This week I read half of Stephen Tatum’s Inventing Billy the Kid. In the book, he describes how Billy the Kid was perceived at different times and why. In the chapters I read, he discusses the initial formation of the legend, and then he tracks it up until 1950 or so. There are a lot of good points, but overall he says that Billy the Kid lasts so long because he is always able to fill a need of the population at the time.
The first era Tatum talks about is the period from 1881-1925. At the time, people were happy to see the Kid dead. Newspapers and dime novelists of the time made it into “the end of lawlessness” in the frontier (39). He was not popular, mostly because people were tired of the killings and rustling that went on For the first few years after his death, the majority of the Kid’s appearances were in classical romances, not as the hero as one might expect, but as the villain. This is the origin of his legendary aim and horse riding skills: authors needed him to be extremely adept and dangerous to make the final confrontation with the hero more dramatic (48). These dime novelists did not make him the hero because they did not know how to reconcile his violence and lawlessness with the values that make a hero popular (48). Eventually, however, during the early 1900s, authors began to add some inklings of virtue. They made the people he killed evil, so he was almost doing a service to society; they focused on his friendships and his generosity, to make him less like a monster, and they gave him a makeover, scrapping the hellspawn image of previous writers for a more human and even handsome appearance (51). These observations back up the Rivera article I read last week. They agree that the Kid was demonized by writers immediately after his death, and they both say that writers used him to disparage certain groups: they made him look like an Indian, or they had him associate with and act like Mexicans, or they said he was born in Ireland.
The reason he stayed in their memory at all, however, was that things were moving fast at the time, and people wanted order (58). McKinley and Garfield were assassinated, the US got involved in two different wars, and Congress was passing all sorts of radical legislation like Prohibition. Billy the Kid represented the unrestrained individual, and Garrett was the community. Tatum makes the point by shooting down the Kid, Pat Garrett actually strengthened the social contract (65). Garrett’s victory over the Kid symbolized that civilization would conquer the wildness of the continent, and this message of security was what people at the time needed to hear.
continued in second post