29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very well researched and written true history of Billy the Kid, January 11, 2010
This review is from: To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West (Hardcover)
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Mark Lee Gardner has so thoroughly researched and written this history of William Bonney, Billy the Kid, and his killer, Pat Garrett that many of the myths can now be put to rest. The Legend of Billy the Kid has been romanticized by many movies, books and songs, but now the actual historical facts are on display.
The book is laid out in chronological fashion and the story of Billy the Kid is told side by side with the one man that will be forever tied to him - Pat Garrett, the Sheriff that brought Billy down. The bibliography is well worth the time to peruse it. Much of the data and primary reference material is quoted and commented upon by Gardner, making this section of the book very valuable to anyone that is truly interested in the full historical story.
The writing is very good and easy to follow. Of the 250+ pages, the first 200 are dedicated to the story of Garrett and Billy and their intertwined lives. After Billy is killed by Garrett, the book concentrates on the rest of the life of Pat Garrett. Garrett's life after Billy is not a pretty one and is quite sad to read. Gardner works his material and maybe overwrites this portion a little. As a writer of pure history, Gardner attempts to leave no stone unturned and this is one of the two negatives that I have with the book - just too much detail without the interest of Billy the Kid's involvement. With the title as it is written, this reader expected Billy to be a part of the book until the end.
The second negative is that this book does not give to the reader any of the surrounding events that are ongoing during the time frame of this story. I like to obtain more historical information in the era of the biography to complement the immediate story of the biography's main character(s). In this case there are many individuals that are on display for their part in Billy's and Garrett's lives, but little else is discussed. For this reason, I marked down the rating from 5 to 4 stars.
If you are interested in the true events surrounding Billy the Kid, then this is the book for you.
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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Stays On The Factual Side Of The Trail, January 18, 2010
This review is from: To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West (Hardcover)
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Billy the Kid is one of America's most famous killers, but the only killing he is really known for is his own. Mark Lee Gardner presents a sober-sided retelling of the life and death of the Kid and of the man who brought him down, Pat Garrett.
"To Hell On A Fast Horse" scores points for sticking to the facts, but loses them for...sticking to the facts. I come away from reading this 2010 history satisfied I know a lot more about Billy and Pat, but as to what made them so important to be worth reading about 130 years later, I can't honestly say. What was it about them that resonates so, now, then, and in all the decades between?
It sure wasn't the vast trove of reliable historical testimony they left behind. Gardner makes clear that available records are scant at best, and often unreliable. Instead of compensating by printing the legend, a la John Ford, he goes to census records and newspaper accounts, synthesizing what is out there with a gimlet eye but not much in the way of a discernable point of view.
Gardner does favor Garrett to Billy, perhaps because there's more data on the lawman, but mostly because he views Billy as a charming thug. "Billy's real and deadly talent was fooling people," he writes. "Billy joked and smiled, but his quick mind was always sizing up the situation, looking for a sign of weakness, a slight mental error, something that would give him an edge."
Garrett stood for something more than using people. Gardner portrays him in the opening chapter, which flash-forwards to Billy in Pat's custody, as a stolid character standing up to a mob to see to it Billy and his other prisoners receive honest justice, not the frontier variety. Later on, after Billy's death, he pursues an investigation with possibly dangerous political repercussions. Even when documenting Garrett's foibles, you get a feeling Gardner is on his side, trying in a non-partisan way to adjust the scales of remembrance which have tipped Billy's way too long.
The legend doesn't get aired out much, except a little in the footnotes. There, Gardner refutes popular misconceptions that Pat and Billy were friends (they knew each other, had mutual pals, but were never buddies) and that Billy was left-handed (the one picture we have of Billy was, like all ferrotypes, a reverse image). Frankly, I wish he had carried over some of this voice to the main text, which is dry as an arroyo at high noon. With such a great title, you expect more.
How many men did Billy really kill? Gardner doesn't really say. He does offer first-hand accounts of a few killings, as well as a shoplifting and a horse theft. Gardner also introduces a lot of characters, even when they don't serve much point in the ultimate scheme of things. He spends a few sentences introducing a co-leader of one of Garrett's posses, then a few pages later, in an aside, notes the guy skipped the country with stolen money, not to be mentioned again.
It's not exciting reading but gives you a sense of what the Wild West was really about, for good or ill. Gardner wants to tell it like it was. In this case, maybe the legend is better.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A story "worth knowing" (4.5 stars), January 4, 2010
This review is from: To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West (Hardcover)
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I heard plenty of
Marty Robbins and Western music as a kid since it was the only music my dad really liked, and I remember listening to the sad story of "
Billy the Kid," crouched next to the big old stereo cabinet while the records played. For some reason outlaws such as Billy the Kid and Jesse James (along with
The Red Baron) loomed large in my childhood mind - I'm still not quite sure why.
Mark Lee Gardiner tells the story of Billy the Kid (a.k.a. Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim, and William Bonney) very well. He provides background on where he came from and how he became a notorious outlaw, at least as far as is reliably known, which is sketchy at best (the Marty Robbins song says Billy "at the age of 12 years he did kill his first man," but the book says he was 17). He also tells of Pat Garrett, the all-but-forgotten Sheriff, who tracked Billy down and arrested him, and later killed him after a brazen and bloody escape (the song also says the two were friends, but the book says no). In doing so Gardiner brings the Old West of New Mexico alive in a very readable way - the chapter where Garrett kills Billy was particularly exciting. I noticed another review complain that Billy is romanticized too much, but I saw it differently; that Gardiner was trying to convey how Billy was viewed by the people, some of which saw him as a hero instead of an outlaw. My only complaint would be that the text and editing is a little uneven, and in some parts (not quotations) the language is a bit colloquial and salty. Also, the book drags a little after Billy's death, and the 100 pages that continue discussing Pat Garrett's latter history could have been shorter. But these complaints are minor, and I found the book to be an excellent and fun history.
(I also recommend
Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West for those who enjoy this book.)
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