374: Young Guns II with Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza

00:00:00:21 – 00:00:14:17
Dan LeFebvre
Before we talk about some of the details in the movie, let’s take a step back and look at the movie overall. So if you were to give Young Guns II a letter grade for its historical accuracy, what would it get?

00:00:14:20 – 00:00:39:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I think I’d probably go with C+. It’s not the most historically accurate movie ever made. It is probably more accurate than a lot of the other Billy the Kid movies, and I think they really, like, captured the essence of Billy the Kid is personality, just kind of the way he was. This is mischievousness, I guess. So for that alone, I’m going to give it a c-plus.

00:00:39:26 – 00:00:53:13
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Yeah, that’s pretty good. Especially being a sequel as well. Sometimes that well, well throw because they’re kind of tied to the inaccuracies of the first movie and then yeah, tying ins. I’ve had that be an issue before too. So I see plus it’s not bad actually.

00:00:53:15 – 00:01:12:27
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And it’s one of the better sequels that have ever been made. You know, a lot of times the sequels are pretty lackluster. The young guns, too, definitely lived up to the, the legacy of Young Guns one. So and I grew up with these movies, man. I used to play Young Guns at recess in, elementary school. So I was all about young guns.

00:01:12:29 – 00:01:17:19
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Yeah. Nice. I’m sure that helped influence what you’re doing now.

00:01:17:21 – 00:01:39:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s a few works of art, I guess that definitely. If it wasn’t for. If it wasn’t for the book Lonesome Dove, and if it wasn’t for Young Guns one and two, I probably would not be doing this podcast. It really instilled in me just a love of history in general. All was history. And with young guns.

00:01:39:09 – 00:01:52:20
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Billy the Kid, man, he he’s just the guy I keep going back to out of everybody I cover on my show. All the mountain men and gunfighters and outlaws. Billy the Kid is just the guy I keep coming back to.

00:01:52:23 – 00:02:07:03
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if we go back to the movie at the very beginning, a Young Guns two were introduced to an older man going by the name of Brushy Bill Roberts, and he claims to be Billy the Kid. And he’s proving his claims by telling the story to a lawyer. And that story is basically the plot of the entire movie.

00:02:07:03 – 00:02:26:26
Dan LeFebvre
So we’ll be talking about that throughout just our discussion today. And then, of course, we’ll circle back to Brushy Bill himself when we see him at the end of the movie. But one of the most common things for movies to do is to just make up characters. So for those of us who have only seen the movie, is it true that there was someone named Brushy Bill who claimed to be Billy the Kid?

00:02:26:29 – 00:02:48:14
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yes, that is absolutely true. Brushy Bill Roberts, his real name was Oliver Roberts, but he did come forward in the 1940s claiming to be Billy the Kid. And he wanted that pardon? Just like he says in the movie at the beginning. The main difference I would say the movie, it looks like they filmed it at White Sands, New Mexico.

00:02:48:14 – 00:02:58:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I’m not entirely sure about that, but that’s what it looks like to me. That’s not how the meeting went down. It actually occurred at Roche’s house in Hiko, Texas. Okay.

00:02:58:13 – 00:03:03:02
Dan LeFebvre
Other than that, yeah, it was kind of a weird location just in the middle of the desert. Yeah, the side of the road.

00:03:03:04 – 00:03:17:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I guess it they they were kind of going for the effect of, you know, he was still, a wanted outlaw, just a desperado living in the desert. But now, at that point in time, Brushy Bill Roberts was definitely living in just a normal Texas town.

00:03:17:18 – 00:03:35:29
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, interesting. Yeah. Well, we’ll circle back to him, but, if we go back to the 1800 storyline in the movie, we get introduced to some other characters as the members of Billy the Kid’s gang. So, I’ll list off the four who I consider the four main characters. Feel free to add more if you’d like, but there’s Doc Scurlock.

00:03:35:29 – 00:03:55:07
Dan LeFebvre
He’s played by Kiefer Sutherland, Arkansas, Dave Ruta by who’s played by Christian Slater, Chavez Chavez, played by Lou Diamond Phillips. And then someone that, is pretty popular. Pat Garrett, another one of those popular ones, he’s played by William Petersen. Were those characters based on real people who rode with Billy the Kid?

00:03:55:09 – 00:04:21:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yes, with a couple of asterisks. So Pat Garrett never actually rode with Billy the Kid as far as outlaw activities or anything like that, that’s they they really kind of strayed from the truth in that aspect. In the movie, Pat Garrett and Billy were friends. Pat. Pat was a buffalo hunter in Texas. He moved to New Mexico. I’m not exactly sure of the exact year.

00:04:21:15 – 00:04:41:16
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And he settled down, at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, and he just ran different businesses. He had, he was a bartender for a little while. He had, like, a butcher shop for a while, and he and Billy would hang out whenever they were together. They would gamble together. They would dance with the senior items, all that stuff.

00:04:41:19 – 00:05:09:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
We we can kind of circle back to how close their friendship was later on. But yeah, Pat Garrett absolutely was a real person. He he was involved in Billy the Kid’s life, but there’s really not much evidence that he participated in outlaw activities. Now, everybody stole horses back in those days. Everybody stole a few cows. Every now and then, even the most respectable of people, you know, had a few stolen, some stolen livestock in the past.

00:05:09:15 – 00:05:33:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There are allegations that Garrett was selling stolen livestock out of his butcher shop. He himself may have gone and rounded up a few had here and there. I wouldn’t doubt it. But as far as him going out and, you know, killing bounty hunters with Billy the Kid or, just basically doing any illegal activities with Billy other than maybe possibly buying and selling stolen livestock.

00:05:33:06 – 00:05:59:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There’s really no indication as far as, the others docs Gerlach and Jose Chavez each others, those are both real life people. They were more involved in Billy’s life. If anybody’s ever seen Young Guns part one, where they basically cover the Lincoln County War, that’s when Scurlock and Chavez were riding with Billy the Kid. They were. They were Lincoln County regulators.

00:06:00:01 – 00:06:24:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
After the Lincoln County War, they kind of drifted apart. Chavez stayed down in Lincoln County for a while. He would end up going to prison later on. Doc Scurlock, he would settle up at Fort Sumner. So he and Billy still remain close. But doc started distancing himself. By the time the events unfold that we see in Young Guns, too, Doc Scurlock was already living in Texas.

00:06:24:28 – 00:06:49:14
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You left the whole thing behind. He got buried, he settled down, became an honest man. Dave Rude, a bore also very real person. He was never known as Arkansas Dave, though historically, I’m not really sure where that nickname comes from. There are stories that I’ve been unable to corroborate that he may have stolen cattle in Arkansas years prior.

00:06:49:16 – 00:07:08:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I actually reached out to John Fusco. This was a few months ago. John John Fusco was the guy who wrote and directed Young Guns one and two. He’s done a lot of great movies, and I thought maybe he had a source on that that I wasn’t familiar with. So I reached out like, hey, man, where did you find this information about him being called Arkansas?

00:07:08:09 – 00:07:31:04
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Dave, is that something you just made up? According to him, he could be completely pulling my chain, but he says he just made it up. He said it sounded you had a better ring to it than dirty. Dirty Dave. Rude about what he was actually known as, believe it or not. So I guess Arkansas Dave sounds cooler than Dirty Dave, but, any even that dirt, even that Dirty Dave nickname I.

00:07:31:06 – 00:07:47:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I may be mistaken here, but I believe it only comes from one source. At one point, Dave was arrested and taken to Las Vegas, New Mexico. And, there was a journalist there. A local paper published an article saying that he was wearing the same clothes that he had been wearing the last time he was in Vegas.

00:07:48:00 – 00:08:06:03
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So I guess that’s where the dirty thing comes from, whether or not he was unhygienic, I honestly don’t have any idea. But, yeah, he was the real deal. He was really more of an accomplished outlaw than any of these guys. He was a few years older than Billy the Kid. He had, he had been, caught robbing a train in Kansas.

00:08:06:05 – 00:08:27:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He spent time, like I said, in Las Vegas, New Mexico, sort of as a crooked lawman. And he eventually, participated in the killing of a jailer. So by the time him and Billy link up, Dave was wanted for murder. But, yeah, all these guys were real. The other two members of the gang that are that you see in Young Guns, too.

00:08:27:00 – 00:08:45:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You got Tom Foley or. Oh, weird. Depending on which version of his last name you want to go with. He too was a real life person. He wasn’t a 14 year old kid like they show in the movie, but he was real. He was a member of Billy’s gang. The other guy you see, Henry French, he’s sort of a composite character.

00:08:45:14 – 00:08:54:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There was a real guy named, Henry Newton French that Billy rode with.

00:08:54:20 – 00:09:18:26
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They I guess they just kind of made, like, a composite character out of a few different people. But in all reality, in the events that we see in Young Guns to Billy, the kids main core group was Dave Root of Ball, Tom folly, and two other guys named Billy Wilson and Tom Pickett. Those seem to be his main outlaw buddies at that time.

00:09:18:28 – 00:09:45:21
Dan LeFebvre
Maybe it’s just me, but when you have a nickname like Arkansas Dave, I assume that either he’s from Arkansas or he made a name in Arkansas before joining Billy the Kid. And I guess throughout the movie, he’s also kind of trying to he, he’s trying to be the one that everybody knows who he is. So I’m was just assuming that he made a name for himself in Arkansas somewhere as a, as an outlaw beforehand or something.

00:09:45:24 – 00:10:06:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And, you know, Dave was Dave got around, man. Dave. Dave knew he rub shoulders with a lot of famous people from the Old West, like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson and Doc Holliday. He knew all those guys. So, I, how, you know, I’ve heard people say that Ruta Ball was the only man that Billy the Kid feared.

00:10:06:25 – 00:10:30:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I don’t know if that’s true, but like I said a minute ago, he was a few years older than Billy, so I’m not sure how much of it was just him. Just straight up taking orders from a 19 year old rather than them just working together, you know what I mean? But yeah, he’s a really interesting guy. If anybody’s interested in learning more about him, I, I do have a full episode just on Dave Root about.

