This week, since the John Henry book talked so much about songs as a form of document, I thought I’d investigate songs about Billy the Kid from around the end of the 20th century. There was an interested grouping of songs by people such as Tom Petty, Billy Joel, Charlie Daniels, and Billy Dean.

The Tom Petty song doesn’t actually have much to do with Billy the Kid. The speaker only compares himself to the outlaw in the chorus, saying:

“I went down hard
Like Billy the Kid
I went down hard
Yeah I got up again”

From this, it seems that Tom Petty viewed the Kid as a resilient character who was destined to fall. At the very least, it implies that Billy the Kid is very well known for his death. This song seems more like a result of the Kid’s legend rather than a propagator of it.

The Billy Joel song, “The Ballad of Billy the Kid”, sacrifices historical accuracy for a good story. It seems Joel had heard some vague stories about the Kid as an outlaw, and he expanded them into an orchestrated ballad. He makes mistake after mistake, claiming the Kid was born in West Virginia, traveled alone, robbed banks, never had a girlfriend, and ended up being hung in front of a large crowd. All these statements are far from the truth, but the musical score also tells a story. There are high energy string swirls and melodies that float around throughout the song, giving it a celebratory, almost triumphant feeling. These positive emotions are transferred from the music to the subject of the song.

Charlie Daniels takes a more historical approach, sticking to relatively established facts. He portrays the kid in a sympathetic light, talking about him as if he were just a poor boy growing up in a time when evil pervaded the land. The Kid is “a mile ahead of Garrett and a step outside of Hell” and apparently fated to fall. This is an classic approach, blending pity for the Kid with disgust at his deeds, that serves to highlight how far wrong this one boy has gone. The song ends on a cautionary note, saying “and I guess you’ll go down shootin and like all branded men/When you shake hands with the devil you get burned”.

Billy Dean, on the other hand, romanticizes the legend. The chorus is:

“I miss Billy the Kid!
The times that he had!
The life that he lived!

I guess he must’ve got caught,
His innocence lost…
I wonder where he is?
I miss Billy the Kid!”

The rest of the song chronicles the speaker’s desire to be free like the Kid was in his own childhood. He touches on the morality of the Kid, saying he doesn’t know which side of right and wrong to be on, but he ends up yearning for simpler times of the Wild West again.

I don’t really know what caused all these songs to be released around the same time. There was a mild resurgence in Western movies around this time, so I would guess that rapid changes to the world were causing a nostalgia for the ‘simpler times’ of the late 1800s. We already saw another resurgence in the late 50s, so perhaps as the Baby Boomer generation aged into roles of responsibility, they were anxious for the same characters that defined their childhood. These songs, no matter what the artists intended them to be, helped define Billy the Kid for their audience: the parents and teachers of future generations.

Billy Dean. “Billy the Kid.” Billy Dean. Chuck Howard, 1992.

Billy Joel. “The Ballad of Billy the Kid.” Piano Man. Michael Stewart. 1973.

Charlie Daniels. “Billy the Kid.” High Lonesome. Paul Hornsby. 1976.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. “Billy the Kid.” Echo. Rick Rubin, Tom Petty, Mike Campbell. 1999.

            John Henry, as told to me in elementary school, was a hard working railroad man who picked up a hammer in each hand and beat a machine in a spike driving race, dying in the process. The only motivation I heard was that Henry needed to prove that man was greater than machine; I did not know about the tracts of land supposedly promised to his coworkers. As such, it seemed to be a nice enough folk tale, but I was intrigued when Scott Nelson claimed to have found the man behind the myth. Scott Nelson found a plausible John Henry, however the man himself is only one small part of the greater legend.

            History has lost the documents that could positively identify John Henry, but Nelson has picked out a believable man. Nelson’s Henry is a young New Jersey man, barely over five feet tall, who ended up working on the railroad as a leased prison laborer (39). At first glance, this appears to be the complete opposite of the massively large freedman Henry is often described as.

            Nelson, however, thoroughly explains how time and changing interests had morphed John Henry’s tale. By looking at the songs sung about John Henry slightly after his death, the author decides that they were originally cautionary tales meant to deter men from working too fast (32). Nelson made the point that dozens of men died at the construction sites, and lung trouble probably killed the rest, but their deaths are largely forgotten under the shadow of John Henry’s (90). The steamdrill race became part of the story later on, once the workers realized every second on the job was part of a struggle against approaching mechanization (92). Over the years, this idea became simplified and restructured until it was John Henry who singlehandedly battled the machine, and it was only John Henry who died in the process.

