and a great selection of similar New, Used and Collectible Books available now at great prices. In unmasking the legend Utley also tells us much about our heritage of frontier vigilantism and violence. : Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life (9780803295582) by Utley, Robert M. Using previously untapped sources, he presents an engrossing story-the most complete and accurate ever-of a youthful hoodlum and sometime killer who found his calling in New Mexico's bloody power struggle known as the Lincoln County War. Utley does what countless books, movies, television shows, musical compositions, and paintings have failed to do: he successfully strips off the veneer of legendry to expose the reality of Billy the Kid. Robert Marshall Utley 3 was an American author and historian who wrote. Within a year Billy the Kid became the subject of five dime-novel biographies as well as Garett's ghost-written account, and that was just the beginning. He was only twenty-one years old when a bullet from Sheriff Pat Garett's six-shooter killed him on July 14, 1881. Utley, former Chief Historian & Assistant Director of the National Park Service, is the author of many books & articles on the West, 'Cavalier in Buckskin', also published by the University of Oklahoma Press, won the 1989 Western Heritage Wrangler Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Book & was a Book-of-the-Month Club & History Book Club selection.

Billy was a fun-loving sharpshooter who excelled at escape and lived on the run after indictment for his role in the Lincoln Country War. Newspapers pictured him as a king of outlaws and his highly publicized capture, trial, escape, and end fixed his image in the public mind for all time. Utley draws sharp portraits of both young men, offering insightful comparisons of their lives and legacies.

Not until his final month did anyone call him Billy the Kid. Whatever his name or alias at the moment-Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim, Kid Antrim, Billy Bonney-people always called him the Kid.

Billy the Kid by Robert M. Utley