00:10:30:26 – 00:10:47:03
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, awesome. Yeah, I’ll make sure to add a link to that in the show notes so people can check that out. If we go back to the movie, New Mexico Governor Lew Wallace convinces Billy the Kid to testify against the Murph and Dolly faction who murdered, Murphy Dolan, I should say faction who murdered John Tunstall in exchange for a pardon.

00:10:47:03 – 00:11:06:18
Dan LeFebvre
That was kind of the context of the first movie, but then. So Billy the Kid and this one, young guns to Billy the Kid agrees and allows Wallace to arrest him so Wallace can protect Billy from anyone who wants to kill him before he can testify. But then Billy’s double crossed when the prosecuting attorney sides with the Irish politicians running Lincoln County.

00:11:06:26 – 00:11:29:14
Dan LeFebvre
Instead of going along with the pardon, he intends on taking Billy to trial, where he will surely be hanged. And while the movie doesn’t really mention it here, the impression that I got was this is the pardon that the older Brushy Bill mentioned wanting at the beginning of the movie. Is there any truth to the movie’s storyline around the pardon for Billy the Kid being offered?

00:11:29:16 – 00:11:51:25
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yes, that that’s also based on a true story. Billy was offered a pardon from Gov Jim. Governor Lew Wallace a little bit different. What they show in the movie, Billy actually reached out to him, as opposed to Wallace reaching out to Billy the Kid at that time, mostly due to the Lincoln County War, that area was in complete disarray.

00:11:51:25 – 00:12:17:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Like matter of fact, whenever Lew Wallace was, was made governor right around the same time, then president it was Rutherford because he, gosh, what do they call it when you you martial law. What did he something martial law. Anyway, he he, Gosh, I’m I’m blanking on the word. He imposed martial law on Lincoln County.

00:12:18:00 – 00:12:37:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I mean, there was a there was a lot of outlaw tivity going on at that time, a lot of lawlessness. But also at the same time, Governor Lew Wallace sort of issued a blanket amnesty for people on both sides, as long as they didn’t have any active indictments against them, which that didn’t apply to Billy. He was wanted for murder.

00:12:37:09 – 00:13:00:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So were several of his close friends. So I guess he wanted in on a little bit of that amnesty action. So that’s why he reached out to the governor. They did meet in Lincoln like they show in the movie. They met in secrecy. They sort of hammered out the details and yeah, Billy left that meeting convinced that he was going to receive a pardon, and he agreed to testify.

00:13:00:19 – 00:13:24:14
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, I guess it’s that’s why they call it the Wild West, right? I mean, just, you know, everybody’s got some sort of crime that they’ve done, like you’re talking about before. So I don’t know what what what was just the general public opinion of these pardons being offered, like because Billy the Kid at that point was he, well, like a well known outlaw that then offering a pardon to him would have affected.

00:13:24:20 – 00:13:37:02
Dan LeFebvre
I’m trying to think of, you know, politicians today offering a pardon and the public reaction to who they offer the pardon to. Was that kind of a thing back then, too, or is is am I projecting today’s, politics back then?

00:13:37:05 – 00:14:03:04
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You know, I’m not sure how that applied to, at the at the time frame when Billy and Governor Wallace agreed on the pardon, I’m not really sure what the public sentiment was. Billy was nowhere near as famous in his lifetime as he is nowadays. I mean, a lot of these famous figures from the Old West, their fame comes from bestselling novels and movies that followed the books later on.

00:14:03:07 – 00:14:35:01
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He wasn’t a he was notorious. He was well known in, in that area of New Mexico, certainly. And as his fame grew, you know, he would be reported on papers as far away as New York City or even Paris, France, you know, but he wasn’t necessarily a household name, I can tell you that. Spoiler alert, when he when he was killed later on, there were so many grateful people that the guy that killed him ended up receiving several thousand dollars just in donations, just from people that were glad to be rid of Billy the Kid.

00:14:35:01 – 00:15:01:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So as far as the public sentiment, you know, I’m not entirely sure that the public was aware that he was being offered a pardon. That’s another thing. There’s there’s not really any anything written down in black and white saying Lew Wallace absolutely guaranteed ability to get a pardon. It was more of an agreement. You know, there’s some people that think maybe the Billy read more into Wallace’s words than he should have.

00:15:01:21 – 00:15:11:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Maybe he put a little bit too much faith into Wallace. But as far as I’m aware, this was not excuse me, this was not a known thing that was just reported on the newspapers.

00:15:11:21 – 00:15:14:06
Dan LeFebvre
Okay, okay. More of an under the table type.

00:15:14:09 – 00:15:26:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Right. And, you know, when they arrested Billy, they had to stage an arrest so that they he didn’t just, you know, walk in one day, they arrest me. They had to stage an arrest to make it look legit.

00:15:26:18 – 00:15:37:05
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. The movie kind of alludes to that. I don’t remember actually seeing it happen in the movie, but it alludes to, oh, we gotta stage this to put on the appearance that we’ve actually caught you. Yeah.

00:15:37:07 – 00:15:39:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Right. Right. Yep.

00:15:39:04 – 00:15:58:24
Dan LeFebvre
Well, after he realizes in the movie, after he realizes he’s not going to get the pardon, Billy slips out of his handcuffs. Thanks to, as the movie puts it, a historical and biological fact that he had small hands and big wrists. Then he proceeds to escape and comes back, pretending to be part of a lynch mob. He there they have faces covered.

00:15:58:26 – 00:16:15:04
Dan LeFebvre
Law enforcement just hands over Doc and Chavez, assuming that they’re going to get killed by this lynch mob. But then, of course, the real vigilantes show up and there’s a huge shootout before Billy and his gang can escape. Did this escape from the Lincoln County Courthouse really happening the way that we see in the movie?

00:16:15:07 – 00:16:37:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Absolutely not. You know, it was nothing like that. Billy was not in chains. He was not locked behind bars. He was basically under voluntary house arrest during that period. So there are kernels of truth in there. You know, they show everybody being thrown into like a pit in the ground. That was a real thing. There was a pit jail in Lincoln, New Mexico.

00:16:38:01 – 00:16:59:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I a matter of fact, Billy had been thrown in that pit, back at the very beginning of the Lincoln County War. So he had actually spent time in there. I may I may not be, I’m not exactly sure about this, but by the time he comes back to Lincoln, I think they may have had an actual jail at that point, but, no, there was no gunfight with a lynch mob.

00:16:59:21 – 00:17:23:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Nothing like that. Billy stuck around, and, you know, they gloss over a few things. Billy did testify in real life. He, he testified in quite a few trials against a lot of his old enemies. And, he spent. Man, I want to say 2 to 3 months there in Lincoln, basically under a voluntary house arrest. And once he figured out that pardon wasn’t coming, he just got on a horse and rode out.

00:17:23:12 – 00:17:27:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
That was it. No gunfight, no dramatics, nothing like that.

00:17:27:11 – 00:17:33:21
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, okay. Well, that wouldn’t be as fun in the movie.

00:17:33:24 – 00:17:55:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Oh, yeah, I know, I know, you know, one thing you touched on was the big wrist and tiny hands. I’ve never I’ve always struggled with this because I’ve never seen anybody with wrists bigger than their hands, you know what I mean? But it is an undeniable fact that Billy was able to slip out of his chains on multiple occasions.

00:17:55:11 – 00:18:06:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He was able to slide out of them. So he may have had abnormally tiny hands. I really don’t know. But that is a true fact. In this instance, though, he was he was not shackled or in chains or anything like that.

00:18:07:00 – 00:18:28:10
Dan LeFebvre
I touched on it briefly too, but the movie does make a point to say that there’s one thing an outlaw feared in New Mexico Territory, and that’s lynch mob justice. And that to me, as I was watching the movie, it implied that they didn’t necessarily fear law enforcement, though. So is it true that outlaws in the Old West feared vigilantes wanting to lynch them rather than actual law enforcement?

00:18:28:13 – 00:18:53:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah, they feared both. So vigilante justice was a very real problem in the Old West, particularly in places like around that area of Lincoln, New Mexico. And part of it came from the law enforcement officials themselves being just as corrupt as the outlaws. So a lot of times they would just arrest their enemies as opposed to the people that were really committing the crimes.

00:18:53:03 – 00:19:20:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So on one hand, you had sheriffs and town marshals that weren’t doing anything about the crime. So the only recourse for justice in a lot of situations were these lynch mobs. And at the same time, if you were arrested, you know, I’ve covered a lot of these guys, man. So many times, I can tell you there would be is the stone cold killer like John Wesley Hardin or King Fisher Clay Allison, and they would gun somebody down in cold blood.

00:19:21:00 – 00:19:43:04
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They would make it to trial and they would get off, and they would just get off with a plea of self-defense or something like that. Nine times out of ten, if you made it to trial without being lynched by vigilantes, you would just get off scot free. So that was another reason why the vigilantes were so prevalent. They knew, if you know, this guy actually goes before a judge, he’s just going to get a slap on the wrist.

00:19:43:04 – 00:20:05:20
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And most so if we want justice be served, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. Unfortunately, that meant a lot of innocent people also got lynched. No due process, you know, no, jury of your peers or anything like that. So it was not a good situation. Billy would have definitely been afraid of mob justice. He knew all about mob justice.

00:20:05:22 – 00:20:26:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
In fact, I mentioned a moment ago they had a staged arrest. He was very particular in who he was going to allow to arrest him. And he was basically worried that if the wrong people arrested him, air quotes, then he would get shot in the back while once again attempting to escape. You know, and you know him and his buddies.

00:20:26:21 – 00:20:51:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They did the same thing during the Lincoln County War. They murdered a couple of guys who they claimed later on were attempting to escape. More than likely, it was just an execution. He knew the same thing happening to him would be a very real possibility, but if it was a legitimate if it was like a legitimate sheriff that arrested him, that was half ass honest, he would have been all right.

