American History Tellers - Billy the Kid | Man, Myth, Legend | 4

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

Billy the Kid has become one of the most iconic figures of the American West. But many details of his life remain unknown or heavily debated among scholars and historians, from his childhood prior to his arrival in New Mexico, to the circumstances surrounding his death.On this episode, Lindsay speaks with Chris Wimmer, creator and host of Legends of the Old West, a podcast about the outlaws, gunslingers and lawmen who shaped the American frontier. Chris and Lindsay dive deep into the Billy the Kid story, both as portrayed in Hollywood and in the history books, to try to separate truth from fiction and reveal the young man behind the myth.Listen ad free with Wondery+. Join Wondery+ for exclusives, binges, early access, and ad free listening. Available in the Wondery App. https://wondery.app.link/historytellersPlease support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's a warm night in June 1880 in the town of Fort Sumner, New Mexico. You're 16 years old, from a well-to-do family of ranchers. Tonight, you're dressed in a tight-fitting gown with a single rose tucked into your raven black hair. You're attending the weekly town dance at a spacious adobe hall, a popular event that draws folks from as far as 50 miles away. Ranchers, cowboys, and even outlaws are welcome,

as long as they're courteous to the ladies. You and your sweetheart have been dancing up a storm, but now both of you step outside for some fresh air. You inhale the perfume scent of oleander riding the gentle breeze as you feel your beau put his arm around you. What a lovely night. Not as lovely as you, darling. You turn and gaze into

the soft blue eyes of your paramour, Billy the Kid. Outlaw or not, your head over heels in love with him. You're such a sweet talker, but I saw you dancing with those other girls. Those gals don't mean a thing to me, honey. I just like to dance. Have a good time. You know that. It's true. Billy has a reputation as a ladies' man. You're used to fighting for his attention with all the other young Latina women at these dances, but you're not worried about that. You know you're his favorite. But his other reputation, now that does concern you. You can't believe Billy is the vicious killer people say he is. He's too charming. He's too sweet. He's a perfect gentleman. But you

know there are plenty of men who would like to see him behind bars or worse. Billy senses that you've grown serious. He takes your hand. Now, what's the matter? Your face has gone all strange. Are you really going to stay here with me in Fort Sumner like you promised? I know the law is looking for you. You should probably hide out in Mexico, but... Of course I'm staying. I'm not going anywhere, no matter how many lawmen are on my tail. Be honest. You know it's not just the law. It's my brother Pete. Your older brother is one of the wealthiest ranchers in New Mexico. He and Billy were once friends, but they had a falling out. Peter is protective of you and has a dark view of your budding relationship with the notorious outlaw. But Billy brushes away your concern with his boyish,

buck-toothed grin. Nah, Pete will come around. Come on, let's not miss the next dance. Billy plants a tender kiss on your nose and then leads you back inside. You feel giddy whenever you're with Billy. If he asks you to elope with him tomorrow, you'd happily go. But deep down, you're still conflicted. You know he doesn't want to steal you away without Pete's approval. But if he stays in these parts, he could be a sitting duck for the men that want him dead. From the team behind American History Tellers comes a new book, The Hidden History of the White House.

Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, intimate moments, and shocking scandals that shaped our nation. From the War of 1812 to Watergate. Available now wherever you get your books. Kill List is a true story of how I ended up in a race against time Get your books. From Wondery Plus. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history, your story. Decades after Billy the Kid's death,

Paulita Maxwell denied that she ever had a relationship with the famous outlaw. But she also admitted that she had been infatuated with him and would have married him if he'd asked. Billy's romance with Paulita is just one of the many parts of his story that have been debated, disputed, and mythologized. Some historians believe that Billy got Paulita pregnant shortly before his death, and the existence of the love child was covered up by Paulita's family. Others believe they were simply youthful sweethearts who met at local dances. And still others believe they were never a couple at all.

The role Paulita's brother, Pete Maxwell, played in Billy's death is also in doubt. Most historians agree that Maxwell was present when Pat Garrett shot and killed Billy, but the extent to which Maxwell aided Garrett, or his motive for doing so, is open to debate. Here to discuss the myths, realities, and uncertainties in Billy the Kid's story is my friend and fellow podcaster, Chris Wimmer. Chris is the host and creator of the myths, realities, and uncertainties in Billy the Kid's story is my friend and fellow podcaster, Chris Wimmer. Chris is the host and creator of the podcast Legends of the Old West, on which he presented a 10-part series on Billy the Kid in 2018. He also brings with him 18 years of experience in film and journalism, which gives him a unique combination of knowledge about both Billy the Kid of the history books and Billy the Kid as portrayed on screen. Here's our conversation.

