Billy The Kid The Endless Ride

"This might be the best Billy the Kid book to date." —Fritz Thompson, Albuquerque Journal In this revisionist biography, award-winning historian Michael Wallis re-creates the rich anecdotal saga of Billy the Kid (1859–1881), a young man who became a legend in his time and remains an enigma to this day. In an extraordinary evocation of the legendary Old West, Wallis demonstrates why the Kid has remained one of our most popular folk heroes. Filled with dozens of rare images and period photographs, Billy the Kid separates myth from reality and presents an unforgettable portrait of this brief and violent life.

Examines the career of the young outlaw whose life and death were an expression of the violence prevalent on the American frontier.

"Born Henry McCarty, Billy the Kid was a diminutive, charming, blond-haired young man who, growing up in New York, Kansas, and later New Mexico, demonstrated a precocious dexterity at firing six-shooters with either hand--a skill that both got him into and out of trouble and that turned him into an American legend of the Old West. He was smart, well-spoken, attractive to both white and Mexican women, a good dancer, and a man with a nose for money, horses, and trouble. His spree of crimes and murders has been immortalized in dime westerns, novels, and movies. But the whole story of his short, epically violent life has never been told as it has been here"--]cProvided by publisher.

“So richly detailed, you can almost smell the gunsmoke and the sweat of the saddles. ” —Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers No outlaw typifies America’s mythic Wild West more than Billy the Kid. To Hell on a Fast Horse by Mark Lee Gardner is the riveting true tale of Sheriff Pat Garrett’s thrilling, break-neck chase in pursuit of the notorious bandit. David Dary calls To Hell on a Fast Horse, “A masterpiece,” and Robert M. Utley calls it, “Superb narrative history.” This is spellbinding historical adventure at its very best, recalling James Swanson’s New York Times bestseller Manhunt—about the search for Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth—as it fills in with fascinating detail the story director Sam Peckinpah brought to the screen in his classic film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

In 1882 a notorious outlaw and a childhood friend of Billy the Kid was released from prison where he had been serving time for killing a Texas Ranger. His freedom finally secured, the outlaw disappeared and was never heard from again. Never, that is, until 1948 when he came out of hiding after almost 70 years. In the course of proving his identity to a court of law the outlaw revealed that his friend Billy the Kid was not killed by Pat Garrett but was still alive even to that day. After a period of research and persistence the young lawyer was finally led to a destitute old man in Texas who was named not William H. Bonney but William H. Roberts, although Bonney had been an alias that he had used. Roberts agreed to reveal himself as Billy the Kid if the lawyer would help him obtain a pardon so he could die a free man. You see, the Kid was still wanted for murder so to come forward was to risk being sentenced and put to death, but this was a risk that William H. Roberts was willing to take. He told his story only one time, to one man. This is his story, now presented for the first time with new photographic evidence and research that supports his claim that he was the one true Billy the Kid of legend.