beaglemagipose - The Monday Morning Memo

“Patrick Henry McCarty was just another wild kid in the Five Points section of New York in the early 1870s when he heard the siren call of the American Southwest. The Five Points was the most disgraceful slum in the United States, dense with alcohol, poverty, drugs, and murder, and one fine morning the teenaged McCarty – as Huck Finn had in another context – decided to light out for the territory. He made his way to New Mexico, assumed the name of William Bonney, found work as a ranch hand and sheepherder, and ended up as one of the pistoleros in the famous Lincoln County War. He was soon called Billy the Kid, and supposedly bragged that he had killed 21 men by the time he himself was 21. He never did turn 22. Sheriff Pat Garrett gunned him down one July day in 1881, the same year that Henry James published The Portrait of a Lady. In a way, McCarty’s early ending didn’t matter. As Billy the Kid of the American Southwest, Patrick Henry McCarty had found immortality.”

- Pete Hamill, the opening paragraph of the foreword to Revenge of the Saguaro by Tom Miller

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