00:20:51:00 – 00:21:01:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He just didn’t want any of his enemies to. A lot of his enemies also wore badges because they would have killed him in a heartbeat. No doubt about it.

00:21:01:11 – 00:21:09:15
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, it sounds like the justice system wasn’t really great back then and then serving justice.

00:21:09:18 – 00:21:28:10
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You. Well, you know, I, I, I’ve thought about that before. I was you know, it almost seems like they aired on the side of justice, almost like, okay, we’re not going to convict this person unless we know without a shadow of a doubt that they’re they’re guilty, right. So a lot of times I think people think of Old West justice like it was very harsh.

00:21:28:13 – 00:21:38:26
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You get caught stealing a horse and you’re going to be executed. Nah, they would just send them to jail for a little bit or let them go. If a lynch mob didn’t get them, they were just fine.

00:21:38:29 – 00:21:56:21
Dan LeFebvre
So then is it maybe that they did? It just wasn’t proof. I mean, everybody didn’t have phones and be able to take pictures and video and stuff like that. So it’s pretty much it sounds like a lot of he said, she said type, evidence. And so if it’s really hard to prove, then they could get away with it.

00:21:56:23 – 00:22:15:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah. I mean, if you if you get in a gunfight with somebody in a saloon and enough of your buddies are willing to say that the other person drew first, you’re fine, you’re going to get by with it. And that’s that’s what I’ve seen happen time and time again with a lot of these guys. They just had really good lawyers and, some pretty good friends to testify under oath.

00:22:15:04 – 00:22:32:24
Dan LeFebvre
If you go back to the movie after escaping, Billy and his gang plan to go to Old Mexico. But they need some money first. So they go to the richest man in New Mexico Territory, John Chisum. And the movie sets it up that John Chisholm was the financial partner for Tunstall and McSween, which makes him a friend of Billy the Kid.

00:22:32:26 – 00:22:52:02
Dan LeFebvre
But once Billy gets there, he demands $500 and Chisum refuses to pay. So instead Billy kills a couple of Chisholm’s men, and that basically turns Chisolm into an enemy. So then Chisum decides to use his money to finance the hunting of Billy the Kid. Was that really how Billy the Kid turned John Chisholm against him?

00:22:52:05 – 00:23:15:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yes or no? He didn’t kill his men like they show in the movie. He did try to basically extort money from Chisholm. That much is true. Chisholm refused to pay, at which point Billy started stealing cattle from him. Now, was Billy already stealing cattle from him? Probably. Would he have stolen cattle even if Chisum had paid him the money?

00:23:15:20 – 00:23:36:20
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Probably. Billy. Billy was a thief, man. He stole horses and he stole cattle. That’s what he did. You know, Billy the Kid never robbed a train. He never held up a stagecoach. He never, robbed a bank. Nothing like that. He was just a cattle thief and a horse. The. A lot of people at that time were stealing Mr. Chisholm’s cattle.

00:23:36:20 – 00:23:54:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
A lot of people, Billy got the brunt of the blame, though he was the more well known of the people that were out there robbing with both hands. And even there were even certain killings that he was not involved in, that he was blamed for. And then that kind of leads back into what we were talking about earlier.

00:23:54:17 – 00:24:17:22
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
As far as his notoriety goes, as his fame grew, he just got blamed for pretty much everything that occurred in New Mexico Territory at that time. But yeah, as soon as he started stealing cattle from Chisum, that’s when Chisum and there was actually another guy named. Well, we’ll get to him in a minute named Joseph Lila. And they were both a let me correct that.

00:24:17:22 – 00:24:39:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I’m not entirely sure I’m saying his last name correctly, Joseph Lee or Joseph Lee. But, they were both really fed up with Billy the Kid just stealing from everybody. And, but yeah, it was primarily the stealing of Chisholm’s livestock that turned him against Billy the Kid. Now, there is another story. It’s a little bit apocryphal.

00:24:39:26 – 00:25:03:26
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Supposedly, John Tunstall, not John Tunstall. John Chisum showed up at, Fort Sumner one day in the saloon there, in the cantina, and Billy held him pistol, gunpoint and basically demanded, I want $500 right now. Chisum said, hey, I don’t have my checkbook on me. I don’t have any money on me. Let me go back to my ranch and I’ll send you a check in the mail.

00:25:03:26 – 00:25:23:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Basically. Billy ended up. Let him go. Now, whether or not that actually happened, I don’t know. Doesn’t sound like something that Chisum would agree to. I think Chisum would have probably told him to go to hell, but the source on that is a guy named Paco. Ennio who? Who did know Billy the Kid. But, you know, sometimes Paco, like, stretched the truth.

00:25:23:17 – 00:25:30:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
A little bit. But yeah, as far as the animosity between Billy and, Chisum, that was absolutely true.

00:25:30:21 – 00:25:49:03
Dan LeFebvre
Were they ever allies then? Because when they ride in the movie, when they ride up to Chisum, it gives the impression that, in the events of the first movie, the first young guns that Chisum was an ally of, of Tunstall and McSweeney. So perhaps he and Billy were friends at one point. That’s the impression I got from the movie.

00:25:49:03 – 00:26:07:16
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
At least they probably weren’t friends just because at that time frame, when the Lincoln County War was going on, Billy would have been 17 or 18. Chisum was, you know, a middle aged man by that point, he probably didn’t even know about Billy the Kid during the Lincoln County War, but he would have certainly known about him at this point.

00:26:07:21 – 00:26:30:26
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And, yeah, Chisum was somewhat aligned with, Billy’s former boss, Tunstall and Tunstall’s partner, Alexander McSween. Chisum really didn’t take part in that conflict, though. But he was he was sort of, you know, the the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Basically, Chisum was kind of opposed to the same people that Tunstall and McSween were opposed to.

00:26:30:28 – 00:26:45:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
But as far as any as far as Billy’s claims that Chisum owed him money, I think he like I said, he was basically just trying to extort some money from him, which he would have stolen from him anyway. I’m 100% positive of that.

00:26:45:07 – 00:26:48:28
Dan LeFebvre
And, I mean, it sounds like. Yeah, stealing cattle was a thing.

00:26:49:00 – 00:27:08:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah. Oh, yeah. And Chisum stole cattle. Everybody back in those days was a it was a livestock thief. Chisum used to, send his men over to the Mescalero Apache reservation and steal their livestock because he knew they couldn’t do anything about it. No, he’s not exactly, you know, the purest of souls either.

00:27:08:07 – 00:27:30:29
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. Okay. I guess, do unto others as you would have done unto you. And he’s. He. It’s happening. It’s happening, is happening. Well, you might have already, answered this some, but if we go back to the movies, versions of events, at this point, John Chisum decides to hire a thief to catch a thief. So then throughout the movie, we get Pat Garrett going from being friend and riding with Billy the Kid to wanting to settle down.

00:27:31:01 – 00:27:52:23
Dan LeFebvre
And Chisum hears about this and offers Garrett the chance to settle down by making him Sheriff Pat Garrett, giving him $500 cash up front, the men and resources to hunt down Billy the Kid, and then a guarantee of $500 cash. Once Garrett kills Billy and if were to believe the movie’s version of events, Garrett accepts the job offer and the hunt for Billy the Kid begins.

00:27:52:25 – 00:28:03:10
Dan LeFebvre
Does the movie accurately portray this swing in Garrett’s character arc, going from being Billy’s friend to then being hired by Chisum as the sheriff to kill him?

00:28:03:12 – 00:28:23:13
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Well, you know, there’s, there’s a several different caveats there. You know, Chisum had no authority to make anybody a sheriff. So really, all all he did was convince Pat Garrett to run for sheriff. He still had to be elected and all that stuff. He still had to go out on the campaign trail. Excuse me. What happened?

00:28:23:20 – 00:28:49:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Garrett got married. I want to say it was in January of 1880. Not long thereafter, he moved, to Roswell, New Mexico, which at that point was part of Lincoln County. Back in those days, Lincoln County was massive. It was it was way bigger than it is nowadays. So Roswell, New Mexico was still Lincoln County, while he was there in Lincoln, he gets buddy buddy with John Chisum and the guy I mentioned earlier, Joseph Leia.

00:28:49:07 – 00:29:15:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And they basically convinced him to run for sheriff. I don’t know where they got the $500 up front and $500 after. I don’t believe that either one of those guys paid Garrett anything to run. You know, he Garrett wanted to become a respectable man. You know, that was, a big goal of his. You. He had spent a lot of time at Fort Sumner, sort of cavorting with people that maybe had a little bit of loose morals.

00:29:15:18 – 00:29:36:27
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He was a married man. Now he was going to raise a family. He wanted to make a name for himself. And, yeah, they convinced him to run for sheriff. I don’t think they there was any money exchanged. Later on, Billy would have a $500 bounty placed on its head. Maybe that’s where they’re basing it from. But that bounty was never from Chisum or, Joseph.

00:29:36:27 – 00:29:41:06
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Leia. That was actually offered by, the Wallace, the governor.

00:29:41:08 – 00:29:59:22
Dan LeFebvre
In the movie. The impression I got was that Chisum convinced Garrett to to be sheriff, specifically to hunt for Billy the Kid. Was that basically the reason why he became sheriff then? To hunt for Billy? Or was it more that he became sheriff and then. Well, now there’s this this outlaw, and that’s that’s your job?

00:29:59:24 – 00:30:24:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
No. Yeah, that was his problem. You’re all right about that. That was his primary reason for running for sheriff. That’s why they wanted him to run for sheriff. And you know, part of it, like you say, it takes a thief to catch a thief. While there’s not necessarily in any indication that Garrett and Billy had rode the hoot off trail together, anything like that, he was still very familiar with Billy’s mannerisms, with Billy’s various hideouts, with his habits.

00:30:24:27 – 00:30:48:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So he was intimately aware of Billy the Kid. Now, as far as their friendship is concerned, this is something that historians still debate about all the time. There’s some people that try to downplay it and say they were. They were just acquaintances, you know, there’s other people that go with, basically the same route they went in the movie that they were just the best of friends, almost like brothers.