Chris Wimmer, welcome to American History Tellers. Thank you. I appreciate it. So now on your podcast, Legends of the Old West, you look at classic stories, outlaws, lawmen, everything from the Battle of Little Bighorn to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. What drew you to creating this podcast that tells these stories of the Old West? Well, our family always loved the Old West. I guess our family was kind of steeped in the Old West from movies and TV. And I think what really drew me to starting the podcast was that I realized at some point

when I was becoming addicted to podcasts that I was really only informed by the movies that I had seen. Some of the classic movies, the John Wayne movies and others that are theoretically based on true stories like Tombstone and Young Guns and all kinds of other films. And I realized I hadn't really read that much about the true story that had fed into the movie. What I thought I knew of the true story came from the movies. So I thought it might be really interesting to start my own podcast and do a bunch of research and try to tell the true story so the people who were out there like me could then have something to compare it to. If you loved the movie Tombstone or the movie Young Guns, then I would give you the true version. You can see how the two compared. And if I've got this right, you're kind of right at ground zero for the Old West.

Where are you living these days? Currently in Phoenix, Arizona. Yes. And when I started the podcast, I was living in Texas. So I've got two hotspots of the Old West here that I consider kind of dual ground zeros. You also worked in the film industry for a while, which probably put you in California for a spat. Do you think that played into your love of these old Western movies?

To some degree, yeah. And I have a couple of specific examples. Yes, I worked in the film and television industry for about 14 years. And so I was living in Los Angeles at the time. And so I would specifically seek out places where some of the older Western movies were filmed. There's a place called Lone Pine, California. It's a very small town about three hours north of Los Angeles. And it's very famously at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. So the mountain range and some of the unique hills around that area and these huge boulder formations featured in tons of early Westerns and some other very famous movies. I mean, for people who might enjoy more modern films,

there's a very famous scene in, I believe, the first Iron Man, where Robert Downey Jr. stands in front of this big mountain range, and I think he's demonstrating a big weapon, and a huge explosion happens right behind him. That scene was filmed in the famous foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains

around the town of Lone Pine, where they also filmed a ton of Westerns. So I would specifically try to find these places and go walk around and try to envision what it would be like to have filmed some of those old Westerns there. And I guess as a slight addendum to that, it's also where one of the early, if not the first episode of the Lone Ranger was filmed right in that area. So there's all kinds of places in California where you can dip into the Western side of it and yet also experience some of the true Old West if you really search for it. So you're pretty steeped in the Hollywood and mass media version of the Old West. So I suppose that's probably where you first encountered the story of Billy the Kid, right? Yeah, absolutely. It was the movie Young Guns that came out in 1988, but I was probably too young to have watched it at that time. I doubt my parents would have let me watch it. But three or four years later, at some point along that line, I found the film and

it quickly became one of my favorites. What was it about Young Guns in particular that caught your attention? Oh, man. It's, you know, being 12, 13, 14 years old, I'm sure it was the fun action scenes. I have no doubt were great. Some of the characters and some of the dialogue I just loved. You know, I didn't know anything about the true story of Billy the Kid at that time. It was just the sheer fun of that movie. The characters, the one-liners, the action scenes, that's what I'm sure really jumped out to me at that age. So Young Guns tells a prototypically embellished story of Billy the Kid and others.

When did you start digging into the true story and what drew you to Billy in particular? Well, I think to answer the second half first, Billy is one of those icons of, I guess, I would say overall American history. And certainly if you narrow it down to the Old West period, then he is one of the top names, certainly one of the top two or three outlaws in American history if people want to start thinking about them. So it was easy to know that at some point I was going to have to tell the story of Billy the Kid. If you're doing a podcast about legends of the Old West, you have to talk about Billy the Kid at some point. And so I chose to do the story of Jesse James first for other reasons, but I knew eventually I was going to circle to Billy and it didn't take very long.

And I guess in a strange coincidence, he's also such an infamous character in American history that I told his story first on my other podcast called Infamous America, and then also had to switch it over to Legends of the Old West and do it both ways because he fits so perfectly in both categories. Let's talk about your telling of the story because you dedicated, as you just mentioned, put this story on two podcasts and told it over 10 episodes. I want to start with your understanding of the Billy the Kid's story, which is deep, by contrasting it with the film that initially caught your attention. So let's just think about Young Guns and discuss how accurate that film is with the actual history of Billy the Kid. We could do an entire interview about that and really dissect it piece by piece. But I think

to try and stay on the top level a little bit and to not, you know, for people who maybe haven't seen the film yet, not to get too deep and potentially ruin certain things about it. I would say the core of most of the sequences is roughly accurate. I think throughout most of the film, you know, if a certain person killed a certain other person, that probably was how it happened in real life, or this person did kill that person in real life. Maybe exactly how it happened in the film was not how it happened in real life, but that's typically how things the film was not how it happened in real life, but that's typically how things get embellished by the film industry.

