The Truth about Billy the Kid
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Lincoln County Jail, in the New Mexico Territory, April 28, 1881. The prisoner swats a fly from his sweating forehead, glancing to the door. Slightly built and barely in his 20s, this man has been chained and shackled here on the second floor of the jail for two weeks. By rights, it should be his final home before the noose. But while he's been waiting, he's been watching for an opportunity, one that's about to arrive. At 5 p.m. each day, he is brought his plate of food. At the same time, one of his two guards escorts the other prisoners in the jail across the street for their nightly vittles. But this evening will go differently. At 5, the guard will exit the building as usual, but he won't return.
This evening, he and his fellow guard will have been shot dead. And the killer who did the shooting, our prisoner, he'll be riding a stolen horse into the sunset, still alive and still known by his now famous name, Billy the Kid.
Billy the Kid
George R. Matthews is an historian and author of Billy the Kid, The Life Behind the Legend, published just last year. George Matthews, sir, glad to meet you. Thank you. Nice to be here. So much has been written about Billy the Kid. I did one special myself on television about it, and it is a world. So many contradictory statements, so much folklore. You have dived in. What kind of sources were you using for this research? Where do you begin, and why is Billy the Kid so mythologized?
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.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–10:01
2
Who was Billy the Kid and why did newspapers mythologize him during his lifetime?
10:01–19:28
3
What original sources did George R. Matthews use to separate fact from myth about Billy the Kid?
19:28–40:48
4
Where did Henry McCarty (Billy the Kid) come from and how did his Irish family background shape his early life?
40:48–45:12