Billy the Kid's last words, we are told, were "Quién es?" (Spanish for "Who is it?"). This is interesting for a couple of reasons. The first was that although The Kid couldn't see him, Billy actually knew the man lurking in a darkened bedroom inside the Maxwell Ranch, near Fort Sumner, N.M., where the gunslinger had holed up on July 14, 1881.
The stalker -- the man about to shoot Billy in the back -- was a lethal lawman named Pat Garrett. The sheriff of Lincoln County, Garrett had arrived on the scene with no intention of making an arrest. Billy the Kid was already under a death sentence and had killed two of Garrett's deputies while escaping from the Lincoln jail.
The second interesting aspect of The Kid's last utterance is the language he spoke: Billy was Irish American, not Mexican American. It shows how quickly he went native once he arrived in the American Southwest, which might be the real point of The Kid's brief life story.
He was born either in Ireland or, more likely, the slums of New York, and his given name was William Henry McCarty. History has no record of the boy's father, but his mother, Catherine McCarty, battled tuberculosis by moving west. In Indianapolis, she met and married a man name William Antrim. The family then headed to Santa Fe.
Young Billy, or Henry, as he was sometimes called, seems to have taken the surname of his stepfather, but only briefly. After his mother died, the elder Antrim wanted little to do with him, so "Kid" Antrim, as he was known (and a familiar formulation for juvenile delinquents at the time), was on his own at age 14.
He fell in with bad men and turned to thieving, fighting, and eventually murder. Besides Billy McCarty and Henry Antrim, he also used the name William H. Bonney, merely an alias by a young man on the run. The moniker "Billy the Kid" was bestowed on him by New Mexico newspaperman J.H. Koogler, editor of the Las Vegas (New Mexico) Gazette. The nickname was certainly fitting: The Kid never lived to see his 22nd birthday.
In most ways, Billy the Kid was a product of his time and place. He came of age in the Arizona and New Mexico territories, and he spoke the regional language fluently, ate the local food, rode horses like an Indian, and courted pretty señoritas. But in another way, Billy never escaped his Irish past, a past he probably knew little about.
The Lincoln County War that Billy fought in and that led to his demise was an Old West range war, fought over cattle, land, and power. But it had an Old World underpinning, and a sectarian one as well. The New Mexico range war pitted Irish-born Catholics who controlled Lincoln County vs. English-born Protestants who wanted to break up the political machine. Although he'd been born and raised Catholic, Billy the Kid was under-churched, you might say. In any event, he fought on the side of the Protestants.
The bloodshed would eventually engender White House intervention: President Rutherford B. Hayes sent the U.S. Army, which responded by escalating the violence. Hayes also appointed a new territorial governor, Lew Wallace, who issued amnesty offers. They only applied to those not under indictment for murder, which ruled out Billy the Kid. He wrote Wallace requesting a pardon, but events had moved too far along for that.
Billy was violent, but he did not, as legend has it, kill 20 men, mostly Apaches and Mexicans. This kind of pulp fiction was the invention of Pat Garrett and his ghost-writer, another local newspaperman, along with a thousand imitators. The annoying and aggrandizing frontier scribe has been the inspiration for numerous less-than-flattering Hollywood depictions. But when it comes to Billy the Kid, the fictions peddled by the motion picture business are pretty wild, too.
Among those who have played The Kid, usually as a noble if misguided young anti-hero, are Audie Murphy, Robert Taylor, Roy Rogers, Buster Crabbe (more than a dozen times), Paul Newman, Kris Kristofferson, Emilio Estevez, Donnie Wahlberg, and Val Kilmer.
They run the gamut, these characterizations, but the real Billy Kid talked to newspaper reporters pretty freely, so we know a little of what he was like. In a late January interview in the Sante Fe jail with a Las Vegas Gazette journalist -- one that has come to light only recently -- Billy expressed amusement at the sensational news coverage he was receiving.
"I'm getting up a terrible reputation," he quipped. Referring to an unflattering portrait of him in a local tabloid, The Kid said, "I got hold of the paper first when it was brought in, but I was ashamed to let the other fellows see it. Wasn't it savage, though?"
Perhaps he should have taken his plight more seriously, but Billy would be subsequently sentenced to death and escape from jail yet again (killing two deputies in the process) before meeting his ultimate fate. But a month before the jailhouse interview, after Garrett had captured him the first time, a reporter commented on his seeming nonchalance.
"What's the use of looking on the gloomy side of everything?" said The Kid, who faced execution. "The laugh's on me this time."
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.