They take an interesting scene from a person's real life and then they figure out ways to exaggerate it and embellish it and make it look better on film. I think as you work through the film, when you get toward the end of the movie, that's when it starts to take more dramatic liberties than some earlier parts. And once you get toward the last 20 to 30 minutes of it, some of the things you see in the film

are loosely based on things that happened in real life, and others are just simply made up for dramatic value. So generally, some of the sequences all have a little bit of core of truth to them, but then as you get going through the film, it strays from the truth a little bit more. The other things that the film takes some liberties with are not huge deals, but, you know, lots of films do this in terms of, and it really comes down to casting. So the film chose actors to play certain parts and the actors were nowhere near the age of the real people i think that's the chief discrepancy you find between real life and the movie specifically the two characters of the the bad guy the arch bad guy lg murphy played by jack palance and then the kind of father figure

to the young outlaws of the young guns johnstall, though the two actors who played those, it was Jack Palance who played LG Murphy and Terrence Stamp who played John Tunstall. They were significantly older than their real life counterparts. And so that's where you start to see the most differences in terms of casting. And some of the other cast members maybe played smaller roles in the real life story, but were kind of reworked for the telling of the movie. I think Lou Diamond Phillips' character, Jose Chavez y Chavez, had a much smaller role in the real story than he did in the film.

And so when it comes to discrepancies or differences between the real life and the movie, it's a lot of things like that, luckily, kind of things that you can, you don't really get super fixated on or you could kind of just slough off and suspend your disbelief. It doesn't really, again, until the end,

just make things up from scratch. The Billy the Kid story in particular has been embellished not really just by Hollywood. It was augmented and stretched from the very beginning. This is one of the stories of Americana that became legend almost the first moment it hit print. How did you, when you were researching your series, begin to tease out what was clearly fact from clearly fiction? Oh, well, that's, yeah, that's always the first step is, I guess the way I phrase it, is always researching the research to try to figure out which books written about any given topic seem to be reputable. And several of them were written many years ago, some of them decades

ago, even generations ago. So trying to figure out which ones are respectable and reputable is always the first chore. And so when it came down to it, I initially started reading about all kinds of different books about Billy the Kid and eventually landed on three or four books that I thought were pretty reputable. And they both, all of those books came from primarily two authors, Frederick Nolan and Robert Utley. The more I read about the story of Billy the Kid, the more it sounded like those two authors should be the two primary sources of information. Frederick Nolan specifically, and I'm reaching back into my memory, so I hope I'm correct about this. I believe Frederick Nolan dedicated a huge portion of his life to researching the story of Billy the Kid.

So when I started reading their books, they really felt right. They have to go a little bit by feel. They felt authentic. And once you start reading about how much time a certain author dedicates to a certain topic, you think, man, they almost certainly know what they're talking about. So I relied very heavily on books by Frederick Nolan and Robert Utley to produce my series. You know, I'm thinking about the general story of Billy the Kid and Outlaws in general. These were stories that at the time were extraordinarily powerful and popular, reaching readers in Europe and captivating them there, even as it was current events. Why do you think outlaws in the American West fixated them then

and these authors now who dedicate their lives to it? Since I've done so many of these stories, and I'm constantly interested in that exact same idea, what is it about people around the world who want to hear about the stories of not only just outlaws, but American outlaws? Whether the people listening live in Norway or New Zealand, what draws them to these stories? What I can guess is that there's an innate quality

in us as humans that we want to hear about rebels and outlaws and the bad guys, for lack of a better phrase, a very generalized phrase. I think there's something innate in humans that draws us to those types of stories. And I think if we were going to get a little deeper into it, it would maybe be, I view it as kind of a sense of freedom, that the people who play by their own rules,

and right or wrong, it's certainly, I view it as kind of a sense of freedom, that the people who play by their own rules. And right or wrong, it's certainly, if you don't play by the rules and laws of society, it's illegal and you can go to jail and there can be very severe consequences. But I think we're still drawn to people who play by their own rules, do what they want to do, when they want to do it, they make up their own rules and go with it. Whether we all recognize that that's illegal and the things that those people are doing are not only just illegal and bad, but sometimes very terrible, it's still a point of fascination. And I think it goes to the kind of desire to live free and by your own guidance. You mentioned that some of the results of these outlaws' behavior precipitated severe consequences. And I don't think you could

