Friday Friends: Billy the Kid Lives Beyond His Grave
CowboySpirit.TV- This week's edition of Friday Friends features an article from the Baltimore Post-Examiner, "Billy the Kid Lives Beyond His Grave" written by Stephen Goode.
When it comes to American legends can any match Billy the Kid’s? Five foot eight inches and weighing a slight 140 pounds when he died at the age of 21, he hardly cut the figure of a tough and mean “desperado,” the word he was called while still alive.
Those who knew Billy invariably described him as “jolly,” a fun person to be around, a man who loved to dress well, and did, as often as he could, and who had small hands and small feet, and a soft and pleasant voice – not the stuff that makes it easy to build a bad man image.
Billy (1859-1881) did indeed do some small-scale cattle rustling and petty thievery from his early teens on, but so did many others in the wild and lawless New Mexico of his time. And he became famously skilled with gun and rifle at a time when those abilities were widely admired – but, again, so were many others.
What Billy did that initially caught the imagination of America was kill men both in one-on-one shoot-outs and with his gang, each instance of which (and with a few added, and their nastiness magnified) made the Eastern press, and began to make his name familiar.
[Read the rest of the article at http://baltimorepostexaminer.com/billy-the-kid-lives-beyond-his-grave/2012/05/22]
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