May 15, 2025
We've got a barn burner developing on the Billy the Kid front. Our little Aussie Bastard has struck again (twice in the same issue!) and he has uncovered some pretty spectacular evidence of Billy the Kid's stature prior to Walter Noble Burns' "Saga" in 1926. We (and I mean me and Mark Lee Gardner and Fred Nolan and Paul Hutton and Leon Metz and a few hundred other Kid Krazy afficionados) believed that when Walter Noble Burns—on assignment to cover the Pancho Villa attack on Columbus, New Mexico—walked into the Coney Island Saloon in El Paso in 1915 and saw the pistol over the bar and asked about it and the bartender told him it belonged to the most famous badman in the Southwest and when Burns asked who that might be, the bartender said, "Billy the Kid" and Burns said, "Who's Billy the Kid?" And then seven years later, Burns visits his sister in Albuquerque and borrows her car and drives out to Old Fort Sumner and interviews Paulita Maxwell! And then, with the publication of one of the first Book of The Month Club entries, we get this "forgotten" Old West character being resurrected from obscurity in "The Saga of Billy the Kid."
Well, as you shall see in the next issue, that is simply not true. Hint: there was a movie playing on the Kid when Burns' book came out! There's a ton more, but here is a taste of who you will see.
Billy the Kid in 1912.
Yes, this is the work James B. Mills and he has done it again. Bravo to our favorite little Aussie Bastard!
The Day I Met Pocho Suavo
He came around a corner in old Suchitoto, flinging his quirt at the flys on a crumbling adobe wall. He was singing an old song (although later I discovered he just made it up). “Buenos Dias, mi Amigo!” He barked at me as if we had known each other for centuries. Before I could even reply he asked me if I knew the way to El Forte, which I did, and before you could say Sancho Panza, he was riding beside me on a little, scrawny burro he called “Mi Esposa!” At about the five mile mark, I knew all the girls he had a fling with and by the ten mile mark he confessed to me he was descended from Aztec royalty, which might be true because he sure was a royal pain in the ass.
The Mexicans didn't like him because he was too Americanized and the Americans didn't like him for the same reason.
"If you have the courage to define yourself, and take ownership over the terms by which you live your life, something mysterious will happen; the walls will fall away, and the world will open up."
—John Koenig, "The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows"
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