be more severe than the killings and murders that happened. These are clearly men and sometimes women who took things to extremes. In any other circumstance, they would be cold-blooded murderers. And outlaws were certainly to be feared. But they became folk heroes too and were celebrated by the public. Why do you think this dichotomy happened? And where does Billy the Kid fit into this spectrum of hero and villain? Yeah, I think some of that is due to maybe just the misinformation that gets handed down from generation to generation and ends up making a good story. Like there's many times you'll hear about the supposed Robin Hood quality to Jesse James. I didn't find a whole lot of evidence that if we apply the classic Robin Hood formula to Jesse James, that Jesse robbed from the rich and gave

to the poor. He definitely did the first half. I just don't know how much he did the second half. But because that was a story that was passed down from generation to generation, those types of guys, Jesse James gets mythologized as more than a guy who robbed banks and trains and hurt people in the process and killed people. And he gets turned into a kind of folk hero, like you're saying. And I think in Billy the Kid's scenario, I would guess that a lot of people view him as the kind of the everyman. He's a quirky young guy. He's not classically handsome. He's kind of goofy looking, but apparently he was also very charismatic. And I think he can represent the average everyday person. You know, if you want to read into it, he didn't have any military training like Jesse James did.

You know, he didn't work with this group of old time friends who all had a military background. They kind of formed this gang together. He was kind of a misfit and a loner to a large extent, even though he then found a very close group of friends. And so I think his kind of natural every man quality is what seems to draw people to him. That's my guess, anyway. Despite all the terrible things he ended up doing, we gravitate toward his story because maybe there's something more on a personal level that's identifiable. In November 1991, media tycoon Robert Maxwell

mysteriously vanished from his luxury yacht in the Canary Islands. But it wasn't just his body that would come to the surface in the days that followed. It soon emerged that Robert's business was on the brink of collapse, and behind his facade of wealth and success was a litany of bad investments, mounting debt, and multi-million dollar fraud. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show Business Movers. We tell the true stories of business leaders

who risked it all, the critical moments that define their journey and the ideas that transform the way we live our lives. In our latest series, a young refugee fleeing the Nazis arrives in Britain determined to make something of his life. Taking the name Robert Maxwell, he builds a publishing and newspaper empire

that spans the globe. But ambition eventually curdles into desperation, and Robert's determination to succeed turns into a willingness to do anything to get ahead. Follow Business Movers wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. For more than two centuries, the White House has been the stage for some of the most dramatic scenes in American history. Inspired by the hit podcast American History Tellers, Wondery and William Morrow present the new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, the world-altering decisions, and shocking scandals that have shaped our nation. You'll be there when the very foundations of the White House are laid in 1792, and you'll watch as the British burn it down in 1814.

Then you'll hear the intimate conversations between FDR and Winston Churchill as they make plans to defeat Nazi forces in 1941. And you'll be in the Situation Room when President Barack Obama approves the raid to bring down the most infamous terrorist in American history. Order The Hidden History of the White House now in hardcover or digital edition, wherever you get your books. Well, let's contrast Billy the Kid with someone who clearly isn't a folk hero. I know that you're working on a series right now on your podcast on John Wesley Harden. He's not a well-known name. Who's Harden? Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up.

When you talk about some of the things that a lot of these outlaws did, they would be considered serial killers and prolific criminals and horrible people, probably in today's day and age. But because a lot of these things happened 150, 160 years ago, time has a way of massaging the severity of it.

And John Wesley Harden is probably an interesting example that he was, it seems by most accounts, if not all accounts, just a cold-blooded killer. His autobiography, he seems almost proud at the number of people he killed and who he killed specifically. And so he, as far as I can tell, didn't rob banks and trains, didn't really have any kind of outlaw agenda. He just killed his first man when he was around 15 years old. And from that point forward, he was just, I don't know how else to put it. He just found himself in situations where he reached for a gun and chose to shoot and kill before any other option. If the numbers are to be believed, he admits to, I believe, 25 killings,

and the number could be north of 40, which would put him up there as one of the most prolific killers in history. And he seems to be a good-looking guy who was also charismatic, so there's an interesting dichotomy there, too, that he wasn't just a hardened, angry, merciless killer, but he did have that side to him where he would shoot first and ask questions later. So he's an interesting character who's known as basically just a killer, though he has to fall into the outlaw category, as opposed to some of the other outlaws who robbed banks or trains or rustled cattle or anything else.

