“Billy the Kid” was still fairly young when he died. This week I wanted to look at his early years, which I guess can be considered the years before he started getting into serious crime. I found a google book http://books.google.com/books?id=h6BuOmP_VuoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=billy+the+kid&hl=en&ei=p-N4TrDQN-SxsAKRjom7DQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=true. Although the book preview was missing information, I was still able to get plenty of useful information from it. All of my information came from the first chapter, “The Kid.” I was actually pretty surprised by some of the information that I had found in this chapter that I didn’t find in other articles that I have read.
I didn’t realize that Billy was only known as “The Kid” until a few months before he died. This fact is what makes the chapter make sense since it did not actually go into details about Billy as a literal kid. I don’t know if I have read this anywhere else, but I did find in this chapter that his origins are suggestive but rarely conclusive. This makes Billy more legendary to me. Not only is his adulthood mysterious but so is his childhood. He is believed to have spent his first few years in an Irish ghetto of Manhattan or Brooklyn. His name, however, was made in New Mexico.
This part is where a page was missing, but I found a useful sentence towards the beginning of the page and had to draw my own conclusions about what it was talking about. It started off talking about how a class of men, I’m assuming the class that they are referring to are the outlaws, had four influences to lead them to violence. The first influence was that of ambition for quick money and the power that went with it. The second influence was liquor. Everyone at that time drank heavily and constantly. The third influence was guns. Nearly everyone at that time also carried guns.
There was also a missing page between this time and my next information that I found. It mentioned “[the code] commanded practitioners to avenge all insult and wrong, real or imagined; never to retreat before an aggressor, and to respond with any degree of violence, even death”. I feel like this goes along perfectly with Billy the Kid based on the information that I have found about him. This also goes along perfectly with a quote they followed which was “I’ll die before I’ll run.”
Back to Billy, something that really surprised me that I haven’t seen before was Billy’s passion for music. Months after his mother died, he and other boys formed a minstrel troupe that played to appreciative audiences at Morrill’s Opera House. I found other useful information in this chapter, but I will save that information for another blog post. The other information that I found has to do with Billy’s crime life that would not fit with the rest of this blog.