00:30:48:26 – 00:31:13:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. If, Paulina Maxwell, she was, one of Billy the Kids gal pals. If what she said is any indication, they were extremely tight. They were very good friends. But that friendship doesn’t really seem to have extended outside of Fort Sumner now. Paul Lita would later, decades later, she would say that when they found out that Garrett was running for sheriff, it came as a big shock to them.

00:31:13:24 – 00:31:27:03
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Like they didn’t think he would turn on on his friends like that. And, that’s basically that basically severed their friendship from that point on. You know, if they came face to face, there was probably going to be some violence.

00:31:27:05 – 00:31:32:12
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. So it wasn’t like Garrett ran with Billy the Kid, though, like we see happening in the beginning of the movie.

00:31:32:14 – 00:31:57:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
If anybody can find any historical evidence showing this might. I’m all eyes and ears, but I have never been able to find any indication that they did outlaw activities together. Now, when Garrett won, the matter of fact, Billy actually campaigned against him during the during the election, he would travel out. Yeah, he would travel out to, like, the, local Hispanic communities and tell them, hey, don’t vote for this joker.

00:31:57:19 – 00:32:11:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Won enough. Garrett had the backing not just of Chisholm and Leah, but he had, his cronies up in Santa Fe, the Santa Fe ring. They were back in his play. Now, interestingly enough.

00:32:11:23 – 00:32:34:16
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You know, it was just like, nowadays you can win an election, but you’re still not going to take hold of that office until the following year, right? So if you’re elected in November, you’re not going to take office until January. February. It was the same thing with Pat Garrett. However, the guy who was the sheriff, the incumbent, the guy that he beat in the election, he was a he basically went ahead and deputized Garrett and in step back.

00:32:34:16 – 00:32:56:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So for all intents and purposes, Garrett was sheriff in just he was basically sheriff at that point as soon as he won the election, he may not have been sheriff in name, but he was a deputy with the power of the the Lincoln County sheriff. He also received a commission as a deputy US marshal is Fort Sumner where Billy the Kid like to spend time?

00:32:56:02 – 00:33:05:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
That was not in Lincoln County. So even a sheriff, he would not have jurisdiction up there. But with that marshal’s badge, now you can go in anywhere.

00:33:05:07 – 00:33:17:20
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, ink. So maybe maybe that’s kind of in the movie because they hand him the badge right away. So maybe that was kind of a nod to that of, pretty much becoming a sheriff. Right away. It sounds like, even if it’s not official by title, but.

00:33:17:22 – 00:33:28:01
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And he did I mean, as soon as he as soon as he got that badge, he went on the hunt. That was that was his primary goal. Not necessarily to kill, but to arrest Billy the Kid.

00:33:28:04 – 00:33:43:15
Dan LeFebvre
In the movie, after he becomes sheriff, we see Pat Garrett hiring, journalists to tag along and record the hunt for Billy the Kid. So then he can turn it into a book. And then at the end of the movie, there’s some text on screen saying it. The book was called The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, and it was a failure according to the movie.

00:33:43:22 – 00:33:47:19
Dan LeFebvre
Did he really write that book and was it a failure or was it any good?

00:33:47:21 – 00:34:06:07
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah, it was a failure at the time. But yeah, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid was published, I believe it was in 1882. So very, very soon after the events that are portrayed in the movie. And the guy that you see there, Ash Upson, he was hired by Pat Garrett basically to be a ghost writer.

00:34:06:14 – 00:34:23:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So as far as his, you know, I have a love hate relationship with that book. You can tell the parts that Ash Upson wrote, and you can tell the parts that Pat Garrett wrote. Ash ups him. He was he was a little full of it. He never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

00:34:23:28 – 00:34:47:03
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Right? Ash Upson even went so far, he didn’t know Billy the Kid’s actual birth date, so he just substituted it with his own birth date. Like stuff like that. You know, he would just make stuff up. You can kind of sorta tell where ash ups and stops writing and Pat Garrett takes over, because the parts were where Pat’s talking about, especially towards the end of the book.

00:34:47:05 – 00:35:05:10
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There’s a lot more accuracy there. So it’s one of those sources that you got to take with a grain of salt or a grain of salt. You definitely need to corroborate a lot of the stuff in the book with other sources, but it’s, to me, it’s a must read for anybody who’s a fan of Billy the Kid history.

00:35:05:12 – 00:35:23:11
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah, yeah, it sounds like there’s well, I guess like movies. They they they, you know, never get the truth, get in the way of a good story. It just sounds like that’s the case, too. There. Well, in the movie, while they’re on the run, Billy and his gang end up in the town of White Oaks at a brothel run by Jane Greathouse.

00:35:23:13 – 00:35:48:01
Dan LeFebvre
And she’s. She’s played by junior, right, in the movie. And she seems to be an old friend of Billy’s. And then that night, a mob of townspeople carrying torches started to burn the building down. If Billy the Gang don’t give themselves up, a local lawman guy named Deputy Carlyle goes inside, tries to talk to Billy, tries to get him to come out peacefully, but instead Billy tricks Carlyle into putting on Travis’s hat and coat and then pushes Carlyle out of the front door and the mob is waiting there.

00:35:48:01 – 00:36:06:07
Dan LeFebvre
They just open fire and kill him, thinking that it’s Chavez. But of course it’s not. And then when they realize their mistake, the town scatters. And that’s how Billy gets out of that one. Even though the older Brushy Bill says that he got pinned with Carlyle’s death, how much of that event really happened?

00:36:06:09 – 00:36:09:20
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Some of it.

00:36:09:22 – 00:36:12:10
Dan LeFebvre
Never left the truth anyway.

00:36:12:12 – 00:36:32:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Never let the truth. And, you know, I, I used to love that scene when I was a kid. I had the biggest crush on Jenny right at that time. But, yeah, she never existed in real life. Jane. Great. Else was actually. Jim. Great house. It was a man. They call him Whiskey Jim because he used to illegally sell alcohol to Native Americans.

00:36:32:27 – 00:36:52:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He ran a roadhouse. It wasn’t actually in White Oaks. It was about 40 miles to the north. And it was. It wasn’t necessarily a, House bill repute. It was basically a place where you could go and get a meal, a couple of drinks and a place to sleep for the night. Whether or not he had any soiled doves working for him, that I can’t say.

00:36:52:05 – 00:37:09:04
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I’m sure he did, but I honestly don’t know about that. But it was sort of a hangout for Billy and several of his buddies. There’s a lot of people that think that that’s where Billy first met Dave Root. The bar now on the on the day in question, it was Billy the Kid, Dave Root of Ball and Billy Wilson.

00:37:09:07 – 00:37:31:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So Chavez and Scurlock and the others that you see in the movie, they were not there for this. But yeah, they they were surrounded by a posse. Deputy Carlyle. He wasn’t like an he wasn’t like a full time deputy. He was a blacksmith, believe it or not. He was just deputized to be part of this posse. And, the reason he went inside is because he knew some of those guys.

00:37:31:19 – 00:37:56:08
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He was on friendly terms with them, so they sort of swapped it out. So, Jim, great house. He goes outside and he’s basically the posse’s hostage while Deputy Carlyle is inside trying to talk everybody into surrendering. Well, Billy’s not going to surrender to a lynch mob, so he’s steadily pouring whiskey down. Deputy Carlisle’s mouth gets him stumbling drunk.

00:37:56:11 – 00:38:18:04
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
The posse outside keeps tossing out ultimatums. They finally they say, we’re going to give you five minutes. If you don’t come out and surrender, we’re going to kill Jim Greathouse. There’s a shot, and he gets fired. Supposedly, Billy the Kid would later claim the shot was fired from the outside, at which point, drunken Carlyle freaks out, jumps through the window.

00:38:18:07 – 00:38:40:07
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Okay, so as he jumps in the window, he’s gunned down by his posse. That’s according to Billy the Kid. Later on, gave root a ball, allegedly told somebody that he, Billy Wilson and Billy the Kid, that all three of them shot Carlisle in the back when he jumped through the window. Where the truth lies, I don’t know.

00:38:40:09 – 00:38:59:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
However, just like they show in the movie, Billy the Kid would definitely get the blame for that particular killing. And, you know, that kind of, that kind of lost him a lot of goodwill to, a lot of people, because Deputy Carlisle was well-liked and well-respected. So a lot of people didn’t appreciate the way he was gunned down.

00:38:59:23 – 00:39:20:14
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Whether or not was the posse or not that did it. Billy still got a lot of the blame for it. And as they show in the movie, Carlisle or not Carlisle, Great Houses Roadhouse was burned to the ground the next day. That is something that did occur. I don’t know that he got on his horse naked and rode out of town, but like, the lady does in the movie.

00:39:20:14 – 00:39:23:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
But they definitely did burn this place to the ground.

00:39:23:18 – 00:39:42:19
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, I guess it just from, as you were explaining, the two different versions of what could have happened with Carlisle, I it sounds like maybe both could be true, like they could have shot him as he went in the back, shot him as he went out the window. And then also the posse opened fire on him. And I mean, who knows?

00:39:42:21 – 00:39:51:21
Dan LeFebvre
I mean, yeah, I guess that kind of goes back to I was talking about it could be like, you know, starts to get into he said she said in the evidence and what really happened. And, you know, I don’t know.

00:39:51:23 – 00:40:09:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah, yeah. It’s one of those and, you know, come to think of it, you would think that if he was shot in the back as he was coming through the window, somebody would have made note of it, you know? But, I’m not aware if there’s any, contemporary reports that specify where his wounds were. I need to check into that.

00:40:09:21 – 00:40:12:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
That’s a that’s a good idea.

00:40:12:02 – 00:40:29:20
Dan LeFebvre
Well, if we head back to the movie’s timeline, Pat Garrett and his men finally catch up to Billy and his gang. And this leads to the big climactic shootout where doc Spurlock is hit badly. He sacrifices himself so everyone else can escape, but it doesn’t really work because Billy finds himself surrounded and captured, and then he’s sentenced to hang.