I'm sure over the course of your research and the writing of these 10 episodes on Billy the Kid, that you got a feeling for who Billy was. More than just the outlaw, more than the myth, more than the goofy, young, charismatic kid. Who do you think Billy was? What was driving him? I guess I view him as a young man who was thrust into the outlaw life through circumstance, that he had a relatively difficult childhood, but not a terrible childhood. I don't think he was necessarily abused or anything like that, but he didn't have the easiest upbringing. And he fell into a classic

scenario that lots of people can identify with, where he ended up with the wrong group of friends at a young age and started doing some illegal things but small-time illegal things and it feels like his early life was just one thing after another one thing led to another and he was somewhat propelled forward through circumstance and not through a desire to be evil or to live the outlaw lifestyle or to do X, Y, and Z that would qualify him as an outlaw. But eventually, I believe he began to embrace it. So I think he started as kind of a relatively innocent young man who was thrust into various situations. But then at some point, he started to embrace the outlaw lifestyle. And I think that really came after the Lincoln County War. I think he probably, when he joined John Tunstall's outfit, he probably found, I'm guessing, what he believed to be his first genuine group of friends in the men who worked and the Tunstall faction began and sparked those years of violence, I think that gave him a sense of purpose. And then when that all ended, he was purposeless,

I guess. He didn't have much to latch on to. And by that point, he had lived more or less outside the law for quite a while. I think at that point, he really started to embrace the outlaw lifestyle and took cattle rustling more seriously and started to do more illegal things and began to embrace the lifestyle of an outlaw rather than having been almost brought up in it or wanting to do that from day one. So I got this sense of a complex guy who started as one thing and then through his series of events in his life ended up as something else. You describe him as, I guess, a reluctant criminal and then a resigned outlaw.

There's some sort of progression. I was wondering if you could tell us maybe an anecdote or two that describes both, is emblematic of how he just fell into the wrong crowd and then maybe how he embraced his fate. The early days go back to his time in Silver City, New Mexico. He ended up befriending someone who got him into some petty robberies. He ended up stealing something or at the very least hiding something that was stolen by his friend. And the sheriff or the marshal of the town caught him and put him in jail as a scare tactic. The marshal or the sheriff didn't really mean to arrest him.

I mean, he didn't mean to arrest him, but I don't think he necessarily meant to throw the book at him and go all the way through the legal process and put a very young Billy the Kid in jail. But Billy didn't know that. And he was so terrified of the circumstances in which he found himself that he broke out of jail and basically went on the run. And that was the beginning of what ended up being his outlaw career, that he fell in with a not so great group of

friends and did some small things, but nothing too severe. But he got caught and his other friend didn't. And because he was so scared of what might happen, he felt his only choice was to flee. And once he fled and was out on his own, he had to find a way to make a living. So he then naturally fell in with other people who could teach him how to get money through either stealing horses and cattle or stealing money from other people. And so I believe that that kind of circumstantial beginning is an example of what I was talking about previously. It doesn't really seem to have been born bad, so to speak, or had a really strong desire to rob and steal from other people.

It just kind of happened. But then later in life, toward the end of his life, after the events of the Lincoln County War, when he really is the leader of his own small gang, he very willingly turned to cattle rustling and ended up in shootouts with various posses who were trying to catch him and ended up killing some lawmen who had put him in jail. So he demonstrated a willingness to take someone else's life, though he viewed it as a way for him to escape his situation or to save himself, but it still cost other people their lives.

And it doesn't seem like he was necessarily hesitant or remorseful for that. It seems like by the time he got to the, you know, 1879, 1880, certainly 1881, he was much more willing to do pretty much anything that would allow him to stay free. And so it feels like at that point, he had really embraced the outlaw life. One of Billy's fellow outlaws was Tom O'Folliard. We didn't actually cover him much in our series, but in your podcast, you go into great detail, not to just show Billy's life,

but the lives and deaths of almost all the regulators in the Bonnie gang. Could you describe the killing of Tom O'Folliard? He was Billy the Kid's best friend. It's a tragic story for sure. And this is kind of the beginning of the end of the Billy the Kid story. It happens in late 1880, in December of 1880, about seven months before the end of the Billy the Kid story.

