Customer Reviews

Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride

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3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

As someone who was born in Southeastern New Mexico and raised in Texas I have been enthralled with Billy the Kid and the events that gave rise to his fame since my earliest memories. I don't consider myself a Billy the Kid scholar, but I have read a dozen or so books, seen most Billy the Kid sites and have spent many hours over the years contemplating the young outlaw's life. Michael Wallis effectively works off the proven facts (which are few)of one Henry McCarty alias Henry Antrim, alias Kid Antrim alias William H. Bonney alias Billy the Kid, to give us a great working backbone with which to study The Kid. When Wallis fills in the holes between the facts, he doesn't lead us on and uses logic and reason to create plausible scenarios based on Billy's time and location to create a fluid line from Billy's youth to his death and beyond. Mr. Wallis substantiates much of what is said in this book by quotes from people that knew and rode with The Kid, newspapers of the time and notes taken from other credible Billy the Kid researchers such as Robert Utley.
Michael Wallis really brings to life the mostly likely childhood The Kid experienced. The author does a superb job of taking the reader back to the Western Frontier of the 1870's. We get an idea of how the times Billy grew up in influenced him and the pivotal events in the young man's life that propelled him down his path, that in retrospect, appears to almost be destiny. The only part of The Endless Ride that perplexed me to a degree is how Wallis manages to only touch on a surface level the events The Kid is most famous for. However, I don't think Wallis' intention was to give an indepth portrayal of The Kid's deeds as an outlaw on the lamb, but rather, approach the story of The Kid, with less study on his events an 'outlaw' and more focus on the creation of Billy in the mind's of people then... and now.
Simply, this is one of, if not the best, Billy the Kid books I have ever read. Wallis' reserach is impeccable and his writing style sophisticated and fluid. Without a doubt, The Endless Ride is the best read yet to give great and accurate insight into Billy before he was 'Billy The Kid', where more than half of the book is focused. This book is a must read for any fan of Billy the Kid and an excellent starting point for any individuals wishing to get swept away in the legend that is The Kid.

Despite several attempts, in terms of a detailed reading, I didn't make it very far into this book: page 64 to be precise. After that I skimed it and, quite frankly, found nothing worthwhile here.

The author's style is, putting it mildly, bizarre. This is 1871, mind you. No electricity. Few labor saving devices. This is Wichita, Kansas, a place not particularly noted for balmy summer weather. Yet author Wallis has the temerity to write "Life in Wichita may have seemed sweet as huckleberry pie for Catherine McCarty. Her steamy City Laundry did a brisk trade thanks to the bundles of soiled hotel and whorehouse linen . . ." Wallis is describing a tubercular woman performing hard physical labor for long hours in less than a hospitable setting. Sure enough, two pages later Wallis writes "[a] stifling hot laundry was far from the ideal place for someone battling a chronic respiratory illness.
"

Wallis' use - or rather misuse - of language is jarring. In another instance, he has the family of the still young boy who would become the notorious Billy The Kid of "slipping" into a state, as if there was something furtive in their movement. There wasn't and the language is a poor attempt to add drama to an ordinary incident. The device doesn't work no matter how many times it is employed - and it is employed all too often.

Wallis takes off on a rant about and against handguns. There's little sense here. Elizabethans were complaining of violence in the streets just as modern day Houstonians do. The availability of early Colt revolvers had little to do with the sometimes lawless character of Western towns.

Not long after, Wallis complains of vigilante justice which was, in fact, an expression of the civilizing impulse. It may have been rough and ready, but it showed the desire of ordinary people for the protection of law.

Wallis makes many gratuitous comments of this kind. He takes the 19th Century folks to task for their lack of environmental sensitivity, ethnic tolerance and so on.

By page 64, I'd had it.

There are many other books available on Billy The Kid, which stick to their subject, avoid language eccentricity and don't try to apply 21st Century political correctness to the 19th Century.

Jerry

To raise a dissenting voice, I found this book to be a journalistic deluge of speculation presented as fact, irrelevant padding (a whole chapter on P. T. Barnum?), and inaccurate factoids (Percy Bysshe Shelley died of TB?) used to fill out the narrative. _The West of Billy the Kid_ is much, much better and more readable.