00:40:29:20 – 00:40:51:00
Dan LeFebvre
But before that gets carried out, Jane Greathouse comes back and she sneaks a gun into the outhouse so Billy can use it to make his escape. In the process, he kills some of the bad guy deputies that we’ve grown to dislike throughout the movie, and he rides off to join the rest of his gang. Once he’s there, we find out that Chavez was mortally wounded, and I know there’s a lot in there, but all of that happens in the movie.

00:40:51:00 – 00:41:04:01
Dan LeFebvre
It’s just like ten minutes of screen time. So it really seems like the movie is rushing through a lot of events to kind of wrap up a lot of these different storylines. Is there any truth to those things that we see happening in that fast paced sequence of events?

00:41:04:03 – 00:41:29:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
A little bit of truth in there. So like you said, it’s, they, they gloss over a lot of stuff. So, okay, at this point in time, after the debacle at, White Oaks, Billy’s on the run. Pat Garrett, hunt him down. And, you know, it wasn’t just Pat Garrett that was after him. There was, contingent of cattlemen from the Texas Panhandle who were also on the hunt for Billy.

00:41:29:03 – 00:41:50:04
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
What Billy was doing at this period following the Lincoln County War. Basically, he was still in horses in New Mexico, trailing them all the way up to the Texas Panhandle, selling them to ranchers there. And then on his way back to New Mexico, he was still a bunch of cattle and sell them to people here in are there in New Mexico.

00:41:50:06 – 00:42:11:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Sorry about that. And my alarm going off. But, so you had Pat Garrett hunt him down. Believe it or not, there was actually a Secret Service agent who was in New Mexico at that time hunting Billy down together. He was connected to a counterfeiting ring, and, yeah, the cowboys from Texas. So. And even the military was on the hunt for Billy the Kid.

00:42:11:12 – 00:42:31:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So a lot of people were looking for him. His sort of a safe place was Fort Sumner, where you see Fort Sumner a lot throughout the movie. The the part where he’s hanging out with the guy he keeps calling Beaver. That was a real life guy named Beaver Smith. They had a cantina there at Fort Sumner, but, Billy felt safe there.

00:42:31:12 – 00:42:55:11
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
It was a predominantly Hispanic area. He was very friendly with the Hispanics. He got along amazingly with them. He spoke their language fluently, was very assimilated into their culture. So he felt safe there. Well, as soon as Garrett gets the badge, he he ends up linking up with those cowboys from Texas. And they lie in wait at Fort Sumner and set up an ambush.

00:42:55:14 – 00:43:12:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So one day, Billy and the boys are riding up Billy the Kid just so happens to be riding sort of in the rear of the column. When they get right up to the to the gates, Garrett yells out from the halt, Billy’s friend. Tom, follow your goes for his pistol! They blasted out of the saddle. Kill him!

00:43:12:04 – 00:43:17:03
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Billy and the others are able to will their horses around and escape.

00:43:17:05 – 00:43:38:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Get bad. A couple of days later and the rest of the what’s called the the Stone house at a place called Stinking Springs wasn’t very far away from Fort Sumner at all. And, it was just an old, abandoned, just tiny one room building made of rocks. Basically. That’s kind of what you see in that scene where, they show Scurlock being gunned down.

00:43:38:21 – 00:44:01:08
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So basically three days later or may have been four days later, Garrett and the posse track them down to the stone house surrounded in the middle of the night. And the next morning, one of Billy’s good friends got him. Charlie Beaudry steps outside. He’s wearing, a big, sombrero of the kind that Billy the Kid also was partial to.

00:44:01:10 – 00:44:27:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He’s mistaken for Billy the Kid. Garrett gives a signal rifle sound and Beaudry shot the pieces. Charlie Beaudry was a Lincoln County regulator. He did help Billy still in live stock after Gotti wore, but at this point he too, he was kind of pulling a Doc Scurlock. He was distancing himself. He had gotten married. He was trying to settle down.

00:44:27:21 – 00:44:48:14
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
That was the last person they wanted to kill. Garrett. And then it was a it was a complete accident. So in Young Guns two, when you see Doc Scurlock being gunned down, that never happened. Doc, was living in Texas at the time. That is actually, portrayal, pretty accurate portrayal of the death of the very real life Charlie Beaudry.

00:44:48:17 – 00:45:12:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There was a siege. Believe it or not, Garrett actually brought in a wagon. They started cooking breakfast outside to lure the boys out, and it worked. They ended up. They all surrendered. So it was. It was Billy the Kid, Ruta Ball, Tom Pickett and Billy Wilson. All of these guys ended up coming out. They surrendered. They were arrested and taken the Las Vegas in New Mexico and placed in jail.

00:45:12:20 – 00:45:30:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Billy was in jail for a while. He was actually tried and convicted for murder during this period. He’s then taken to Lincoln to await, execution. So that all the stuff that you’re saying they glossed over. Absolutely. You know, they you don’t we don’t get to see him. Well, you do see the trial. We do see that in the movie.

00:45:30:24 – 00:45:59:10
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I forgot about that. The judge says he’s going to hang by the neck until he’s dead. Dead, dead. And Billy tells him you can go to hell, hell, hell. But but yeah, it they did sort of gloss over a few things. It wasn’t Scurlock who was killed. It was actually a guy named Charlie Beaudry. Now, if anybody is not familiar with any of these people and, you’re a little morbidly curious, do a Google image search for Charlie Beaudry, and you’ll find the photo of him and his wife.

00:45:59:10 – 00:46:14:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
It was actually taken off of his body. Still has the bloodstains on it. Really cryptic image. But, he was he was a real deal outlaw. Very tough guy. And unfortunately, he was trying to go straight at the time. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That deal.

00:46:14:21 – 00:46:32:01
Dan LeFebvre
Wow. Yeah. I mean, I guess that kind of goes back to. Yeah, they don’t have I know they wanted posters, but they don’t have, you know, mug shots and photographs and things like that to know what somebody actually looks like. So they’re going it sounds like what you said they were going off Garrett’s recognition of him. Right? Garrett gave the give the shot.

00:46:32:05 – 00:46:41:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Or gave it? Yeah. That’s what it seems to be. It seems to be the case to me as well. I mean, Garrett Garrett just they it was a case of mistaken identity, you know?

00:46:41:07 – 00:47:04:12
Dan LeFebvre
Well, throughout the movie, I really felt like it could have benefited from some titles clarifying dates and locations and perhaps that that sequence, there’s perhaps the most obvious at the end, because the whole time they’re talking about going to old Mexico. And there’s one line of dialog after the shootout where Arkansas Dave asks, the a couple of guys nearby if he’s in old Mexico and they simply nod.

00:47:04:12 – 00:47:20:24
Dan LeFebvre
So he seems to think that he’s finally made it. And since the whole gang talked about going to old Mexico, the entire movie, that led me to believe, as I was watching it, that maybe finally they they made it to old Mexico after this big shootout. Can you clarify the actual locations where these events in the movie took place?

00:47:20:24 – 00:47:23:24
Dan LeFebvre
I’m assuming not in near Old Mexico?

00:47:23:26 – 00:47:41:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah. You know, there is some indication that Billy was planning on going to Mexico and one of his buddies would would have write a book. Gosh, man, it was one of the Cocos. And he was either Frank or George Coe, who said that Billy was planning on going to Mexico and laying low. He just had to settle some business there.

00:47:41:21 – 00:48:04:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Fort Sumner I think. I do think that’s pretty plausible. He just dragged his feet too long about doing it and he got got. But Dave Root Ball would flee to old Mexico like they show in the movie. It wasn’t immediate like that. He would live for several more years. But yeah, he would eventually find his way to Mexico, to a place called Parral, Mexico.

00:48:04:25 – 00:48:32:06
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And he got crossways with the wrong guys. They shot him dead, and they cut his head off and placed it on a pike so that that part was real. I think, you see him kind of sharpening the machetes and get ready to take care of him. It just didn’t happen. As immediate as they show in the in this in the in the movie, most of the movie is going to take place either in Lincoln, New Mexico or Fort Sumner, New Mexico, maybe.

00:48:32:08 – 00:48:51:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Oh, excuse me. The scene where they show Garrett meeting with, John Chisum and being offered the job of sheriff, maybe that’s supposed to represent the capital of Santa Fe or maybe Roswell. I’m not sure, but I know what you’re talking about. It does sort of seem like they’re just on the run towards New Mexico the entire time around.

00:48:51:15 – 00:49:00:01
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Answer I’m sorry, old Mexico, but no, in most of what you’re seeing, there is either taking place at Lincoln or Fort Sumner or the surrounding areas.

00:49:00:03 – 00:49:08:25
Dan LeFebvre
Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot more sense because, yeah, I got the impression that, yeah, they’re trying to trying to make it there, but they never really seem to make it there.

00:49:08:28 – 00:49:13:09
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
The route about did, but, I’m sure at his final moments he wished he hadn’t.

00:49:13:12 – 00:49:30:29
Dan LeFebvre
At the very end of the movie, Pat Garrett is alone when he finds Billy the Kid, and he seems to regret being in the position of killing his old friend, according to the movie. Garrett says this hurts him to do it, but he’s in a place that he can’t get out of and Billy says he’s going to make it easy and then turns his back to Garrett.

00:49:31:01 – 00:49:52:18
Dan LeFebvre
There’s a gunshot, but the movie never really shows Billy getting hit. And then in the next scene, we see a casket being lowered into the ground with Garrett and Chisum, and they’re watching this going on. And then the movie cuts back to the elderly Brushy Bill telling his story to the lawyer from the beginning. So from the movie’s perspective, it seems to suggest that Pat Garrett helped Billy the Kid fake his death.

