Dreamscape Desperado
Who remembers Billy the Kid?
By: Paul Andrew Hutton 04/01/2007
Digging Up Billy
With Billy the Kid flourishing so much in popular culture mediums, it shouldn’t be surprising that he would end up the focus of a real-life drama.
Three New Mexico lawmen, sick of Pat Garrett’s good name being dragged through the dirt due to allegations that he may have freed the Kid instead of killing him at Fort Sumner in 1881—initiated an investigation into the Kid’s death and burial in spring 2003. Sheriff Tom Sullivan of Lincoln County and his Deputy Sheriff Steve Sederwall, along with DeBaca County Sheriff Gary Graves were determined to prove that Brushy Bill Roberts of Hico, Texas, was not Billy the Kid. (The Lincoln County Heritage Trust may have thought that its 1989 committee had put a stake through the heart of the Brushy Bill story, but like Dracula in Billy the Kid versus Dracula, Brushy Bill just kept rising from the grave.)
New Mexico’s high-profile Gov. Bill Richardson lent his support to the lawmen in their effort to protect New Mexico’s most famous citizen from this Texas imposter. “This is not a publicity stunt; it’s an effort to get at the truth,” Richardson told a room packed with reporters on June 10, 2003. He was flanked by the Stetson-bedecked sheriffs of Lincoln and DeBaca Counties, and by me, appointed as historian on the project. The governor and the sheriffs proposed to dig up Billy’s mother in Silver City and compare her DNA with that of the imposter Roberts.
The story made headlines from New York (including a front page story in The New York Times) to Bombay. CNN interviewed the governor about Billy while the BBC, Discovery and History Channels filmed programs on the controversy. True West magazine’s highest-selling copy of 2003 was its August/September issue, with the cover story “Digging Up Billy the Kid.”
Irate officials in Silver City and Fort Sumner quickly announced that they would fight any exhumations. Billy the Kid scholars Fred Nolan and Bob Utley joined in, along with political columnist Jay Miller, to denounce the project.
The governor, no amateur at this game, gingerly sidestepped his critics by moving the debate to a pardon for Billy (once promised but never delivered by Gov. Lew Wallace, see p. 64). A force to be reckoned with, like Billy had been, Gov. Richardson made clear that much of his intent in supporting the investigation was to call attention to the colorful history of New Mexico, which the Kid still perfectly represented.
The myopia of those opposed to the project is astonishing but predictable. Billy the Kid seems to invite controversy no matter the issue at hand. Governor Richardson, although busy running his state—negotiating with the North Koreans and Sudanese, and attempting to save the national Democratic Party from implosion—still remains hot on the trail of Billy the Kid; it remains unclear if that road will lead to a pardon.
Who Remembers BTK?
The answer is, of course, just about everyone. More than 125 years after his death, it is impossible to forget him: Every boy wants to be him, and every girl wants to be with him. He is our own deadly version of Peter Pan morphed into Robin Hood. The eternal boy who refuses to grow up, change or compromise or sell out, and—most important—sees injustice through innocent, youthful eyes and does not hesitate to set it right.
What would Billy do? As we adults face our own difficult and complex world of corruption and compromise, it is somehow comforting to think of the outlaw youth with his crystal-clear vision of gunsmoke justice. We were all once “The Kid.” That is why he remains the outlaw of our dreams.
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