            Throughout the book, the author does not try to address the concrete details of the man who inspired the myth. His major sources are songs, which provide plenty of details about the legend but none about the man. He traces some prison records, but even these are woefully incomplete. In his conclusion he calls Henry “almost infinitely mutable” (172). This lack of proof, however, does not detract from the big picture.

            I agree with Nelson’s point of view that John Henry the man is far less important than John Henry the legend. Unlike other more historically based figures, knowing the specifics of a man named John Henry does not really help put the myth in any more context. The larger story was already contained in the work songs and pictures of John Henry; it only took someone to decode them. When presented to children, John Henry is often called a “folk hero,” so kids are already expecting him to be not quite real. The larger story of black oppression, monolithic railroads, and human struggle existed all along, and John Henry was only the vehicle for it.

            Nelson admits that the man behind the legend is unknowable, since crucial details like cause of death, date/place of birth, and family history were never recorded. If Nelson’s Henry is to be accepted, it is remarkable that, in light of all the changes his myth endured, his name was never altered along the way. In any event, the overarching themes of the legend say more about our history than the biographical details of the man.

This week, I looked at Billy the Kid: Las Vegas Newspaper Accounts of His Career, 1880-1881. The accounts begin with the circumstances leading to his capture, and then they report on his escape and death. The content of the pieces is much like the other descriptions I have read, but I was really looking to see how they portrayed the bandit. The coverage is surprisingly straightforward, with the expected villification of Billy the Kid, but they still seem to relish his deeds.

The newspapers seem to love everything about the saga. They talk up Pat Garrett, the sheriff, using language such as “this modest man, who has little to say, but is always ready for action” and “the terror of all evil-doers in this loser country” (5, 23), but they also bill the Kid as “THE DARE DEVIL DESPERADO” and continually refer to his shrewdness and daring (19, 20). They do not portray him as popular, however. In describing the Kid’s escape from the jail, the editors explain that he was not stopped due to a mixture of fear and sympathy, and they lambast those who preferred to see him go free. In one article from May 9, 1881, one paper got the erroneous report that Billy the Kid had been killed. They describe it as not likely, but go on in detail about what would happen if he were to die. The piece says that the kid burned whatever sympathy the public had for him by his continued killing of innocent men, and that should he die, “no tears, will be shed, no requiem chanted in token of his earthly departure, but. . .silhouettes of an evil life will arise to accuse and condemn him” (20). Another article by a different paper published on the following day says essentially the same thing, saying that death is the only justice for a man such as Billy the Kid. When the Kid actually is killed, the newspapers stick to their word for the most part, praising Garrett and writing off the Kid as a bad man who got what as coming. The writers sometimes slip adjectives like “promising” and “remarkable” into their descriptions, however, creating some confusion as to their true feelings (27). If everything is taken at face value, the newspapers do not seem to be responsible for the Kid’s ascent into myth.

The prevailing attitudes of the papers of the day seem to be that the Kid is just another outlaw, memorable only for being a little brasher and younger than the rest of desperadoes of the west. The editors elevated him a little, but nothing compared to the job Siringo does, describing him as the friendliest, bravest fellow there ever was. So somehow, the public took these straightforward accounts and found a darling criminal to love within them. Part of it may have to do with how vehemently the writers decried some of the Kid’s actions. People, having no exposure to the reality of the killings, took these descriptions and romanticized them into the version of the Billy the Kid that appears in the 1920s. It may also have to do with the outlaw culture of the West at the time. From the lack of surprise in the language of the articles, one can assume that murders and thefts were fairly common. Perhaps the story of Billy the Kid appealed to the outlaw, renegade spirit that was inside of many settlers, and so they took it in turn and imagined it into something greater.

Billy the Kid: Las Vegas Newspaper Accounts of His Career, 1880-1881. Waco: W. M. Morrison, 1958. Print.

