Does this Tintype Show Pat Garret and Billy the Kid?

Six years ago North Carolina lawyer Frank Abrams bought this tintype for $10 at a flea market. He was intrigued, he says, because it seemed to be from the old west, not the sort of thing one normally finds at North Carolina flea markets. He hung it in his house and gave it little thought until he heard about an alleged photo of Billy the Kid that had been valued at $5 million. Looking carefully at this and comparing it to photos of famous western characters, he decided that the man on the far right must be Pat Garret.

You know, "Poor Billy Bonney, you're only twenty-one, and Garret's got your name on every bullet in his gun. . . ." Here is another photograph of Garret, and below are two others. I see the resemblance, but would you say that is definitely the same man? No doubt somebody will go at this with high-tech software, and maybe the image of the man on the far right is clear enough for us to get a pretty good idea. Certainly there are plenty of images of Garret to work with.

Garret was one of those men who was a gambler and a brawler in his youth but then went straight and became a real terror to men just like he had been when he was a little younger, including his old friends. He was elected sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico in 1880. One of his friends from his disreputable days was William Bonney, alias Billy the Kid and several other alias. Garret told Bonney that if he cleared out of New Mexico, Garret would forget about him, but if he stayed in the territory he would have to hunt him down. Bonney didn't take the warning seriously, and Garret became so eager to get his man that he had himself made a deputy sheriff and a US Marshall before his term as sheriff even started. He found Bonney at the home of a mutual friend, Pete Maxwell; the room was dark but Garret recognized Bonney's voice and shot him dead.

Or anyway that was Garret's story. Others told different stories. Some of those stories made Bonney out to be an ok guy, or at least no worse than Garret, and hinted or said outright that Garret used the cover of the law to murder his old friend because of a grudge. Some of these pro-Bonney stories made it into big city newspapers. Garret, incensed, cooperated with newspaper reporter Marshall Upson to write The Authentic Life of Bill the Kid, which was published in 1882 and made Garret's story the official one. The tintype that started the latest fracas is said to have come from New York, and Frank Abrams speculates that it went there with New York native Upson, who got it from Garret in the course of working on the book.

And then, when Abrams decided he had a photo of Pat Garret and started showing it to experts in western memorabilia, somebody told him that not only was that really Pat Garret, the man second from the left, in the back, is Billy the Kid. The tintype has been dated to between 1880 and 1885. So it might actually be a record of one of the last cordial days Bonney and Garret spent together. (Splendid bunch of fellows they hung out with.) Above is the most famous portrait of Billy the Kid. I dunno, maybe, but the image in the tintype is so blurred I don't know how you can be sure. On the other hand, how many friends did Pat Garret have? So we're not really trying to identify this face from the whole ocean of humanity, but from the circle of a few dozen people that Pat Garret knew well enough to pose for a photo with. Assuming, that is, that the man on the far right is really Pat Garret.

Garret, incidentally, was eventually murdered himself, a mysterious crime for which nobody was ever convicted; wikipedia lists five different suspects. It had something to do with those famous range wars between cattlemen and sheep herders; unless it was, as some have said, a long-delayed revenge for his unjust murder of Billy the Kid.

Which brings me to another interesting thing. The western frontier as Hollywood remembers it lasted about fifty years, and even if you expand the definition pretty broadly it involved only a few hundred thousand people. The wars between the US government and the western Indians were tiny skirmishes compared to Gettysburg or Shiloh and would not even have merited a mention during World War II. There were western desperadoes but in 1870 there were probably as many criminals in Manhattan as there were white people in New Mexico. There were cowboys, yes, but again just a few thousand in a nation of fifty million. It's another example of how a brief period of history involving comparatively few people can seize our imaginations and our attention. There are thousand-year stretches of history, across whole continents, that have bee treated in fewer books and movies than the Gunfight at the OK Corral. (Which incidentally arose from an attempt to enforce a local gun-control ordinance.)

The Wild West, Athenian Democracy, the Italian Renaissance; our historical imagination is half filled by just a few places and a few million people.