Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1991
Abstract
Billy the Kid's last trick was his best. Handcuffed, shackled, and condemned to hang, he overwhelmed and killed two deputies and rode, unharmed, out of Lincoln, New Mexico. Months later, in July 1881, the twenty-one-year-old fugitive would stumble into Sheriff Pat Garrett's waiting firearms. But by then the surface had already been primed for the legend that has since been embellished in dime novels and movies- a legend whose veneers award-winning historian Robert M. Utley (Frontier Regulars, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation) strips away. His Billy the Kid is a scrupulously researched, well-paced-but slightly diffuse-biography of the Southwest's premier outlaw.
Comments
Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 11:4 (Fall 1991). Copyright © 1991 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.