This book does not describe the legend of Billy the Kid. Instead it creates a portrait of Billy by revealing the details of his life: what the people who knew Billy said about him, what were his known personal tastes, what was his mother like, what was his step father like, where did he live, what was the nature of the places he lived. As I read this book an authentic portrait of Billy the Kid began to emerge in my mind, painted by each fact revealed, not a portrait build on imaginative fiction, but one drawn from the documented details of his life.

Billy the Kid, like most people, was a mixture of both good and bad. He died at an early age, and by that time he had killed several men, but Billy also was a very likable young man. He was a great dancer, popular among the women folk, loved to sing, play cards, read dime novels, tell funny stories, and he did not drink alcohol. But what stood out the most about him, the thing that most people remembered about Billy, was his politeness. Billy was polite to women, to children, to the elderly, and a well-mannered young man. This is the one thing that I take away from this book, the power of politeness. Never underestimate the power or good manners and politeness. Who knows ? Start being polite today, and maybe you too will someday be fondly remembered.

Armed with a six-shooter or a Winchester rifle each man was empowered to enforce his own brand of justice on the American western frontier. This book's narrative acknowledges the brutality, violence, corruption, and unwholesome of the western migration. With a panorama of murder, theft, rape, bloodshed, slaughter, prostitution, alcoholism, prejudice, and pain our nation forged a uniquely American heritage, and ever since then we have been both enamored and entertained by the Old West and its wild legends. Billy the Kid had the misfortune of leading a life that would make him one of those legends.

Billy the Kid is a name we all know from the days of the Wild West. But what do we know about the young man himself? Was he a psychopathic killer? A misunderstood Robin Hood-like gunslinger? Where was he born? What was his real name? Henry McCarty? William Bonney? And did Pat Garrett shoot him down in cold blood?

The truth is that there is scant evidence - for instance just the one picture of him, seen above - but much legend - most of it untrue - surrounding this fabled young man. The author does an excellent job separating fact from fiction in this book while providing a very engaging read. Using a biographical technique that's becoming popular, Michael Wallis starts with what we do know about the times Billy lived in and then fits his subject into this context. This opposed to writing a "life" by trying to fit conjecture, legend and questionable first-hand accounts into documented history.

It is difficult to track Billy's early life but it appears he was born in New York and his real name was not Billy but rather Henry McCarty. He and his family's move west is sketchy but Billy finally ended up in New Mexico - a territory then, not a state. As he drifted in and out of the public eye and the arm of the law's grasp - Billy was a horse thief and cattle rustler - the historical evidence firms up.

His final days as a participant in the Lincoln County War in New Mexico - which reads like a Chicago gangster turf war complete with daylight ambushes and crooked politicians - were documented by both the newspapers of the time and the multiple law enforcement personnel involved in trying to stem the violence. Billy also pulled off a jail-break near the end of his life that is worthy of a Hollywood movie or a western pulp fiction novel. He was an out-law and he did kill at least three men but that was not extraordinary for the times - so why the infamy? The author also does a very good job in explaining how and why this young man has become a legendary Wild West figure with men like Pat Garrett, who shot and killed Billy, instrumental in propagating the The Kid's story.

If this time and locale - and its subject - are of interest then you can't do much better than this book, it's a very good read.

I wanted to like this book. The author, with his subtitle and thesis ("The Endless Ride") implies that he's going to look into not only Billy himself, but his myth and legend. Instead, what we have here is a lengthy biography replete with guesswork and innuendo, and lots of padding, some of it vaguely worthwhile, some of it not, really.

Billy was an interesting character, if only because of how little is known about him, and how many people have been almost hypnotized by his mythical persona. I was hoping that the book would concentrate on this aspect of his life: instead, it spends most of its words discussing the life and the possible origins of Billy. The author is well-versed in the story of Billy's life, and in the circumstances of his fame and death. He's also very conversant in the various rumors, stories, and theories about Billy's origins and roots. That's all very well and good, but beyond that there isn't much here, to be honest. For one thing, the book isn't as long as it appears. The publisher used pulpy paper, which makes a 328-page book look longer. They put a picture at the front of each chapter, and inserted a large picture section in the middle of the book. With chapter breaks (which result in blank pages frequently) and other devices, this book isn't really that long.