The issue of written versus oral history has come up before in class. When discussing Sacagawea, for instance, the question of her death depended entirely on whether one chose to regard documents or stories as more reliable. Historians, when fulfilling their role as presenters of truth, should always have documentary evidence to fall back on, but they should also use oral histories when possible to corroborate or explain their findings.

Written histories and oral accounts provide two different services for historians: the first are facts as presented at the time of writing, and the latter are facts as described at the time of the telling. Both are useful, but both have their flaws. A historical document’s strength is its inability to change. A written history from a reliable source, when combined with other reliable sources, can provide definitive facts from a time period like nothing else. However, a lone written source of questionable reliability is not very useful at all. The danger of these sources comes from the tendency of researchers to regard all documents as both accurate and reliable, without subjecting them to the proper scrutiny. If, for instance, a document is nothing more than a transcription of an oral account, then it’s value changes significantly. Oral accounts do not often provide factual information, but they do offer insight about the values and opinions of the people telling them. As such, a transcription of an oral tale provides a snapshot of the time period, and can be instrumental in tracking a myth’s metamorphosis over time. Interestingly, ‘family histories’ from some sources can fall into the same trap as written sources. Researchers will assume that, since the storyteller is related to the subject, the account is accurate. This tends to happen with Harriet Tubman, as her descendants base many of the stories they tell off of the fictionalized accounts that appeared in the intervening years (312). The property that makes them less desirable than written sources, namely their malleability, makes them ideal for anthropologists or other historians looking to learn about the culture and prevalent attitudes of the time.

Sernett agrees with this position, as he states that “oral history or ‘family lore’ is important, but it does not in and of itself offer proof of authenticity” (313). He applauds Larson’s book, which has its foundation in documents, and supports Humez and Larson’s practice of using “family lore” to contextualize their other sources (313). Essentially, oral histories can provide previously unknown lenses to analyze the past through, but as sources of fact, they play second fiddle to written documents. In the event that an unverifiable oral history comes into conflict with sketchy written documents (as in the case of Sacagawea), it is up to the reader to decide what is correct, as it is impossible to create a certain truth out of the situation. Optimally, the two will work in tandem to create a rich, colorful, verifiable picture of the past.

As we’ve seen in class, often times the most remarkable aspect of a legendary figure is how he or she died. In the instance of Sacagewea and Davy Crockett, their deaths defined their lives, and changing the details of their death could change their place in American history. As such, I decided to investigate Billy the Kid’s death and how it affected his legend.

I continued to use Siringo’s book and checked his details against an article written by Robert Utley on the subject. Utley also wrote Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life, so that may be a useful book to read in the coming weeks. Their accounts matched, with Utley’s providing a bit more detail and insight into the motivations and reactions of the people.

The story goes that after the daring escape I wrote about last week, the Kid lodged around Fort Sumner. Pat Garrett, after the murder of his two deputies, went out after him but was having trouble locating the criminal. One night, he went to a known associate of The Kid’s, Pete Maxwell, with the intention of asking about the Kid. However, as he was in the room, Billy the Kid himself stumbled in, having been startled by the sheriff’s deputies outside, and asked Maxwell who was out there. Noticing the sillouhette of Garrett on Maxwell’s bed, he started backing up, still asking “Quien es?”. Pat Garrett drew his pistol and fired two times, killing the Kid before he had a chance to retaliate (Siringo 128-132) (Utley 418-423).

There are several aspects that make this an entertaining story. The sheer amount of luck it took for both men to stumble into Maxwell’s room at the same time, for instance, would only seem plausible in a movie or a book. Also, the fact that Billy the Kid never fired a shot, despite having his pistol drawn before Garrett’s, lends some humanity to the tale of the ruthless killer (Utley 424). Utley proposes several reasons why the Kid might have refrained from shooting, ranging from unwillingness to shoot strangers to concern over hitting Maxwell. In any event, any of these interpretations softens the image of the Kid.

Utley makes the point that up until his escape and eventual death, Billy the Kid was nothing more than a sensationalized bandit who owed his fame more to the newspapers than to his exploits (424-426). Siringo doesn’t make the same claim, but he also spends much more time describing the final months of the Kid’s death compared to the rest of his life. So once again, a legendary figure becomes defined by his death.

The killing of the Kid manages to make him a tragic hero. Cut down in his youth by cruel fate, people might say. Billy the Kid’s life, capped by his death, allows the population to sigh and say “if only” before dropping the fantasy and returning to their lives.

