August 1, 2025
We are putting our Sept-Oct issue to bed this weekend and sometimes I can get a little buggy rounding up all those photo credits, author bios and cutline corrections. Stuart Rosebrook quipped to a friend recently that most people don't know that the magazine is essentially put out by five people. Ha. He should know, since he was number two of the five! With that said, perhaps this post is going to be a little buggy, because truthfully, I am a little fried at the moment.
Kid Observation #21
Like the Kid, if you hang around long enough in this history game you will notice someone is nipping at your heels and when you slow down to take a better look, you will notice he is not alone.
So, today I got a bit of the Enth Degree online over the fact that I appear to be the main guy claiming that William H. Bonney wore a sugarloaf sombrero with a green hatband. Okay, I can live with that, but according to some I am full of it and if you believe others, I made it all up. So I read with interest this post on the website Chasing Billy posted by James Townsend:
"Regardless of opinions concerning William H. Bonney and Sheriff Pat Garrett, The Kid is dead. No longer will his darting form be seen in the villages of New Mexico. No longer will his broad brimmed sombrero with a bright green Irish hat band attract attention. And no longer will friend and foe alike hear his peculiar whistle as he jogs or walks along, whistling 'Silver Threads Among the Gold' through his crooked, widely spaced front teeth."
—Ruidoso News, Aug 1, 1952, rerunning an 1881 article from the Lincoln County Leader
That seems like a pretty solid confirmation to me, but no, it was reprinted in 1952 and can't be trusted. Well, excuse me while I erase all the following.
Egregous Billy Hatbands Galore
(and one hatless head by Buckeye Blake)
And, here's a few more. . .
And if you want to get all technical about it, here is a real sugarloaf.
Which he probably did not wear. Plus, I admit we are still thwarted by that goofy slouch hat he is wearing in his only known photo.
Truth be known, at the end of the day, all I want to do is have fun with the concept of the Kid in his time and give him a cooler hat than he has in the photo. Is it the authentic TRUTH? Garrett's reference in Authentic Life and the above Ruidoso News citation are enough for me.
I was telling my querida last night, that would be Kathy Sue, that, as I age out, I have this growing suspicion that this whole history game is just that—a game. And a very high school oriented game. And lately, I have had this fantasy that when I get to the end of the maze I will meet my younger self just coming in and I will laugh at the absurdity, and yell out—while pointing down the trail he is running towards—"Good luck with all that!" And he will, of course, flip me off and swear to find the Truth, once and for all, and then he will tell everyone within hearing that Billy the Kid did NOT wear a green hatband!
"If Napoleon had nuclear subs, we'd all be speaking French, so the history thing can be oversold."
—Mike Murphy
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.
ReplyDeleteHe 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
Ha. Excellent commentary Bradley, and you made me laugh. We all have that one photo. . .
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