[In honor of the
150th anniversary of Butch
Cassidy’s birth, in this week’s series I’ll AmericanStudy histories and
images of some of our more famous—or infamous—outlaws.]
On two telling
layers to the famous outlaw’s mythos, and the context they both mostly miss.
Like most
outlaws, Billy the Kid went by a
number of names and identities (each at least somewhat uncertain, due to the
historical ambiguities that necessarily come with lives lived outside legal
and social norms): he was born Henry McCarty, and renamed (by himself,
apparently) at the age of 18 as William H. Bonney. But there’s a reason why Billy
the Kid was and remains the one that stuck, and it’s not just because his first
arrest came at 16, he was accused of murder at 18, and he was dead at 21. As
best reflected in the two
blockbuster Young Guns films of the late 1980s,
and the portrayal of Billy therein by the baby-faced Emilio Estevez,
Billy’s youth is a hugely evocative quality: partly because of the irony of a “kid”
who is at the same time one of our most famous killers; but also, and I would
argue most importantly, because the emphasis on his youth allows us to embrace
and even celebrate a shadowy historical figure about whom virtually everything
we know relates to crime.
That embrace and
celebration of Billy are elements of what I would call the romanticization of
the outlaw, a trend illustrated by the Young
Guns films but much more complicatedly evoked and analyzed by a book
published in the same year that Young
Guns was released: Larry McMurtry’s underrated historical novel Anything
for Billy (1988). By creating as his first-person narrator a successful
dime novelist who was also one of Billy’s most consistent companions, and thus
an artist creating exaggerated, romanticized depictions for his outsider
(Eastern) audiences of real figures and experiences, McMurtry makes the dual
subjects of his novel both Billy himself and his legend. Yet although he
certainly recognizes Billy’s flaws and failures, that narrator nonetheless (as
the title suggests) comes to idolize the young outlaw, and thus his perspective
(and, inevitably, McMurtry’s novel) participates in the romanticization
process. Even referring to him as Billy (which of course conjures up the full
Billy the Kid sobriquet) rather than William or Henry links McMurtry’s narrator
and novel more to the mythos than whatever historical realities we might
recover underneath it.
Perhaps the most
significant such historical reality, and one about which scholars have
recovered a great deal, is the Lincoln County
War of 1878. Interestingly, perhaps the best historical work on that war
published to date, Robert
Utley’s High Noon in Lincoln: Violence on
the Western Frontier (1989), was released in between the two Young Guns films (the first film does,
to its credit, depict some key aspects, figures, and moments from the war). Yet
even Utley’s book, as the titular reference to the film High Noon implies, at least partly links the war to the same mythos
of mano-a-mano, gunfighter
violence that is so central to the romanticization of Billy and his
murders. Whereas to my mind the details of the Lincoln County War and its
culminating, mid-July Battle of Lincoln
depict a much more organized, communal conflict between competing business
interests, each deploying a mob of such violent individuals (Billy’s mob were
known as the Regulators) to protect their assets. Which is to say, the ultimate
irony of Billy the Kid might be how he can help us recognize that the Wild West
was more capitalistic and corporate than it was wild or romantic.
Next outlaw
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other outlaws you’d analyze?
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