00:49:52:21 – 00:50:15:07
Dan LeFebvre
And then he lived out the rest of his days as Brushy Bill Roberts. There’s even some text at the end of the movie that says, Brushy Bill went before the New Mexico governor, Thomas Mabry, on November 29th, 1950, and despite identification by several surviving friends of the notorious outlaw Brushy Bill, was discredited. Finally, I’m going to quote this last bit of text from the movie.

00:50:15:07 – 00:50:34:02
Dan LeFebvre
So this is a quote from the movie. It says, quote, whether or not Brushy Bill Roberts was Billy the Kid remains a mystery. End quote. Can you help unravel the history that we know from the movies version of this guy named Brushy Bill Roberts, living in the 1950s, actually being Billy the Kid?

00:50:34:05 – 00:50:53:22
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah. So I’m glad you included that quote, especially the the word mystery. There is a lot of mystery, you know, taking taking Brushy Bill out of the equation for now. There’s a lot of mystery surrounding Billy the Kid’s life. There’s a lot of stuff that we make assumptions about that we don’t know for certain. We don’t know when he was born.

00:50:53:24 – 00:51:17:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
We don’t know where he was born. We don’t know how old he was when he died. We don’t know his his father’s name, his mother’s maiden name. There’s so much we don’t know about Billy the Kid. His death is probably the least mysterious aspect of his entire life. So once again, there’s a lot of misconceptions surrounding his death.

00:51:17:18 – 00:51:37:25
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
To be frank, there’s a lot of false information that people put out there. I’m really not sure why, but, one of the things that people seem to, to think is true, that’s not true, is that Garrett killed Billy the Kid without anybody else seeing what was happening, and then buried his body before anybody could get a good look at it.

00:51:37:27 – 00:52:02:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
That could not be farther from the truth. So Garrett had two deputies with him at the time, Kit McKinney and John Poe. They snuck into Fort Sumner under the cover of Dark. They and they eventually made their way to the home of P Maxwell. So Fort Sumner used to be a legitimate military installation. A guy named Lucian Maxwell bought the fort from the Army.

00:52:02:22 – 00:52:29:06
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I want to say, in the late 1860s. Could be wrong about that date. Lucian Maxwell ended up passing away. Everything went to his widow and his kids. His son was Pete Maxwell. So by the time these these events are unfolding, Pete Maxwell basically had to run to Fort Sumner. Lady I mentioned earlier, Paul Lita Maxwell, that was Pete’s sister, and also Billy, the kid’s alleged girlfriend.

00:52:29:08 – 00:52:44:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So if anybody knew where Billy the Kid was, it was going to be Pete Maxwell, right? Pat and his deputies make their way once again to the middle of the night. It’s dark. They kind of sneak their way inside the fort. They go because they want to talk to Maxwell. Basically, they ask him, hey, have you seen Billy?

00:52:44:29 – 00:53:06:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Do you know where Billy could be? They were not expecting to find Billy the Kid there. Matter of fact, both. You know, Garrett obviously would write his book, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, John W Poe. Decades later, he would write his own book called, The Death of Billy the Kid. And they’re both very clear that they kind of felt like they were on a wild goose chase at this point.

00:53:06:26 – 00:53:31:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They knew Billy was in the area. They just didn’t think he would be, for lack of better words, I guess naive enough to actually be inside Fort Sumner itself when he was such a wanted man by this point. And they definitely didn’t think he’d be at Pete Maxwell’s place. Right. So Garrett goes inside to question Pete Maxwell. He leaves his two deputies outside on the porch.

00:53:31:19 – 00:53:47:13
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
This happened very quickly, like in less than a couple of minutes. Right at that moment, Billy the Kid comes strolling up. He’s he doesn’t have his boots on. He’s in his he’s in his stockings, as they call them. He’s got a pistol in one hand and a butcher knife in the other. He’s going to get a midnight snack.

00:53:47:15 – 00:54:03:20
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He’s. There was a slaughtered steer. He was going to cut a piece of meat off of it, take it back to a friend’s house. They were going to cook him a midnight snack and he was going to go to sleep. So he wasn’t expecting Garrett either. It was all it was. It was the perfect storm. He’s almost on the deputies.

00:54:03:22 – 00:54:24:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
When he notices them, he immediately raises his pistol and starts asking them in Spanish. Once again. You know, it was a predominantly Spanish area. He’s asking them, Kens, who is it? DNS kidnaps as he’s back in. As he’s doing that, he’s backing into Maxwell’s bedroom. The layout of Fort Sumter was a little strange. There’s a lot more involved here, Pete.

00:54:24:26 – 00:54:45:14
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Only he did not have an interior door going to his his room where he where he stayed. It was an exterior door. So Billy just backed into it. He. Pete, who are those guys outside? At the same moment, he sees a shadowy figure standing next to Pete Maxwell’s bed, lifts his pistol again, says kidnaps. And that’s when Garrett shoots him and kills him.

00:54:45:17 – 00:55:04:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So right off the bat, you’ve got an eyewitness and Pete Maxwell. The whole entire town converged on that building. As soon as soon as this happened, he, Maxwell, did not live alone. His mother, his siblings, other relatives all live in that house. They came to his room. They saw Billy the Kid lying there dead. Everybody else was looking in the window.

00:55:04:29 – 00:55:29:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They saw Billy the Kid’s body lying in their dead. Things were so tense that Garrett and his deputies had to follow it up inside of Maxwell’s room for the rest of the night. They were expecting the mob to attack them just to avenge Billy’s. That the attack never came. The next morning, a coroner’s jury was formed. Every single one of the people that were in the coroner’s jury where people who personally knew Billy the Kid, they saw the body.

00:55:29:27 – 00:55:54:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They interviewed Pete Maxwell, they talked to the deputies, they talked to Garrett. They issued a, coroner’s jury report. It was basically the same thing as a death certificate back in those days, describing the entire event and explicitly saying that, yes, Billy the Kid was shot and killed by Pat Garrett. Later on that morning, they released Billy’s body to the citizens of Fort Sumner.

00:55:54:27 – 00:56:17:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He was a very popular figure there. A lot of people loved him. Not everybody loved him, but a lot of people did. They dressed and cleaned his body or they cleaned his body. They dressed it in new clothes. Other people dug the grave. They held a public wake, like there was a literal public wake. So many, many, many people saw Billy the Kid’s dead body.

00:56:17:21 – 00:56:44:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
The funeral was attended by nearly everybody in town. According to Polly, the Maxwell. And that was it. And of course, Billy the Kid was never seen again after that happened. So there is a lot of evidence coming from multiple sources that Pat Garrett did indeed kill Billy the Kid. There was no photograph taken. A lot of people are under the false impression that every dead outlaw had their pictures taken back in those days.

00:56:44:14 – 00:57:01:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Once again, nothing could be further from the truth. I know what people are thinking of because there are a lot of. I hate to sound say it this way, but a lot of cool photos of dead outlaws from the old West. They would prop them up, take pictures of them, turn them into postcards. That is something that did happen on occasion.

00:57:01:27 – 00:57:24:01
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
But I mean, we only have like maybe 15 to 20 of those type of photos. At the same time, there is probably a thousand outlaws at any given time roaming the West. There’s a lot of people like Dave Root Ball, for example. We don’t have any photos of him while he was alive. Right. And he was a much more accomplished outlaw than Billy the Kid ever was.

00:57:24:03 – 00:57:44:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There was a lot of people that we don’t have photographic evidence of their death. Right. But some people will point to that and say, that’s how we know that Pat Garrett did not kill Billy the Kid because we don’t have a photo. Well, number one, he didn’t have to provide photographic proof. He had all the proof he needed in the coroner’s jury report and all the eyewitnesses.

00:57:44:03 – 00:58:09:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And we know that because he was paid the reward eventually for killing Billy the Kid, and there was no photographer that lived in Fort Sumner. This is a very tiny community. I want to say it was less than 300 people. Yeah. No, no, photographer probably within about 2 or 3 days riding, Fort Sumner. Okay. So.

00:58:09:04 – 00:58:29:07
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Oh, and one more thing historians have been able to identify. At least I always forget on the exact number it was. It’s over two dozen people by name who saw Billy the Kid’s dead body. A lot of these people live for a very, very long time. I’m talking up until the 1920s, 30s. Some of these people wrote books.

00:58:29:13 – 00:58:50:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Some of them had had their journals published. Many of them were interviewed by historians and journalists. And, you know, there may be certain details that people get wrong, just like any, you know, if if there’s a carjacking and a police officer shows up, somebody is going to say it happened at 115 in the afternoon, somebody else is going to say, no, no, it was after 2:00.

00:58:50:19 – 00:59:12:18
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Somebody is going to say the guy was wearing a green shirt. Somebody else is going to say, but they all agreed. That guy definitely stole that car, right? It was the same thing with Billy’s death. Not all the details lined up. Maybe not everybody agrees on the timing, but the one thing that they all maintained for literally the rest of their lives, even after Pat Garrett was long gone, was that Garrett absolutely killed Billy the Kid.

00:59:12:20 – 00:59:36:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So there’s a ton of evidence showing that it’s kind of all the all the mystery, the supposed mystery surrounding the kid’s death is pretty much much ado about nothing. By contrast, there is zero evidence that Brushy Bill Roberts was who he claimed he was. It’s a cool story, man. I, I when I was a kid, I believe that Brushy Bill Roberts was Billy the Kid I want.

00:59:36:06 – 00:59:56:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And to this day, if there was a new discovery that definitively that definitively prove that brushy was Billy the Kid, I would be ecstatic. You know, I don’t look up to Billy the Kid as a hero. Like a lot of people, I’m pretty neutral on the people I cover on my show. They were just historical figures, you know?

00:59:56:04 – 01:00:13:01
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
But he is a very sympathetic character, and he’s a very. He was a likable guy when he was alive. He was fun loving. He, if mean, you got in the time machine right now and were whisked back to Fort Sumner, we would be in no danger. Billy the Kid is not just going to shoot you like a dog in the street.

