Billy the Kid-Pa

Whatever his name or alias at the moment-Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim, Kid Antrim, Billy Bonney-people always called him the Kid. Not until his final month did anyone call him Billy the Kid. Newspapers pictured him as a king of outlaws; and his highly publicized capture, trial, escape, and end fixed his image in the public mind for all time. He was only twenty-one years old when a bullet from Sheriff Pat Garett's six-shooter killed him on July 14, 1881. Within a year Billy the Kid became the subject of five dime-novel "biographies" as well as Garett's ghost-written account, and that was just the beginning. Robert M. Utley does what countless books, movies, television shows, musical compositions, and paintings have failed to do: he successfully strips off the veneer of legendry to expose the reality of Billy the Kid. Using previously untapped sources, he presents an engrossing story-the most complete and accurate ever-of a youthful hoodlum and sometime killer who found his calling in New Mexico's bloody power struggle known as the Lincoln County War. In unmasking the legend Utley also tells us much about our heritage of frontier vigilantism and violence. One of the preeminent western historians writing today, Robert M. Utley is the author of High Noon in Lincoln: Violence on the Western Frontier, Cavalier in Buckskin: George Armstrong Custer and the Western Military Frontier and The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull, as well as Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1848-1865 (1984) and Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891 (1981) published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Author: Robert M. Utley
Publisher: Bison
Published: 08/01/1991
Pages: 342
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.92lbs
Size: 8.96h x 5.30w x 0.75d
ISBN13: 9780803295582
ISBN10: 0803295588
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Historical

About the Author
Robert M. Utley is a preeminent historian of the West and the author of numerous award-winning books, including The Last Days of the Sioux Nation; Frontiersmen in Blue: The United States Army and the Indian, 1848-1865 (Nebraska, 1981); Custer and the Great Controversy: The Origin and Development of a Legend (Nebraska, 1998); and Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891 (Bison Books, 1984).