Billy the kid ,when did he die

Factual Questions
1

As we have heard for many years William Bonty (billy the kid) Was shot in the dark unarmmed. But what if Pat Garet made a mistake and say shot one of his friends. I don’t know is Cecil has ever wrote about this but I have done countless hours of research and this is what i have come up with.
1st it is dark how could Pat tell who he was because allthe man said was is “that you Pat” but yet it was in spanish not english.
2nd The man had a beard. No big deal but is was 6 inches long and billy was in jail for I belive 4 months and could not shave but you can not grow a beard in that amount of time. You can get more by going here. http://www.angelfire.com/mi2/billythekid/brushy.html

“There are test every day if you fail you get slow then you die” Billy The Kid

2

I did a search of the archives, and it doesn’t look like Cecil has covered it. Depending on how you want the discussion to go, you might want to ask Arnold to move the thread to General Questions to see if anyone there can supply any information(unless he can find a column on it that I missed).

3

Before it gets moved, I alwasy thought it was William Bonney? And Pat Garrett? Did I get suckered?

4

No It was my spelling. It is Pat Garrett and William Bonney sorry.
“You are tested every day if you fail you get slow then you die.” Billy the kid

5

I don’t find a colum written by Cecil Adams about Billy the Kid’s death, either in any of Cecil’s Books or in the online archive. Therefore, this post is leaving the Comments on Cecil’s Columns forum and going to visit my colleague manhattan in the General Questions forum.

6

Here’s another account of Billy the Kid’s death that mentions the controversy. But quite frankly, Brushy Bill Roberts’ story has to many holes in it for me to take seriously.

http://www.thehistorynet.com/WildWest/articles/1998/0898_side3.htm

7

I am not sure that I am excited about running down one more “he really didn’t die” story. (They exhumed a pretender to the name Jesse James, this week, in Texas.)

For one guy who dismisses the “Brushy Bill” story (with some evidence) try these sites (why do all these people hang out on angelfire?).

Did anyone view Billys Body?
and
Coroner Jury Report
and
Account by Poe

I will note that of the dozen or so notorious badmen who have been reported to have survived their own apparent deaths, only Butch Cassidy has a following among certain actual historians. The dime novels (followed by the movies of the 1930s-1950s) did such a thorough job of distorting anything that the public perceived as history, that you can now find “eyewitnesses” and “sworn depositions” about events that never occurred by people who were not there.

I have no idea whether Brushy Bill was really Billy the Kid. One aspect of the stories in the OP’s website that set off alarms for me are that several people are reported to have seen Brushy Bill in the 1940’s (sometimes from a distance) and immediately “recognized” him. Sorry, I have a very hard time believing that after sixty years of aging, a person will be immediately recognized by another person with 60-year-old memories if there is not a context to set them in. I just went to a class reunion a few months ago. While a very few guys looked pretty much like they had (after fewer than 30 years) there were a lot of guys who did not recognize each other–and we all knew that the other guys were somebody we knew.)

I am aware that the OP’s web site mentions knife and bullet scars and “secret” information, but we have only the word of that web site’s author that he is not making all that up.

Good luck.

8

The sites you posted are very interesting. I still what to knew what hole you are talking about. Even if it is false that billy the kid died but still it made a great young guns 2

There are test every day you fail you get slow then you die.
Billy the kid