01:00:13:07 – 01:00:36:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He wasn’t a he wasn’t a psychopath. A lot of the people I cover on my show were definitely psychopaths. Billy was a young kid who got caught up with the wrong people. He probably had a little bit of, you know, he aversion to authority, but he wasn’t an evil person. And we don’t like the idea of him just being killed in the dark like that at the hands of Pat Garrett.

01:00:36:00 – 01:00:51:27
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Somebody that used to be his friend is not a it’s not a fairy tale ending. You know, we never get to see Billy the Kid grow up to be Billy the Man, essentially. You know, so I think a lot of people just don’t want it to be true. They don’t want Billy to have been killed the way he was.

01:00:52:01 – 01:01:16:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Somebody like Brushy Bill Roberts comes along. It’s a very compelling story. It’s surface level. So people just, you know, they buy hook, line and sinker and now brushy. Like I said, on the surface, it’s very compelling. The story goes that Brushy had all the same scars as Billy the Kid that he had. He he was fluent in Spanish, just like Billy the Kid.

01:01:16:23 – 01:01:34:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He was ambidextrous, could shoot just as well with both hands that he had tiny hands and big wrist, just like Billy the Kid. He knew things about the Lincoln County War that nobody could have possibly known unless they were Billy the Kid, or very close to Billy the Kid. And yeah, I think he sort of touched on this earlier.

01:01:35:01 – 01:02:01:13
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There were people who knew Billy the Kid that vouched for Brushy Bill Roberts. Sounds very compelling. If any of that that I just said was true, I would be convinced. But if you dig just a little bit deeper, it all falls apart. So we can start with the multiple gunshot wounds. Brushy Bill. Well, let me just. Have you ever known a pathological liar?

01:02:01:15 – 01:02:02:01
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah.

01:02:02:03 – 01:02:28:08
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Unfortunately, a lot of times they don’t know when to stop, so they’ll they’ll they’ll take, a tiny lie and it’ll snowball until it’s just this fantastical, unbelievable fairytale story. Brushy Bill was the same. He, the the stories he told were. If you tried to print them as a fiction novel now, you’d be laughed out of the publishing house like, we’re not going to we’re not going to print this.

01:02:28:08 – 01:02:49:06
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
This is too silly. This would be a comedy story, you know? But. So, Bryce, he didn’t just say that he was shot a couple of times. He had been shot. I want to say 30, 34 times. He claimed he had 34 various bullet wounds and knife wounds over his body. Did he have the same scars as Billy the Kid?

01:02:49:06 – 01:03:12:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Well, how many times was Billy the Kid shot when he was still before Pat Garrett killed him? Possibly once. There’s some evidence. He took a bullet to the thigh when they ambushed and killed Sheriff Brady. Even that’s not, like, proven for a fact, because just a couple of days later, Billy was on his feet, participating in a completely different gun gunfight at Blazer’s Mill.

01:03:12:09 – 01:03:30:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So we think he was possibly wounded. It may have been a grazing wound, at one point in his life, but he certainly wasn’t riddled with scars like Brushy Bill. Roberts claimed that he was. So no, he didn’t have any of the same scars. The ability to kill because we don’t know what scars bleed to get. Have number two.

01:03:30:18 – 01:03:51:07
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There is no evidence that Brushy Bill Roberts had any scars. You know, there’s a lot of photos of Brushy Bill Roberts out there, but neither he or his lawyer ever thought to document any of these supposed scars. A lot of people are under the false impression that there is, autopsy report out there documenting the scars. There’s no autopsy report.

01:03:51:09 – 01:04:13:10
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He died of a heart attack. You know, when an old man dies of a heart attack, they don’t necessarily perform an autopsy. So the only evidence we have of brushy scars comes only from his attorney, William Morrison. I don’t think I’ve said it yet, but after Brushy passed away in 1950, a couple of years later, Morrison actually published a book sharing brushy story.

01:04:13:10 – 01:04:17:06
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
It’s called, Alias Billy the Kid.

01:04:17:09 – 01:04:38:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
As far as the supposed inside information that Brushy Bill Roberts said that nobody could possibly know, there has been nothing that he said that wasn’t already common knowledge. So there was a guy named Walter Noble Burns in the, early 1920s. He kind of made the rounds there in New Mexico, and he interviewed a lot of people that knew Billy the Kid back in the day.

01:04:38:29 – 01:05:03:03
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He talked to Paulina Maxwell, Billy’s old girlfriend. Another dear friend of Billy’s was a lady named Del Vino Maxwell. He talked to her. You interviewed a lot of people, and he published a book called The Saga of Billy the Kid in 1925 or 26. This book is is one of the main pieces of works that kind of catapulted Billy into superstardom.

01:05:03:06 – 01:05:24:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
The book was a huge bestseller. Everybody had it. I need to double check on this. I may be wrong here, but I believe it was one of the first book of the book of the month books or but late book of the Month Club books, right? It was sold. It was such a popular book that it was serialized, and they ran in newspapers all over the country.

01:05:24:14 – 01:05:52:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Brushy Bill Roberts definitely read the saga of Billy the Kid, because while it is a very cool book, not everything, it’s historically correct in it. Burns did make quite a few mistakes. Brushy Bill Roberts also happens to make the same exact mistakes, almost word for word, that Burns made. So basically all of his insider knowledge, he was just copying off of other people, and it was information that was that had been known for decades.

01:05:52:19 – 01:06:16:07
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
The affidavits Brushy Bill Roberts and his attorney were able to obtain five signed and sworn affidavits from people that supposedly knew Billy the Kid and boots that Brushy and Billy were one of the same. Once again, you just got to dig a little bit deeper. Out of those five people, three of them never knew the historical Billy the Kid ever.

01:06:16:09 – 01:06:32:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
One of them wasn’t even born yet in 1881 when Pat Garrett shot Billy the Kid. So if he wasn’t even alive at the time, how could he possibly know of Brushy Bill? Roberts and Billy the Kid were the same. The best they could do was there were these two old men they had that had, lived in Lincoln, New Mexico.

01:06:32:26 – 01:06:53:13
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
They had allegedly known Billy the Kid when they were young children. I’m talking like 12 years old. They weren’t Billy the Kid’s friends. They weren’t his outlaw buddies. They weren’t Old West lawmen. Nothing like that. These were two old men who, 70 years after the fact, they may have possibly known Billy the Kid and even one of them when he first met up with Brushy.

01:06:53:13 – 01:07:13:27
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He goes, now you’re way too young to be Billy the Kid for whatever reason, he changed his mind a couple of days later, but that’s the best they could do. So whenever, Brushy Bill proponents will try to say that people who actually knew Billy the Kid vouched for him kind of nothing. None of Billy’s old associates ever vouched for him.

01:07:13:27 – 01:07:37:12
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
None of his Lincoln County regulators ever vouched for Brushy Bill Roberts. Once again, the best they could find were two old guys who possibly knew Billy the Kid when they were very, very young. So every other aspect of Brushy story falls under the same purview. I mentioned earlier that he was kind of he kind of went a little bit too far in his exaggerations.

01:07:37:15 – 01:08:00:11
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
In addition to being the most famous outlaw of all time, he also claimed to have been a Pinkerton detective. He said he was a deputy U.S. Marshal under Hanging Judge Parker. He lived with three different Native American tribes at three different times. He, he fought in Cuba as a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt. He fought as a mercenary in Mexico with Pancho Villa.

01:08:00:13 – 01:08:28:22
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
On another occasion, he survived a running gunfight with 2000 Mexican soldiers. He, chased after horse thieves in Oklahoma. He was a gunfighter in Idaho. He was a professional boxer. He was, rodeo champ toward all over the place. He worked for Buffalo Bill Cody on his ranch, breaking horses. He’s claimed to have had his own Wild West show that toured extensively across the United States, putting on, you know, those reenactments of Old West, events.

01:08:28:24 – 01:08:55:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He caught wild horses in South America. I could go on and on with all the. He was a lookout for the famous lady bandit Belle Starr. There’s a million stories that Brushy Bill Roberts told, and I cannot stress this enough. There’s no evidence for any of it. By contrast, the evidence we do have, which is legion, shows that Brushy Bill Roberts was a toddler when the real Billy the Kid was shot and killed.

01:08:55:25 – 01:09:31:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So Rush’s real name was Oliver Roberts. You can find him on every single census from 1880 all the way to his death in 1950. Every single census. We have marriage certificates, we have divorce decrees. There is a family Bible that shows that he was born in 1879. There’s, there’s even a World War One draft registration. We know what Brushy Bill Roberts did where he lived, what his occupation was, the names of his wives, the name of his parents.

01:09:31:07 – 01:09:52:14
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
We know dang near every detail of his life. And in no point was he allowed law at no point did you live in New Mexico. Like I said he was. He was one and a half, two years old when the real Billy the Kid was gunned down. The, Now, you may be wondering, why do people believe in Brushy Bill’s story if there’s that much evidence?

01:09:52:16 – 01:10:14:05
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
The one tiny thread, the one tiny little string that holds his entire story together? He never gave a date on this, but he claimed that later in life, he, was in Oklahoma and he came across, a couple of law men who had just killed what they thought was a horse thief. Well, it wasn’t a horse thief.

01:10:14:05 – 01:10:48:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
It was an undercover police officer who just so happened to be Brushy Bill Roberts cousin, Oliver Roberts. Okay. His much younger cousin, Brushy took his belongings back to Texas, to his family. Oliver’s mother mistook him for Oliver, and he just went with it. At that point on, he kind of slid into that new identity of Oliver Roberts, which is why Brushy Bill proponents will say, well, that’s why he he’s so much younger on all the census data and all the records, because he wasn’t really Oliver Roberts.

01:10:48:19 – 01:11:13:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He just kind of slid into his, identity after he died. Once again, there’s there’s no evidence of any of this occurring. I don’t know about you, but if if my brother died and my cousin returned his belongings, I wouldn’t let my grieving mother think that that was her. Her dead son. You know what I’m saying? Like, there’s just so many fantastical angles to his story.