And by the accounts I read, Tom O'Folliard was one of the closest friends, one of Billy's closest friends. And so by December of 1880, Pat Garrett was elected sheriff of Lincoln County in November of 1880. But once he was elected in November, all the powers that be in the area basically gave him the keys and said, here, drive. Catch Billy the Kid. Do whatever you have to do to bring him and his gang to justice. So for a period of weeks, Pat Garrett tracked Billy the Kid and tried to catch him and failed a couple different times. And by mid-December 1880, Garrett just decided that's enough. We keep missing this guy. We can't keep chasing him. We've got to bring him to us. So Pat Garrett and his posse of, I believe, roughly 25 men, don't quote me on that figure, but I think it was a decent-sized posse,

they set up in the town of Fort Sumner. At that time, in 1880, 1881, that was Billy's headquarters. That was his home base. So Pat Garrett and his posse set up in mid-December in Fort Sumner. They pay a local man to ride out to an unknown hideout, or at least this gentleman knows where he can go find Billy the Kid. So Pat Garrett pays this local gentleman to ride out to Billy's hideout and tell him, the posse that has been in town looking for you is now gone. It's safe to come in. Don't worry about it. So the man rides out, he delivers the message, he comes back. And in the meantime, Pat Garrett and his posse men have set up around the town and they're laying a trap and an ambush for Billy the Kid. So on December 19th, at about 11 p.m. is what the sources say, Billy and his gang

ride toward Fort Sumner. And apparently there was a thick fog hanging throughout the area. So it really does set up like a great movie scene where Pat Garrett and his posse men are hiding in different places around the old Fort Sumner, watching the road into town. There's a thick fog hanging over everything. And this group of six riders comes slowly through the fog. When Pat Garrett sees the six riders, the six outlaws of Billy's gang, he shouts out and yells for them to drop their weapons and come in with their hands up.

Billy and his gang open fire at the sound of Garrett's voice and in the direction of Garrett. And that starts a gun battle. So the posse men start firing from their hiding positions the six outlaws are caught in the crossfire they're firing in all directions it must look like a strobe light show of these muzzle flashes and bullets flying through the air in this thick fog and late at night and in the middle of this the six outlaws spin their horses around and gallop out of town to escape so now pat garrett's guys are in town not knowing exactly what the outcome of their intended trap and ambush is but a few minutes later they see a lone horse ride back in

through the fog and there's a figure slumped over the horse. And as the horse rides into town, it turns out to be Tom O'Folliard in the saddle who slides off the saddle and crashes to the ground right there in the street. So it had turned out that one of the posse men had shot Tom. He had ridden out with the rest of his gang, but as he started to lose strength and started to die, his horse stopped and turned around and walked back into town. And that's when the posse men found him. They picked him up and carried him into a building, and he sustained for about another 30 minutes. They gave him some water and tried to talk to him and get information from him. And apparently he did not much more than just spat curses at

Pat Garrett until he finally passed away 30 minutes later. So to the best of our knowledge, that's the story of the end of Tom O'Folliard's life. A lot of this recounting is very detailed. And I'm sure, as we know, the historical record is spotty and based on recollections from years after the actual events. And this has led to a great deal of debate about what is the facts of the matter here. So when you were recounting this story, what were the most hotly debated topics? And I guess the hardest to get right. Well, I think the easy one to latch on to is the end of Billy the Kid's life.

I think that will always be the most hotly debated element of his life, his actual death. There were so few witnesses, I mean, potentially only two, one of whom was Pat Garrett, who supposedly and probably did shoot and kill Billy the Kid in Fort Sumner. And the other was Pete Maxwell, though now that we're talking about it, my memory's failing me and I'm not 100% sure if Pete Maxwell was still in the room, but I'm pretty sure he was. And so they're just simply very few witnesses. And because one of them was the man who killed Billy the Kid, largely you have to take his word for it. And that's where the biased information comes into play. And people who

simply don't like Pat Garrett and idolize Billy the Kid might be inclined to not believe Pat Garrett and his story. And then, of course, many years later, a gentleman popped up in Texas calling himself Brushy Bill Roberts, who claimed to be Billy the Kid, had claimed to have survived the shootout with Pat Garrett and gone on the run and hidden in Texas for many years. And so when that story came to light, it just added fuel to the fire. And it really gave people the idea that maybe Billy didn't die. Those who were already inclined to disbelieve Pat Garrett now had further ammunition. And even though Brushy Bill Roberts' story has tons of inconsistencies and tons of

holes in it, there are certain things in it. And now that I'm saying it out loud, I can't remember specifically what they are, but I remember when I read his account, there were specific things that were intriguing. We thought, man, there aren't too many people who should know this fact or that fact, but this guy, Brushy Bill Roberts, does. But at the same time, there are other things that should have been easily known to a guy like Brushy Bill Roberts that he struggled with. So it's the inconsistency just adds to the mystery, and it allows people to believe whatever they want to believe because there's really no way to prove or disprove any of it. Is that part of the allure, the mystery, the romance? I mean, if we knew the actual events to the letter,