Much of what's in the book isn't directly related to Billy anyway. Imagine my horror when in the first pages I ran across a reference to America's "love affair with guns," turned to the bibliography, and discovered Michael Bellesiles' book "Arming America" in it. For those who aren't aware, Bellesiles was the darling of the gun control set when he released "Arming America" in 2001, right up until it turned out he'd fabricated or distorted much of the evidence for his thesis, which identified a large conspiracy among 19th-Century gun manufacturers to fabricate a "frontier myth" which would include settlers who carried guns, when (according to Bellesiles) everyone went unarmed in the frontier era. Anyway, Bellesiles lost his job teaching at Emory University, and the Bancroft Prize his book won was revoked, the first time that's ever happened. No historian, including most of the liberals who were supporters of his, takes him seriously any more. Unfortunately, Wallis appears not to have gotten the memo.

The PC angle of the book turns out, in the end, to be not quite as bad as you'd think. Wallis uses Bellesiles for context, but when he discusses the Lincoln County War, he becomes much more common-sense-oriented. He basically thinks that the whole war was between two groups of greedy oligarchs who used the various gunmen as pawns in a deadly game of Monopoly. That might not be a completely fair opinion, to those who have a side they root for in reading the history of the war, but it's always been closer to my opinion than anything else I've read. I don't think it particularly PC: the author makes it clear that both sides engaged in back-shooting, skullduggery, and general viciousness.

I generally enjoyed this book, within limits. I wish the author had been a little less interested in injecting his 21st-Century politics into a biography of a 19th-Century person. It also could be a bit better organized. There's a lengthy passage at the beginning where the author discusses Billy's origins, and then later in the book there's a chapter where the author skips back and discusses the possibility of Billy being part Mexican-American. All, or most, of this would have probably been better-placed in an appendix. Frankly, you wonder what the point to the publication of this book was: there's almost nothing here, that I could see, that's not contained in Utley's book. That being said, this isn't necessarily a bad book. Recommended, but only guardedly.

At first glance of Michael Wallis' new book, one might ask, "Do we really need another book about this young guy on the wrong side of the law?" After reading Billy the Kid, my answer is a definite, "Yes."

Wallis is masterful at discovering and sharing information about a life lived in too short a time (1859-1881) in an era and place where little was documented. Addressing questions about Billy the Kid's birthplace, his correct name, and other unresolved facts, Wallis weaves a sympathetic story about a notorious figure from our country's celebrated Wild West era.

Most of us think we know this historic hoodlum, but Wallis shows us we do not. As we read each chapter, we see Billy the Kid more clearly. His father was non-existent, and his mother worked hard to protect him and his brother from the perils of life before she died of tuberculosis when Billy was a mere 14.

Living in the Southwest, he became intrigued with the Mexican culture and learned to speak Spanish as fluently as he spoke English. He was, for the most part, a likeable personality. Sure, he stole horses, a high crime in his day, and he was a killer, but he didn't turn killer until the man bullying and beating him wouldn't stop. As a last resort, Billy the Kid shot his tormentor, then began his life running from the law.

We've been intrigued by Billy the Kid for generations because, until now, we've known so little but conjecture about him. Wallis changes all that.

Armchair Interviews says: This book is a must read for history buffs, Wild West gurus, and Billy the Kid fans.

Probably one of the best books written about the Kid. It's a fast paced read, and draws you into the events. Quite enjoyable all around. Mike Wallis has done his homework, and interprets many of the events in Bonney's life with a keen eye. Well worth your time to read.

"Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride" is a great book. Not only does the author speak about the life of Henry McCarty, but he also describes in detail what it was like to be alive in the late 19th Century. Most of details of "Billy the Kid's" life are unknown, and many of these voids have been filled in with fictional tales. The author discusses the myths and gives reasons for and against why they may or may not be accurate. This book allows the reader to form his own opinion on how the life of William Bonney was really played out. I strongly suggest that anyone who is interested in the the old west, post-civil war history, outlaws, etc. should read this book. I hope that you all enjoy it as much as I have.

The book separates myth from what few facts are known about Billy the Kid. A more clear picture of who he was; a young man who was a good singer, popular with young ladies because of his dancing skills, charming and charismatic, with a teens propensity to get into trouble. He did not kill as many men as dime novelists would have have us believe, but still could be brutal as his killings during his famous jail escape indicate. Well researched and written, Wallis presents an enjoyable read that makes you want to learn more about Billy the Kid. But as the author states, as have many before him, the Kid remains elusive to researchers, but Wallis may have come as close as we can get.