Man With A Price On His Head

[poliphilo]

 And now YouTube is sending me photographs of Billy the Kid.

Actually there's only one authenticated photograph of Billy. It's a tintype- well battered- and it sold at auction for $2,000,000. Billy dead has a far higher price on his head than he ever did when living.

No wonder then that pictures of him have proliferated.

Most are way off the mark.

The only one that is accepted by about half the people who claim to know what they're talking about (aka "experts") shows a bunch of young people playing croquet on what has been identified as the Chisum estate. The dude who might be Billy is a long way off and blurry, but has the requisite amount of attitude, even though that's a croquet mallet he's holding and not a Winchester 73.

A slightly comical one shows two young dudes dancing while a somewhat older man plays the fiddle. (Shortage of gals round these here parts!) One of the dudes has been identified as Billy and his partner as Billy's fellow regulator, Tom O'Folliatt., while the guy with the fiddle has been identified as Pat Garrett.  

Dream on.

Seems like the old West was teeming with young fellas with big chins, buck teeth and sticky-out ears.

P.S. I just watched a vid claiming that the authentic tin-type is post mortem.Theory goes that Pat Garrett had the Kid dressed in his outlaw clothes and propped up in a lifelike attitude to prove that he'd shot him. But, surely, if you wanted to prove a man dead in order to claim bounty on him you'd empahises the deadness not try to make him look like he's sharing a joke with the photographer. Yes, the eyes do look a little unfocused but that, I'd argue, is not because the subject is dead but because he's very, very drunk.

Comments

[cmcmck]

It's known that Billy was a keen dancer.

Steve Tilston has written a song about it.

https://youtu.be/Gt5EzRkF36s

[poliphilo]

Great song. I know it in Peter Bellamy's cover version.

[tagryn]

It's almost impossible not to expect actual folks from those times to look like the people in the movies (handsome actors, beautiful women, the genetic cream of the crop, etc.), b/c that's the main visual reference most people have of those times. But the reality AFAIK was that dentistry was primitive, rare and painful, laundry and deodorant was catch-as-you-can, as was skin care, etc.

[poliphilo]

Billy- to judge by that one tintype- was no oil painting- though people who knew him said it wasn't a particularly good likeness.

What he had was charisma- and that comes across in the photo.

[mallorys_camera]

Billy the Kid...because you've been watching Westerns?

[poliphilo]

Well, I'm always up for a Western but I'm also interested the actual Wild West-and how things went down before the myth makers got to work- which was about five minutes after the dust settled.