01:11:13:03 – 01:11:33:02
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And when you add them all up, they’re just completely unbelievable. You can even just Google pictures of Brushy Bill Roberts. There’s a lot of pictures of him out there, and none of those pictures does he look anywhere near 90 years of age. In all reality, he was 7071 when he dropped out of that heart attack. But yeah, there’s there’s no evidence that he was Billy the Kid.

01:11:33:02 – 01:11:58:16
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Some people will try to tell you that there was a DNA test proving that they were, the same person. No, Billy has never been exhumed. There has never been a DNA test done on Billy the Kid. Never happened. So with. I can tell you, with, you know, there’s a lot of mysteries in the Old West. I can tell you with 110% certainty that Brushy Bill Roberts was definitely a frog, and he hung out with other frogs.

01:11:58:19 – 01:12:20:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
There’s another guy that’s, there was also, an old West fraudster named J. Frank Dalton. He claimed to be Jesse James, and he and Brushy were best friends. They would hang out together. They would go to they, they, Billy, Brushy Bill Roberts, I think, attended, J. Frank Dalton’s 100th birthday. So they were thick as thieves and they were just telling lies.

01:12:20:29 – 01:12:22:22
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Man.

01:12:22:24 – 01:12:40:13
Dan LeFebvre
So in the movie, it suggests that the reason why Brushy Bill is coming forward is because he wants that pardon that we, we see happening, to Billy the Kid. And that seems to be the impression that I got was that’s why he came forward near the end of his life. He’s like, I finally want this. This pardon that I’ve been promised.

01:12:40:19 – 01:12:56:27
Dan LeFebvre
Was that really what he was going for? Or was the real Brushy Bill, just as you said, you know, just telling lies and couldn’t stop? And or was he trying to sell his own book or was he trying to make money off of it? Like, what was his motivation? I guess it would be my question.

01:12:57:00 – 01:13:24:07
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You know, I, I an acronym that I like it’s mice in Missy. So it’s a good way to kind of figure out someone’s motive money, ideology, coercion and ego. I don’t think Brushy Bill was doing this on ideological grounds. I don’t think somebody, somebody was coercing him or blackmailing him into telling these lies. I think it was a mixture of money and ego.

01:13:24:09 – 01:13:46:22
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Now, now, Brushy, had a very long history of telling tall tales, even even before he was claiming to be Billy the Kid. He used to tell people he was like a scout, an old army scout and a frontiersman. There’s even an old newspaper article. Gosh, man, I want to say from the 1920s. So we’re talking decades before he claimed to be Billy the Kid.

01:13:46:24 – 01:14:13:17
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
In this newspaper article, he’s making this wild claim that he saved a group of Texas Rangers from machine gun wielding gangsters. So he had a history of telling these type of stories. I do know that he was he was living in poverty in his later years. So I think money certainly played a role in it. Like I said, he was good friends with J.

01:14:13:17 – 01:14:34:22
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Frank Dalton, J. Frank Dalton was kind of being wined and dined by people. He was living rent free. He was taking trips to New York City. I think maybe Brushy wanted a little bit of that limelight. And he really did meet with the governor. That is, something that occurred. He basically got left out of there. I mean, he he forgot key details.

01:14:34:24 – 01:14:55:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He couldn’t answer very simple questions. And it was just a big joke. And about a month later is when he just fell dead of a massive heart attack. But, you know, I people people will ask me, well, why would he possibly lie about that? I don’t know, man. I don’t I don’t know why anybody would lie about that, but I have known people that told similar lies.

01:14:55:19 – 01:15:15:19
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I’ve known old men who told similar lie. You know, there was, there was a movie, a few years ago, The Irishman with Robert De Niro, the Scorsese movie. And that was based on, a book called We Paint Houses. I believe this guy, you know, he claimed to have killed Jimmy Hoffa and claimed to have done all this stuff.

01:15:15:21 – 01:15:34:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
A lot of the stuff that that guy claimed to have done, we know that he absolutely did not do well. Yet. He was a dying old man, and he still told these stories that were lies. Why? I don’t know, but I do know it’s it’s human nature. It is something that does happen.

01:15:34:02 – 01:16:01:14
Dan LeFebvre
Well, like you said, there are, you know, compulsive liars out there too, that once you get get started on that, I imagine the money part aside, the ego, like just feeling, people asking you these questions and people focusing on you, it’s, I mean, today, you know, it’s a dopamine hit, right? We know that. But that that’s one of those things, I would imagine that he might not have known even why he did it himself.

01:16:01:14 – 01:16:12:23
Dan LeFebvre
Just that I like being Billy the Kid right? I like when people think I’m Billy the Kid. So keep telling those stories to keep more people thinking that, yeah, that’s the only hack I could think of.

01:16:12:24 – 01:16:36:28
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
You know, it’s the same way nowadays. People will lie about stolen valor. People that were never in the military will claim to be Navy Seals and stuff like that. It happens all the time. Why? You know, and especially in Bryce’s day, there wasn’t the internet, so we couldn’t just immediately fact check the guy, right. All of those records weren’t you couldn’t get on Ancestry.com in 1950 and look at all the census records.

01:16:36:28 – 01:16:40:16
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
So there he he probably was able to convince quite a few people.

01:16:40:18 – 01:16:54:23
Dan LeFebvre
Especially if you’re something like you mentioned, you know, with, with the wounds, like, we don’t really know what Billy the Kid wounds were. So how like, how can you how can you how would you know? Maybe he has the same wounds, but we don’t know what Billy the Kid had. So how would you know?

01:16:54:26 – 01:17:18:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And you know, I was talking to, one of my buddies about this the other day. My father. Was it my father? Recently turned 80 years old. He was in the Vietnam War. He was, in a combat intensive unit during the Vietnam War. But he was never wounded. Thankfully, my dad came home and spent the rest of his life raising a family, but he lived kind of a rough life.

01:17:18:29 – 01:17:40:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
My dad grew up on a cotton farm. No electricity. I mean, he he grew up pretty rough. If if my dad wanted to start telling stories and say that he has all these war wounds, people would probably believe him because he looks like he has war wounds. He’s missing a a couple of fingers. He, he was in a hunting accident when he was younger and got got shot in the face with a shotgun.

01:17:40:24 – 01:17:59:21
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He could easily lie and say he got all these wounds in the Vietnam War, which he was in the war, but they were just. These are just injuries that he’s accumulated during that throughout the course of his life. I think Brushy Bill Roberts was a lot was much the same because Brushy Bill, he spent the vast majority of his life as a laborer.

01:17:59:24 – 01:18:17:26
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
He did a lot of blue collar work, farming, you know, I think he was working on oil rigs later on in life. Like this guy, this guy would have definitely been he would have looked rough. He would have certainly have had scars and marks of his own that were most likely work related injuries that he could have. Hey, hey, look at this.

01:18:17:26 – 01:18:37:01
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
This is where I got shot back in 1885. Would really, you know, he he was he got kicked by a mule when he was 12. You know. So I don’t doubt that he did have, markings that may have appeared to be scars, the uninitiated. But as far as him ever getting any type of gunfights and stuff like that.

01:18:37:04 – 01:18:39:23
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Absolutely.

01:18:39:26 – 01:18:57:07
Dan LeFebvre
Well, you mentioned the name, Jesse James and a lot of people are familiar with Jesse James. Billy the Kid, you know, because there’s so many movies that have been made about them. But let’s say you’re given the budget to make a movie about someone from the Old West that hasn’t had a movie made about them yet. Who would you pick and why.

01:18:57:09 – 01:19:20:24
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Is it so hard to choose? Because there’s so many great stories that have gone completely untold. What’s fresh on my mind right now? Because I’m currently doing a series on it right now. But Chief Joseph and in this purse war. Wow. I mean, just you hear a lot of stories about people having their, you know, the indigenous peoples having their land stolen and being screwed over and stuff like that.

01:19:20:26 – 01:19:41:08
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
I’m not sure if there’s as much of a clear, just open and shut case of them being screwed over. As much as the Nez Perce were in the events that led to the Nez Perce War, I mean, these were a very peaceful people. They weren’t raiding the American settlers or anything like that. It just basically came down to, hey, we want your land, so you have to leave now.

01:19:41:11 – 01:20:09:29
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And by the way, we’re going to kill some of your people until you leave, and they eventually push them to the limit. And the war broke out. But it’s a very fascinating story. And just the the way the Nez Perce, it was basically a 1400 mile running gunfight with the U.S. Army. There was maybe 250 Nez Perce warriors with hundreds of women and children, old and sick, against thousands of U.S. troops.

01:20:10:01 – 01:20:37:00
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
And they still held them off. Time and time again were able to defeat them in battle time and time again. It truly is an amazing story, and it’s a heartbreaking story because it doesn’t end well for the Nez Perce people, but I would love to see something like that. Not necessarily a movie. I, I would love to see that made into like an HBO mini series or something, you know, something that could they could really, you know, put about 8 or 9 hours into telling the story.

01:20:37:02 – 01:20:59:23
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Dive a lot deeper into the story for that. Yeah. Wow. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about the true story behind them, guns, too. For anyone who wants to learn more about the history of the Old West, I highly recommend they check out your podcast called The Wild West Extravaganza. You obviously do a ton of research and do a great job bringing the stories of the Old West to life.

01:21:00:00 – 01:21:04:10
Dan LeFebvre
So thank you. Can you give my audience a peek into your podcast and where they can find it?

01:21:04:13 – 01:21:20:15
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Yeah, I have a YouTube channel, The Wild West Extravaganza. It’s also available wherever else you listen to podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, audible, or you can go to my website, Wild West extra.com. But yeah, I mean, everywhere where you listen to podcasts.

01:21:20:17 – 01:21:24:24
Dan LeFebvre
Fantastic. I will add all those links in the show notes for this episode too. Thanks again so much for your time, Josh.

01:21:24:27 – 01:21:26:11
Josh from The Wild West Extravaganza
Thank you man. My pleasure.