George R. Matthews
speaker
318 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 13 Jul
George R. Matthews’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, you begin by reading all the secondary sources that relate and tell you about all the
mythology, and then you delve into all the original sources.
I decided that once I had done that, that could I solve all the Billy and the Kid mythologies?
Could I strip away those layers of myth?
And so I decided I would do some original research to see if I could do that.
And the first area I went into was the history of Irish immigrations.
because Billy's mother was an Irish immigrant.
And that revealed a great deal of information about her coming to the United States, her occupations, her going to Indiana, and Billy's childhood, which is new information, that he was born in New York City, for example.
And then the other area I decided to delve into was history of dime novels, because we know Billy was a reader of dime novels.
And lo and behold, I found some original information that explains why he adopted the alias William H. Bonney, for example.
And then the third area was knowing that his mother was in Indiana and knowing that Billy was literate to do research in the history of Indianapolis and in particular, public education in Indianapolis.
And again,
I found out that Billy the Kid, at six years old, was living in Indianapolis with his mother and was in the first school district of Indianapolis.
And they had a fabulous public school system in Indianapolis by the middle 1860s.
That's where Billy was educated.
And so those three things, and then going back to the original documents during the Lincoln County War,
and comparing those, we can now safely say that we can eliminate almost all of the mythologies around Billy the Kid.
We now have a complete, authentic picture.
Billy was actually made a outlaw celebrity during his lifetime by the newspapers.
And it started with New Mexico newspapers.
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