Utley, Robert M. “Final Days of Billy the Kid.” New Mexico Historical Review 64.4 (1989): 401-26. Print.

Everyone in the public eye, from politicians to rappers, depends on self-promotion to keep their image strong. Harriet Tubman was the same way, though she had the facts to back up her reputation. Her efforts to spread her story helped her become one of the most recognized Americans of all time. Tubman played an important role in manufacturing her own legend by retelling her story, but she also set a precedent that invited others to use her memory, leading to widespread recognition and eventual mythical status.

Tubman, both during and after her active years, often accepted speaking engagements in order to retell the stories that made her famous to begin with. Milton Sernett cites a quote by Emma Telford, saying “as a raconteur, Harriet herself has few equals”, and he also discusses her dozens of appearances at abolitionist meetings (49). These accounts were spread mostly by mouth, creating an oral tradition which morphed and slowly grew to enshrine Tubman as the ‘Black Moses’, a term she created for herself (52). These stories morphed in the retelling, as oral traditions tend to do, and the lack of documented sources led to the vagueness that surrounds most legends.

Unlike most legends, however, the myths began to spread while Tubman was alive. Authors like Sarah Bradford, interested in telling Tubman’s tale, often floundered in the lack of verifiable details as early as 1869, a good 40+ years before Tubman’s death. Here is an instance where Tubman influence her own legend by not taking action. Being illiterate, she never read Bradford’s account, and if someone did question Tubman on the specifics (how many people she rescued, for instance), she did not send corrections to Bradford. This let Bradford’s account become standard source material, despite its less-than-stellar credentials.

Another aspect of Tubman’s behavior that accelerated her legendary status was her willingness to play along with whatever angle people demanded of her. As Jean Humez says, she “was a skillful strategist who could and did present herself in a variety of disguises as the situation demanded” (130). If suffragists wanted to praise the way she broke gender molds, she became General Tubman, the only woman to ever plan and lead a military operation (90). If the writers of civic texts needed a hero who exemplified bravery and conscious and the ideals of the American Revolution, she became Black Moses. This quality is a staple of legendary figures; for example Sacagawea experienced similar versatility after her death and John Brown could be described as either a violent abolitionist or a gentle and paternal figure to the slaves. The difference here, however, is that Harriet Tubman cultivated these images herself, and as such, practically invited others to use her in a similar manner. She became such a potent character because although her story was complicated, writers could distill her down into one of her many facets and use her as a symbol for whatever cause they needed.

One of the startling points that Sernett makes is that authors have purposefully manufactured Tubman into a legend in the years between her time and the present. In the first chapter he points out the incredible amount of children’s books written about her, especially in recent years (32). She has been canonized in civic texts aimed at children, with some authors even saying that her history is worthwhile because “she embodied the great affirmations the marked the birth of the republic” (31). Though she never expressed such feelings herself, her oral storytelling and willingness to fit any role made it easy for authors like Bradford to take her story and run with it.

Stories of John Brown’s kiss reveal little about the man himself, but they do shed light on the attitudes of Americans at the time.

By the time the first story of the kiss reached the press, Brown was already three days dead and resting in a coffin (Finkelman 50). Since, in all probability, the event did not happen, historians would be hard pressed to use it to analyze Brown’s character. The kernel of truth that may have sparked the tale comes from the idea that Brown possibly planted the kiss on a child inside the jail, before leaving for the gallows, but this only shows that Brown identified strongly with blacks, a fact well-established by his career as an abolitionist (Finkelman 52). It does indicate, however, his enthusiasm for martyrdom, as few acts are as symbolic as kissing a child on the forehead. Finkelman states that Brown was actively seeking martyrdom by the time his death was certain (45), to the delight of abolitionist leaders. These actions reveal Brown to be fanatically against slavery, but again, one only need look to Harper’s Ferry to draw the same conclusion.

