Hart: a poet on Broadway

* Billy the Kid’s West

* The Wild West: History, Myth and the Making of America

* Tascosa, his life and gaudy times

* The Billy the Kid Reader