More Billy the Kid Green Hatband Commentary

 August 3, 2025

   Just in case you haven't gotten your fill on the quibbling over the Billy the Kid green hatband controversy, here are a couple more, ahem, headgear adendums. 

Kid On The Tired Horizon

   "Billy the Kid is, at his core, a study in duality — the dichotomy between the real boy who lived and breathed in the dust of New Mexico, and the mythic figure who’s been endlessly reimagined in print and film. On one side, there’s the Kid as he truly was: a young man who woke up with the sun, stumbled out to the outhouse, splashed his face with water, and pulled on a pair of sweat-stained, dust-caked clothes. He wore a battered hat and boots that had seen better days, then stepped out into a life no more glamorous than that of a thousand other young men scraping by in the territory.
   "He was likely clever, maybe even charming when the moment called for it, but he wasn’t composing witty lines for the ages. He wasn’t rehearsing for legend. His days were full of grit, sweat, hunger, boredom, heat, and danger — not romance. He didn’t expect to be remembered, let alone mythologized.
   "But then there’s the other Billy — the unreal one — the outlaw prince of pulp and celluloid. He lives in that same mythic landscape as the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and Custer’s Last Stand. That Billy has been lost and reimagined through the words of Pat Garrett and Walter Noble Burns, and later distorted further by Johnny Mack Brown, Paul Newman, Emilio Estevez—and all the silver-screen shadows they cast.
   "Modern historians still tend to chase that ghost on the same tired horizon, reins in one hand and a script in the other. Most writers write about the Kid as if he lived out of his million-dollar picture. As an artist, you’ve given us a glimpse of the kid as a man who wore many hats, and one of them probably sported a green band. But, Bob — I think you’ve done better than most. You’ve tried to drag the Kid back down to earth, knock the stardust off him, and see the man underneath the myth. And for that, I think he’d tip his hat to you — even if it was beat-up and full of holes.
   "And as far as the truth. What is the truth in our own lives? I imagine my truth differs slightly from my wife and children's, let alone some stranger 150 years from now. For the record, if there was only one picture of me that existed- I hope it isn’t the one with me at nineteen wearing a Charlie Daniel’s T-shirt, jeans shorts (not really shorts, just jeans with the knees blown out that my buddy tore the legs down from) and cowboy boots. Adios."

—Bradley Ross

Even More Mark Lee Gardner Research

   The green hatband reference doesn't come from Poe, East, Siringo, or Garrett, who twice refers to the Kid's headgear only as a "broad-brimmed hat." I'm also very suspicious of the 1952 story (see attached) that purports to be a reprint of an 1881 piece from the Lincoln County Leader. It seems like it was written much later from information found in Burns and in the author's own imagination. That crazy line from Maxwell -- "The trouble with Billy was he talked before he shot" -- is not, of course, in the report from the coroner's jury. But not only that, according to the Library of Congress, the Lincoln County Leader, published in White Oaks, didn't produce its first issue until October of 1882.

El Paso Times

July 31, 1952

"If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday."

—Pearl S. Buck