The story, however, says much about those attempting to propagate it. Anti-slavery spokesmen were happy to have a martyr to rally around, but they needed to take the edge off of his radical, almost insane approach. The story of the kiss, though probably not conceived as such, was the perfect antidote to Brown’s numerous murders. Found on a little read page of New York Tribune, abolitionists quickly adopted it and modified it to suit their needs (Finkelman 50-51). Painters like Louis Ransom wasted no time in portraying Brown as a saint, adding quasi-halos and Biblical imagery to the scene (Trodd 12). The kindly, fatherly image showed a rational man going solemnly to his death, not the brazen zealot who initiated a bloody standoff at Harper’s Ferry. By the time it became truly prolific, everyone would consider that kiss the defining image of Brown’s legacy, rather than the slaughter of the settlers at Pottawatomie Creek. The eagerness with which abolitionists manipulated Brown’s image showed that by the time of his death, they only valued him for his symbolic value, nothing more.

The legend of the kiss filled several needs in the abolitionist movement: it provided a key sentimental picture to draw in supporters, and it was a calm conclusion to Brown’s violent legacy, allowing them to immortalize him without mentioning his moral shortcomings. It also assuaged the fears of the general public, since it proved that the abolitionists were not all about blood and rebellion. Their willingness to accept and retell this story shows that many of them may have been sympathetic to the movement in the first place. In the end, the story of the kiss is less important in John Brown’s life than it is in the anti-slavery movement as a whole.

After finishing the book this week, I looked up Charles Siringo’s entry in the American National Biography. As it turns out, Siringo’s life was similar to Billy the Kid’s, except the author opted to ally with organizations rather than strike out on his own. He spent a lot of time in the West and later joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency, where he had an illustrious career. The ANB sheds some light on his moral inclination, mentioning his involvement in voter fraud, undercover manipulation, and even murder. This lax moral code provides one reason why he had no problem describing Billy the Kid’s killings and robberies as grand and romantic. The ANB also mentions that he is relatively reliable in his writings. However, his career indicates a infatuation with a daring and romantic lifestyle, so this leads me to think that his account of Billy the Kid puts more emphasis on the dashing aspects of the criminal’s life. Furthermore, he had a distinct financial incentives in writing his books, much like Parson Weems or Walt Disney, and it’s likely that this influenced his accuracy.

Dealing with the actual substance of the book, the final chapters were much the same as the rest. They detail a few more of his escapades before his eventual capture, escape, and then death. The Kid’s jailbreak is a particularly interesting story. He evidently ate so little that his hands were able to slip out of the cuffs (115), and then he surprised and shot one of the guards. The other guard’s earlier quip about the shells in his shotgun (“I reckon the man who gets them will feel it” 114) came back to haunt him as the Kid shot him with the same gun. The outlaw then mounts his horse in front of a crowd and gallops off, leaving one man to say, “[I] could have killed him with [my] pistol, but [I] wanted to see him escape.” (119).

This seems to be a quintessential Billy the Kid story. He helps himself out of a jam with ironic flair, then rides off into the sunset with the support of the townspeople. I haven’t looked up any corroborating sources yet, but I would guess that if these events actually happened, Siringo sensationalized them into the account he presents. People like this story because behind all the killing and stealing, the Kid has a distinctly American set of values behind him: self-reliance, resourcefulness, a little showmanship, and popularity. Especially in Siringo’s romanticized account, readers find it easy to root for the Kid and difficult to sympathize with the lawmen. His story appeals to people because it provokes to the same emotions as the American Revolution.

Billy the Kid is a character in history who did not consent. He did not consent to laws, government, or even societal standards. All his murdering and rustling comes down to one thing: he lives like he wants to, not how others tell him to. But, as Dr. McDaniel pointed out in a comment, he manages to stick with his group while doing this. This cohesive-but-independent attitude makes him an ideal representative of the American ideals.

This lifestyle could not go on forever, though. Much like there is tension between the ideas of consent and freedom, the Kid’s ruthlessness and society were at odds. As much as the public tried, they could not ignore the trail of bodies the Kid left in his wake. They reconcile this, however, by remembering the bandit’s death. There seems to be some justice in the way the Kid died, gunned down by the sheriff. This makes the whole saga palatable by letting people say, ‘Well, he got what was coming for him in the end.” The Kid became legendary because his tale embodied so many American views: freedom, loyalty, but in the end, justice.

“He died as he lived” is a fairly common sentiment among mourners. However, this axiom cannot apply all the time, and Davy Crockett’s death might be one such exception. There is still much debate over the circumstances of his death, with many historians treating it as the most essential part of his legend. The event, however, matters less than what came before. Crockett’s death, though the end of a saga, is largely a side note compared to the rest of his legendary career.