would Billy the Kid be famous? Yeah, I think that's a great question. And it's hard to know if he would be famous. You're probably right. I guess he probably would not be as famous. I guess we could say it that way, that you're absolutely right. The mystery and the mystique is 100% part of the story. And that's what definitely an element that draws people to any story about the Old West is that it's kind of the perfect scenario where there's enough verifiable information, but enough stuff that's also lost in the mystery that you have this perfect balance where we don't know enough so we can kind of fill in the holes with whatever we want to believe, but we do know enough and the

stuff we do know is really intriguing and really interesting. So I think the mystery can draw people to it just as well as the facts. And you're probably right that if we did know every single element of Billy the Kid's story, it might not be as interesting as it is now. I'm Tristan Redman, and as a journalist, I've never believed in ghosts. But when I discovered that my wife's great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door to where I grew up, I started wondering about the inexplicable things that happened in my childhood bedroom. When I tried to find out more, I discovered that someone who slept in my room after me, someone I'd never met, was visited by the ghost of a faceless woman. So I started digging into the murder in my wife's family, and I unearthed

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You can listen to The Best Idea Yet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. You said something earlier that caught my attention, that the outlaws of the Old West are specifically outlaws of American culture, and yet they have a global fan base. The interest is, you know, without borders. And I'm trying to think, I'm sure with a little more thought I can come up with better examples, but there are very few non-American topics that endure in the same way. I suppose that there are samurai or medieval knights, but what do you think it is about Old West American outlaws that capture the imagination so much? I think it's because it's one of the things that I believe is, I guess it's not entirely unique

to America, but it's mostly isolated in America. There are very few other nations and very few other cultures who have a portion of their history that is like the American West. That just simply didn't happen in lots of places. There's a version of it that happened in Australia with an outlaw like Ned Kelly, who is considered kind of a very similar figure to Jesse James. This type of history just didn't exist in almost every other place on earth. It is almost unique to America. And so if you want to hear about these types of figures and these types of events, the only place to find them is the American West, by and large. I mean, like I just said, there's some of this is very similar to what happened in Australia in the 1870s and 1880s. But by and large, these stories are isolated and unique to America. And because of that,

I think that it's the mystery of it, I think to tie into what we were just talking about with Billy the Kid, that if you grew up in Scandinavia, Norway, for instance, you don't have any point of comparison. So this is a total unknown and just probably a fascinating topic

that you can't find anywhere else. And so I think it's that uniqueness that really draws people to it. The deeper you get into it, like I mentioned in a previous answer with this sense of freedom and riding the open country and the scenery of it. I have no doubt that once you start researching the American West and you start looking at pictures of Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, Texas, all these different places, you get drawn in by the scenery and that adds to the mystique and the romanticism of it. So I think you tie a lot of things together when you talk about the interest of the Old West and then specifically the outlaws. There are also things that were unique to American culture, even though we might not have been the first to do them, the way we did them were unique, like the cattle drive. You know,

there aren't that many places on earth that had cattle drives like we did them, and towns that were set up the way the towns in the West were set up, with a marshal or a sheriff walking the streets. I mean, the stuff that you see in movies is based on what actually happened. As a quick example, Wild Bill Hickok, when he was a marshal in two different towns in Kansas, walked right down the middle of the street purposefully because by that point in his life, he was so well known and so many people would have built a reputation by killing him that he couldn't afford to walk down a boardwalk and walk past a dark alley where anybody could shoot him. So he purposely walked right down the

middle of the street with two guns on his hips and a shotgun or a rifle in his arms to see anybody coming. And because he did that kind of thing in real life and other marshals did similar things, that stuff kind of filtered into the movies and we eventually all saw it or read about it in books or, you know, newspaper articles. And so it added to the mystique. I mean, you can't have the Old West as we think of it and as we know it without the weaponry. The Colt revolver and the Winchester rifle

and the Henry rifle, you know, are still iconic weapons and they're still coveted. I mean, I think Pat Garrett's gun, the pistol that he supposedly shot Billy the Kid with, it recently sold at auction for more than $6 million. And granted, that's much more about a piece of memorabilia, but it's a gun. It's not a hat. It's not a badge. It's not a pair of boots or anything like that. It's a weapon that is so valuable specifically because it killed someone who was potentially famous. He potentially killed someone who was famous, however you want to frame it.