The critics of Crisp care about Crockett’s death because to them, Crockett represents the nation. The version that goes down swinging shows tenacity, bravery, and determination, while the version that is captured and executed implies cowardice and suggests that America can be overpowered by another nation. Crisp spent a long time analyzing the letters he received in response to his work and the motivations behind the racist language often used in them. (140). He concluded that people reacted so harshly because of the racial overtones history attributed to the Texan revolution (150). As he mentions in previous chapters, the Texan revolution had little to do with race (41). Instead, racism crept into the retelling as Tejanos and Mexican sympathizers were erased from the record (150). This, combined with the national adoration Crockett gained from Disney’s movie, made the idea of his submission and execution almost unbearable to the public. People, conditioned to racism, did not want to believe that lowly Mexicans could humiliate such a great American. They expressed this through writings and paintings until what they wanted to believe became popularly accepted. Ironically, by doing this, they ignored yet another sympathetic Mexican, General Castrillion, the man who supposedly offered Crockett safety (126). These critics fashion Crockett’s death as the defining moment of his life.

The manner of Crockett’s death is not, however, relevant to his position as a legend. The Disney perspective is certainly romantic, but I am not betrayed by the possibility that Crockett surrendered. One reason for this is that I was born after the time of Disney’s movie, and Crockett has since faded back into relative obscurity. The fears that he addressed in the 50s are now less relevant; Communism is not the looming threat it once was, television has been accepted into society, and the rest of the concerns of post-war America don’t seem to matter. Also, I recognize that he has been pumped up, warped, and inflated over the last several decades, so I tend to regard his portrayal as the quintessential American hero with a little skepticism. As such, his execution at the hands of the Mexicans does not hold much symbolic value. The main lesson the proponents of the ‘fighting death’ want to take away is that independence is worth more than life; however, this point is already made when Crockett chooses to remain with the doomed defenders.

The significant parts of his legend come from his life. The mere fact that he chose to fight at the Alamo displays enough courage and determination for me; the details are not important; he made his decision and accepted the consequences. However he died, his life was what is important.

This week I read half of Charles A. Siringo’s History of Billy the Kid. Siringo was a cowboy of the same era, and he befriended Billy the Kid and his gang. After they parted ways, the author, a huge fan of the Kid, began collecting and recording stories about his exploits into this book. Published in 1920, it gives some insight as to what made the Kid so legendary to begin with, and it could also provide some source material for some of the legends about Billy the Kid.

The overall picture given of the Kid is one of a gallant criminal. He only kills when those who “deserve” it and takes the honor of himself and his friends seriously. For instance, most of the men he kills have either insulted him, stolen from him, or wronged his friends. The victims who do not fall into any of these categories are Mexicans, Jews, and Indians. By limiting his descriptions of violence to people readers dislike anyway, Siringo manages to avoid the stigma of murder and even garners support for the Kid’s actions.

Siringo also paints a picture of loyalty. Time and time again, the Kid rescues his friends and avenges their deaths.  He breaks his friend Segura out of jail (21), he goes back into the desert to find his partner O’Keefe (30), and he swears to “kill every man who took part in the murder of his friend Tunstall” (39). Society respected these values, and so they ignored the less savory parts of the Kid’s exploits.

Furthermore, the tone of the book lends to Billy’s rise as a legend. The author constantly refers to him as a “young hero,” which encourages readers to think of him in the same way. Also, the writing style is detached and clinical, though this may just be the style of 1920. In any event, the Kid shrugs off wounds and 72 hour waterless-stretches with stoic strength, further enhancing his larger than life persona.

Siringo fits into the Parson Weems mold here, building a historical figure into a legendary character. His motivation seems a little hazy, though. It’s not likely he felt Americans needed to model themselves after this outlaw, though he did have an enormous amount of respect for the Kid. Perhaps he magnified the Kid’s story in order to give Americans a common history. Prohibition was just starting up in the 1920s, so it’s possible that he felt a little rule-breaking could even be beneficial for Americans. In the coming week I hope read the final few chapters of the book, mostly to do with the Kid’s death, find some more background on Siringo and the time period of this piece, and discuss some of the legends he mentions here.