So you certainly can't separate the weaponry from the overall story. And it's, but I think it's some of those things, all of those things combined, the scenery, the weaponry, things like cattle drives, the towns, and the actions of people who obviously were not trying to garner attention. Wild Bill didn't necessarily care how he looked when he was walking down the middle of the street. He cared about surviving in a town where potentially any armed man was a danger to him. I'm glad you mentioned the movies again, because in this final question, I'm going to return to them. Certainly, the Old West is fertile ground for Hollywood and with new TV shows like 1883 and movies like The Power of the Dog West are certainly grittier than many of the 1950s Westerns. But still, I wonder, are they keeping the culture and heritage of the American West alive and maybe telling a truer version of it, or are they still romanticizing the period? I think it can be a little bit of both.

I think every form of entertainment, every medium evolves with the tendencies of the audience. At the time when John Wayne was making Westerns, audiences probably would have reacted harshly if they had seen lots of blood and gore in the movies and seen harsh language, which reflected much more the reality of life of the characters that John Wayne was portraying,

but it wouldn't have worked for that audience at that time. Our interests and our tendencies have evolved over time. And so now for a modern audience, they're more interested in not just violence or vulgar language for the sake of entertainment value, but because it probably more accurately reflects what it was actually like back then. I think the example that I always like to go to

is the TV show Deadwood, which became famous for the incredible level of vulgarity with the language. And it probably was not, people in the real Deadwood were probably not vulgar to the extent that you saw in that TV show. But it was probably pretty close and heightened to a Hollywood extent for protective reasons. reasons that if you could simply end an argument with words instead of reaching for a gun which was such an easy thing to do back then then everybody stayed alive to keep drinking at the saloon and so i think you can take modern westerns and make them a little more violent and a little more vulgar a little more action-packed whatever you want to do to them and yes they will be probably closer to what happened in the real Old West, but it also plays to the sensibilities of a modern audience, and it can do both at the same time. If a modern audience finds a modern Western and really likes it, that audience will probably start to think about what

it really was like back then. Was the movie I just saw anywhere close to what it was in real life? And maybe that will encourage the audience to start reading about it or listening to podcasts about it and start wanting to know what the true story is. And so I think it all feeds into itself and it can be kind of a darker, grittier version of reality, but also can help romanticize it for people who may not have been inclined

to dabble in the waters of the Old West at all. Why don't you tell us what's coming up next on your podcast, Legends of the Old West? Well, as you mentioned, we're actually doing, coincidentally, we're doing a series entitled Outlaws. And so we're doing the story of two outlaws in one series, the first of which you referenced earlier, John Wesley Harden, a very famous cold-blooded killer from Texas. And the second is another great one that factors into what we've talked about a lot in this interview, the mystery and the mystique. There's a man named Henry Plummer who was part outlaw, part lawman, mostly in Montana

territory. And a lot of people believe he was both at the same time. He definitely had his evolutions. He was a lawman for a while, and he was outlaw for a while, and then he became a lawman again. And a lot of people believe that when he became a lawman later in life, he was also organizing and running an outlaw gang at the same time with the cover of a badge. So we're exploring his story

and trying to separate fact from fiction and trying to get to the bottom of the story of Henry Plummer and then also just telling the wild story of John Wesley Harden on the series called Outlaws. Well, Chris, I really enjoy all of your podcasts, so I'm anxious to listen to the new ones, and I hope my audience is too. Thank you so much for speaking to me on American History Tellers today.

Thank you very much. This was fantastic. That was my conversation with Chris Wimmer, creator and host of the podcast Legends of the Old West from Black Beryl Media. I hope you check it out. From Wondery, this is the fourth and final episode of Billy the Kid from American History Tellers. On our next season, in 1876, a group of criminals hatched an audacious plot. Steal the body of Abraham Lincoln and hold it for ransom. After months of preparation, they were sure they had planned the

perfect crime. But a tenacious Secret Service agent and an unlikely informant would join forces and bring the grave robbers to justice. right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham for Airship. Audio editing by Molly Bach. Sound design by Derek Behrens. This episode was produced by Morgan Jaffe and Peter Arcuni. Our senior producer is Andy Herman. Executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman and Marshall Louis for Wondery. In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and

mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her. And she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is The Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses, and specific instructions for people's murders. This podcast is the true story of how I ended up in a race against time

to warn those whose lives were in danger. And it turns out, convincing a total stranger someone wants them dead is not easy. Follow Kill List on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C true Crime shows like Morbid early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening.