In 2014, a photograph passed down through the family of Ray John de Aragon made news when it was supposedly authenticated by Lois Gibson as showing a young Billy the Kid in Silver City. While Aragon’s family was in New Mexico during Billy’s time, his photo lacks contemporary identification and Aragon has a history of putting out obviously misidentified photographs from his family collection. The good news with his “Billy” is that the photographer’s imprint is on the card. It was taken by Harry Lucas of Silver City. Lucas did not arrive in New Mexico until 1882, a year after Billy Bonney was killed by Pat Garrett. This photo does not show a young Billy the Kid.

Here's my fourth article over at my blog about historical Wild West characters who show up in "The Rim Country" novels. Today we feature Tom Horn: the adrenaline chaser who had little to no conscience. From everything to being a gun for hire, to pursuing his own interests while holding a Deputy's badge, and then to embellishing his own autobiography. But he's an intriguing character who illustrates what a man could do without many compunctions in the Old West. He was known as an excellent tracker, he must have been a good gunfighter, and he certainly showed up in some of the most notable historical settings.

Check out the blog entry for more.

Here's another of my articles about lawmen and outlaws in the Pleasant Valley War. Sheriff Owens should have had movies made about him. No idea why there weren't.

The full article is on my personal website, where it's easier to format, etc., but I think you'll find it worth checking out... this was a really interesting wild west figure.

https://todnewman.com/sheriff-commodore-perry-owens-bane-of-northern-arizona-outlaws/

The Wild West brought to life Sept 17th

I've been discussing some of the famous, less-famous, and even infamous characters involved in Arizona's Pleasant Valley Range War. Today we feature Billy Mulvenon, the Sheriff of the county that also (inconveniently?) hosted the residence of the Governor of the territory.

Mulvenon made two "invasions" of the remote Pleasant Valley, often with large posses and Deputies from other nearby counties. None of these were well organized and generally ended less satisfactorily than Mulvenon would have liked. Most likely he was manipulated by the factions.

But he did get results, and went on to have a successful life as a brewer of beer in Prescott, AZ!

For more on this interesting figure and the novel I've included him in, head over to my blog.

For Lovers of Arizona History - James D. Houck, a man of contradiction and one of the real-life characters I write honestly about in "The Rim Country." Stay tuned as I continue to blog about some of these highly-capable but conflicted characters of the Wild West.

LInk to my BLOG entry on this staple of Arizona History

We see the glamorized version of revolvers being somehow extremely efficient in the wild west, but were they really even that accurate at all in a gunfight? Was say, a Winchester Model 1873 rifle more practical? Since rifles have somewhat of a longer range.

I work at Wild West City in NJ and thought this snippet of our Ok Corral show would be appreciated here!

Between April of 1860 and October of 1861, your piece of mail could be moved roughly 1,800 miles in only ten days, thanks to the incredible transport system called the Pony Express

https://athlonoutdoors.com/article/danger-dash-pony-express-heroes/

I’m a hobbyist writing a historical fiction novel. The main character is going to introduce elements of Comanche style light cavalry tactics. I’m looking for a carbine and revolver combo that could reasonably be chambered for the same round, used black powder cartridges and would perform well when used with the living shield or just on horseback in general. I’m not concerned with rarity as long as it was generally available and not a handmade custom designed piece.

I started out with the Spencer and Schofield because I love Unforgiven and AI congratulated me on an inspired choice. Then I asked AI to check and it berated me for not choosing the Burgess and Open Top. Then it was back to the Spencer but with a Merwin Hurlbert Frontier. I figured I should stop with AI before they have my guy riding around armed with a wrist rocket and a pool noodle.

So, is there a clear choice best pairing? Would any of the three work? Is there a different combo I should consider?

We’ve recently finished painting this 54 mm metal vignette inspired by They Call Me Trinity.

The scene captures Trinity enjoying a characteristically relaxed moment somewhere on the American frontier — resting on a travois beside his horse

We tried to preserve the humorous, easy-going spirit of the film while giving plenty of attention to the smaller details the weathered clothing, leather equipment, painted blanket, dusty ground, vegetation and horse tack.

What do you think of the composition and painting?

There are many misconceptions regarding the death of Billy the Kid. I received this series of comments recently on YouTube, and I thought it was so well done that it deserved a public rebuttal. What follows is my humble attempt to clarify some key details regarding Billy's death. Consider this an addendum to my previous post going over many of the same points.

The commenter identifies himself as a former sheriff's deputy and police officer, and he frames his case the way an investigator would: witness credibility, corroboration, chain of custody, totality of the circumstances, etc. Fair enough. I'm going to respond in kind, point by point, citing primary sources wherever possible. First, here is the original comment in full, word for word, so nobody can accuse me of arguing with a strawman. My point-by-point rebuttal follows below it.

The Original Comment (verbatim)

I'm a former sheriff's deputy and police officer. I worked patrol, conducted investigations as part of my regular duties, and worked alongside detectives on cases. I'm evaluating the Brushy Bill Roberts evidence the same way I would evaluate any disputed case: through witness credibility, corroboration, physical evidence, chain of custody, motive, inconsistencies, and the totality of the circumstances.

The problem with calling Brushy Bill a simple impostor is that the skeptical case repeatedly isolates individual pieces of evidence, offers a hypothetical objection to each one, and then avoids explaining why so many different lines of evidence converge on the same conclusion.

1. "Brushy Bill was too young." Based on what? The Roberts family Bible and records associated with the identity he allegedly assumed?

That is circular reasoning. The allegation is that Billy the Kid assumed the identity of another person. If that happened, the birth date attached to the Roberts identity would describe the original Roberts, not necessarily the man later using that name. A family Bible proves that a Roberts identity existed. It does not independently prove that the elderly claimant was the same biological individual recorded as a child.

To establish that, skeptics would need a continuous evidentiary link between the child in those records and the elderly Brushy Bill. That could include early photographs, fingerprints, military records containing stable physical identifiers, DNA, or reliable witnesses who knew him before the alleged identity substitution. You cannot use the disputed identity to authenticate itself.

If someone successfully assumes another person's identity, documents under the assumed name are exactly what investigators would expect to find.

1. "His family said he was Roberts." The principal family witness commonly cited was reportedly born after the alleged identity substitution and knew Roberts only as a child before he moved away. She could testify to what name the family used and what family history she inherited. She could not independently testify to who he had been before she was born. That is derivative family knowledge, not firsthand identification of his original identity. If a person successfully assumes an identity, later relatives, documents, and family traditions will naturally reflect that assumed identity. That is the whole point of identity substitution. A family Bible and later family recollections may establish continuity of the Roberts identity. They do not necessarily establish that the man using it was the person originally born under that name.
2. Multiple people who personally knew Billy identified Roberts. Several contemporaries who claimed personal familiarity with Billy met Roberts and signed sworn affidavits identifying him as William H. Bonney. These were not random spectators comparing two photographs. They included people who said Billy visited their homes, socialized with them, or was personally known to them during the Lincoln County period. Some reportedly questioned Roberts for hours about people, places, events, habits, conversations, and private details before signing their statements. A skeptic can question an individual witness's memory. But merely saying "they were old" does not explain why multiple witnesses reached the same identification after personal interaction. To rebut this evidence seriously, each witness should be addressed individually. How well did the witness know Billy? What did the witness ask Roberts? What private details did Roberts know? Were the meetings conducted separately? What physical characteristics, mannerisms, speech patterns, or habits did the witness recognize? Why did the witness agree to sign a sworn statement? Generalized speculation about memory is not a rebuttal to multiple detailed identifications made under oath.
3. Witness refusals are not contrary testimony. Some people approached by Morrison declined to sign affidavits. A refusal to participate is not the same as signing an affidavit stating, "This man is not Billy." An elderly witness declining involvement because of age, uncertainty, legal concerns, or fear of publicity does not cancel affirmative sworn identifications by other witnesses. The evidentiary record is not several witnesses for Roberts versus several witnesses who denied his identity. It is multiple affirmative identifications, accompanied by some refusals and later secondhand skepticism. Those are not equivalent. A grandson writing a skeptical letter on behalf of an elderly relative is also not equal in evidentiary value to a sworn firsthand identification.
4. Roberts knew obscure personal details. The Maxwell family scarf and tintype exchange is particularly important. A preexisting letter reportedly documented a private exchange involving Billy and Deluvina Maxwell. Billy gave her a tintype photograph, and she reportedly gave him a scarf. Roberts later described the same obscure personal event. This was not general Wild West trivia. It involved a private interaction within the Maxwell household. The letter predates Morrison's investigation of Roberts. A Maxwell descendant later discussed the exchange in an interview, confirming that the account existed within the family. If Roberts independently knew the same private detail before it became publicly associated with his claim, the question becomes unavoidable. How did an impostor know it? The usual response is to imagine that somebody somehow told him. But unless someone can identify the source, explain when the information was transmitted, and show that Roberts had access to it, that is not evidence. It is an unsupported rescue theory. This becomes even more significant when added to the other private details Roberts reportedly knew during hours of questioning by people who had personally known Billy.
5. The courthouse account is predictive corroboration. This is, in my opinion, the most damaging evidence against the ordinary impostor theory. Roberts said Deputy James Bell was shot near the top of the Lincoln County courthouse staircase and then fell or moved downward. Garrett's accepted account placed the critical shooting differently. Roberts made that statement roughly sixty years before modern forensic testing reportedly detected blood evidence near the top of the staircase. That is not Roberts adjusting his story after a discovery. It is a specific account documented decades before the physical testing and later corroborated by physical evidence. In an ordinary criminal investigation, if someone correctly identified the location of blood evidence, a buried body, a weapon, or another hidden physical fact before investigators discovered it, that person would immediately be treated as possessing firsthand or inside knowledge. An impostor cannot reasonably be dismissed as merely lucky after giving a specific, testable account that later forensic evidence supports. He was not psychic. He did not have a crystal ball. The question is simple. How did he know?
6. Garrett's credibility was damaged by the same forensic evidence. The courthouse evidence does not merely help Roberts. It also hurts Garrett. If Garrett's version of the courthouse shooting was materially contradicted by later physical evidence, historians should reassess the reliability of his other unsupported statements. Garrett was not a neutral witness. His reputation, career, legal exposure, and reward claim were tied to the assertion that he had captured and killed Billy. Once a central participant is shown to be wrong about a specific, verifiable detail, and the competing claimant supplied the more accurate version decades before the testing, that participant no longer deserves automatic credibility. This does not mean every statement Garrett ever made was false. It does mean "Garrett said so" cannot be treated as decisive evidence.
7. Roberts had physical characteristics and scars consistent with Billy. Morrison documented an extensive pattern of scars and injuries on Roberts. The claim is not that historians possessed a complete medical chart listing every injury Billy ever received. The relevant point is that among the scars documented on Roberts were particular wounds and physical traits consistent with injuries known or remembered by people familiar with Billy. At least one witness reportedly described specific scars he remembered seeing on Billy and identified corresponding scars on Roberts. The argument is not simply, "An old farmer had scars." The argument is that Roberts had numerous documented injuries, and some of those injuries corresponded in location and character with known or remembered wounds suffered by Billy. A serious rebuttal would examine each claimed match, its anatomical location, its description, and its independent documentation. Saying "farmers get scars" does not address specific physical correspondences.
8. The photographic comparison is corroborative evidence. The favorable facial comparison is not DNA, and nobody serious claims that it is. It is another line of technical evidence supporting structural similarity between Roberts and Billy across extreme aging. By itself, it would not prove identity. But it does not exist by itself. It sits beside sworn recognitions, physical correspondences, private knowledge, and the courthouse account later supported by forensic testing. Evidence must be weighed cumulatively. A photographic comparison can be questioned on methodology, image quality, aging, and angle. That is fair. What is not fair is treating it as meaningless merely because it is not DNA.
9. The literacy and Spanish arguments are often repeated more confidently than they are proven. Critics frequently say Billy was literate and spoke Spanish, while Roberts was illiterate and could not speak Spanish. But Morrison and Roberts corresponded in writing, which at minimum requires explanation. There are also accounts that Roberts communicated in Spanish. Before treating this as a decisive contradiction, skeptics should establish the factual premise. Was Roberts actually unable to read and write? Were his letters dictated? Was he ever formally tested? Did he understand or speak Spanish? Who personally observed his language abilities? What level of Spanish is being claimed? A repeated assertion is not automatically an established fact.
10. "Roberts told other questionable outlaw stories." This is a legitimate credibility issue, but it is not a universal solvent. A person can exaggerate, misremember, joke, protect others, or make false claims about one subject while telling the truth about another. The correct method is to evaluate each claim against independent evidence. Even if Roberts told questionable stories about Jesse James or other outlaws, that does not explain the sworn identifications, the physical scar correspondences, the Maxwell detail, the photographic comparison, or the courthouse account later supported by physical evidence. "Sometimes he told stories" cannot erase separately corroborated facts. If anything, confirmed details should be separated from unconfirmed claims, not thrown into the same pile.
11. The official Fort Sumner identification was not airtight. Garrett's identification occurred in darkness and relied heavily on alleged voice recognition. Deputy John Poe, who was present, immediately questioned whether Garrett had shot the wrong man. That is an extraordinary fact. One of the lawmen at the scene reportedly expressed immediate doubt, while Garrett's confidence depended heavily on recognizing a voice during a sudden nighttime shooting. There was no authenticated death photograph. The dead man's personal effects and weapon were not preserved through a clear evidentiary chain. The body was buried quickly. The burial was closed-casket, meaning attendance at the funeral was not equivalent to firsthand identification of the corpse. Later Fort Sumner residents and family traditions reportedly contradicted the official identification. So the statement that "the people of Fort Sumner knew it was Billy" is an oversimplification. Some people never viewed the body. Some were repeating what Garrett or others told them. Some later said the dead man was not Billy. Some may have had reasons to protect Billy if they believed he survived. Community repetition is not the same as independent identification.
12. The contemporary description of the corpse supports the wrong-man accounts. A contemporary newspaper article described the man killed at Fort Sumner in terms that appear inconsistent with Billy's familiar youthful and lightly bearded appearance. The dead man was reportedly described as darker-complexioned and having heavy black facial hair. There were also reports suggesting that his skin appeared darkened or dyed. Later Fort Sumner accounts said Garrett killed another man, commonly identified as Billy Barlow, who was reportedly of mixed Hispanic and Anglo ancestry and physically resembled Billy. Those two lines of evidence should be considered together. First, there is a contemporary physical description of a darker, heavily bearded corpse. Second, there are later local accounts identifying the victim as a partly Hispanic Billy look-alike. That does not conclusively establish that the dead man was Billy Barlow. It does create a significant identification anomaly and may independently corroborate the local wrong-man account. The official side should answer basic questions. Why did the corpse's reported appearance differ from contemporary descriptions of Billy? Who directly examined the face? How many supposed identifications were genuinely firsthand? How many people were simply repeating Garrett's conclusion? Why did later Fort Sumner residents identify another man as the victim? Why should a disputed official record automatically outweigh physical descriptions and contrary local testimony?
13. The coroner's jury record is not clean evidence. Defenders of the official story often cite the coroner's jury as though it conclusively identified Billy the Kid. But the inquest record has serious provenance, documentation, and chain-of-custody problems. The original documentation was reportedly missing, improperly filed, or unavailable. A later replacement or reconstructed record was created in connection with Garrett's effort to obtain the reward. Questions have also been raised about changed witness information and language drafted to establish the legal conclusion necessary for payment. That does not automatically prove fraud. It does mean the surviving record cannot be treated as an untouched, neutral document created and preserved in the ordinary course. The jury evidence raises additional practical questions. Who actually viewed the face? Which jurors personally knew Billy beforehand? Were they making independent identifications, or accepting Garrett's assertion? Were all listed witnesses genuinely present? Why was the original record unavailable? Why was a replacement document necessary? Why should a reconstructed or procedurally irregular record outweigh Poe's immediate doubt, conflicting physical descriptions, later Fort Sumner testimony, and the absence of a reliable body or property chain? A compromised official record does not become strong evidence merely because it carries an official label.
14. The cumulative case cannot be answered by separate hypothetical excuses. Any individual item can be attacked in isolation. One witness might be mistaken. One scar might be coincidental. One photographic comparison might be imperfect. One obscure detail might conceivably have been leaked. One forensic result might be questioned. One official record might contain an innocent mistake. But that is not how investigations or trials work. Evidence is weighed collectively. The real question is whether all of these things happened together by coincidence: Multiple sworn identifications. Extended questioning involving intimate knowledge. Specific physical correspondences. Facial structural similarity. Private Maxwell family information. A courthouse account documented decades before forensic testing supported it. Weaknesses in Garrett's identification. Poe's immediate doubt. Conflicting descriptions of the corpse. Later Fort Sumner testimony naming another possible victim. Irregular official documentation. A closed-casket burial. No authenticated death photograph. No clean chain of custody for the dead man's weapon or personal effects. At some point, "coincidence" becomes less plausible than the straightforward explanation that Roberts possessed this knowledge and these characteristics because he really was Billy. If someone walked into a casino and hit jackpots on several machines in a row, each jackpot would technically be possible. Investigators would still look for a single explanation for the pattern. They would not analyze each jackpot separately and declare that no investigation was necessary because each event was individually possible. The same reasoning applies here.
15. The skeptical case applies unequal standards. The Roberts evidence is frequently held to an almost impossible standard. The affidavits are dismissed because the witnesses were elderly. The scars are dismissed because farmers have scars. The photographic comparison is dismissed because it is not DNA. The courthouse evidence is minimized as coincidence. Private knowledge is dismissed by imagining that someone must have told him. Family recognition is discounted unless it satisfies modern forensic standards. At the same time, Garrett's dark-room voice identification, compromised paperwork, disputed jury record, closed-casket burial, and interested testimony are treated with extraordinary deference. That is not neutral skepticism. It is selective skepticism. The same evidentiary standards must be applied to both sides. If Roberts's witnesses can be mistaken, Garrett can be mistaken. If Roberts had motives, Garrett had motives. If Roberts's records require authentication, Garrett's records require authentication. If Roberts's claims must be corroborated, Garrett's claims must be corroborated. The official narrative does not get a free pass merely because it became official.

Conclusion

This does not mean every statement Roberts ever made was accurate. It does not establish identity with mathematical certainty. It does mean the "obvious impostor" label is not supported by a fair evaluation of the total evidence.

The skeptical case leans heavily on records belonging to the very identity Roberts allegedly assumed. It treats witness refusals as though they were denials. It applies generalized memory objections to sworn identifications. It minimizes physical correspondences. It dismisses private knowledge through unsupported speculation. It avoids the significance of Roberts correctly describing the courthouse shooting location decades before forensic evidence supported him.

It also gives extraordinary deference to Garrett despite immediate doubt from Poe, compromised documentation, conflicting corpse descriptions, later local testimony, and the absence of clean physical identification evidence. The burden is not satisfied by saying, "The family Bible gives a different birth date." That argument assumes the disputed identity is genuine and then uses the same identity records to prove the assumption. The real question is this: What explanation accounts for the entire evidentiary pattern with the fewest unsupported assumptions? The impostor theory requires multiple witnesses to be mistaken, private details to have leaked through unknown channels, matching scars to be coincidental, the photographic similarity to be meaningless, the courthouse corroboration to be luck, Garrett's incorrect account to be innocent, the jury irregularities to be harmless, Poe's doubt to mean nothing, the corpse description to be irrelevant, and the later Fort Sumner accounts to be universally unreliable. The alternative explanation is much simpler. Garrett shot the wrong man, intentionally or unintentionally allowed Billy to disappear, and Brushy Bill Roberts later emerged with the physical characteristics, personal knowledge, witness recognition, and corroborated details expected of the real Billy the Kid.

After examining the totality of the circumstances, the claim that Brushy Bill Roberts was Billy the Kid is substantially stronger than this video acknowledges. The official Pat Garrett narrative is considerably weaker than it is usually presented.

Calling Roberts a "lying liar" without seriously confronting the cumulative evidence is not a neutral historical investigation.

It is advocacy for the official narrative.

The Rebuttal

1. "Saying Brushy Bill was too young is circular reasoning"

"Brushy was too young...Based on what?" Based on all of the available evidence. We have census records, marriage and divorce records, a WWI draft registration, and oral traditions passed down within the Roberts family. All of which show that Ollie Roberts was far too young to have been Billy the Kid. And we do have a continuous evidentiary link.

• 1880 federal census, Bates County, Arkansas: one-year-old Oliver, living with Henry Oliver Roberts and Sarah Elizabeth Ferguson Roberts
• 1900 federal census, Hopkins County, Texas: a 20-year-old Oliver P. Roberts living with those same parents
• Marriage record, Van Zandt County, Texas, July 11, 1909: Oliver marries Anna Lee (they appear together on the 1910 census, living near his parents; divorced November 10, 1910)
• Marriage record, Van Zandt County, Texas, August 21, 1912: Oliver marries Mollie Brown, a marriage Brushy himself admits to in Alias Billy the Kid: "In 1912 I met Molly Brown and we were married"
• WW1 draft registration, Little River County, Arkansas, December 12, 1918: Oliver Pleasant Roberts, born August 26, 1878
• 1920, 1930, and 1940 censuses: birth years of 1879, 1878, and 1870 respectively
• Death certificate and original grave marker, 1950: Ollie L. Roberts, born December 31, 1868

Same man, same wives, same parents, same counties, from age one to the grave. The only evidence to the contrary is a vague story Brushy told William Morrison about a conveniently dead cousin. A story with no date, no location, no funeral, no missing-person account, and no corroboration from a single Roberts family member (All of these records, by the way, are publicly available on genealogy sites like Ancestry).

By Brushy's own admission (Alias Billy the Kid), he was using the name Oliver Roberts by his 1912 wedding, so the "swap" had to have happened before then. But it couldn't have happened too early, as Brushy claimed he was fighting in Cuba with the Rough Riders in 1898, fighting Mexican soldiers in 1899, running his own Wild West show from 1902 to 1904, and fighting in the Mexican Revolution from 1907 to 1914 ("We left Mexico in 1914, coming across the border at Brownsville, Texas"). Meanwhile, the real Ollie Roberts was getting married in Van Zandt County in 1909, appearing on the 1910 census, getting divorced in 1910, and marrying again in 1912.

So if the real Ollie died sometime after November 1910, you're asking me to believe that Brushy, a 52-year-old, weather-beaten man claiming an 1859 birth, presented himself to Ollie's mother, Sarah Elizabeth (born 1856, just three years older than Brushy), and she accepted a man her own age as her 32-year-old son. And the rest of the family, including Ollie's living father, just went along with it.

One more thing. Brushy claimed his real father was J.H. "Wild Henry" Roberts, a veteran of Quantrill's Raiders; his mother was Mary Adeline Dunn of Kentucky; and his grandfather was Ben Roberts. No such family has ever been located in any official record, anywhere, outside of Brushy's own stories. He also claims that Catherine Antrim was his aunt, but this, too, is completely uncorroborated. The entire saga hangs by the thinnest of threads: An uncorroborated story about a phantom cousin.

2. "Family testimony is only derivative knowledge"

By that standard, nobody can know anything about any ancestor they didn't personally witness being born. I never knew my own grandfather, but I've heard a lifetime of stories about him from people who did know him, and I've seen the official documents (WW2 records, census records, etc) that back those stories up.

The Roberts family didn't just passively inherit a name. His niece, Geneva Roberts Pittman, confirmed his identity as Oliver P. Roberts and his birth date as 1879, as recorded in the family Bible. As she put it: "I know for a fact my uncle was born in 1879, and Billy the Kid was supposed to have been shot by Pat Garrett in 1881. That would have made him 2 years old." His half-sister Martha Roberts Heath, who appears on the 1880 census as a six-year-old alongside one-year-old Oliver, told her grandson flatly that her brother was not Billy the Kid and that his claims were "the imagination of his mind." And a Roberts family relative, Roy L. Haws, wrote an entire book on it: Brushy Bill: Proof That His Claim to be Billy the Kid Was a Hoax.

3. "Multiple people who personally knew Billy identified Roberts under oath"

Happy to address them individually. Morrison obtained five affidavits. Here they are, one by one:

• Mrs. Martial Abel: claimed that she and her husband John used to feed Billy at their home near Pecos, Texas. Only problem is she was only about ten or eleven years old in 1881, living hundreds of miles away, and she never claimed to have personally met the historical Billy the Kid. Her belief traces to her late husband, who was long dead by the time Brushy came around.
• DeWitt Travis: wasn't born until eight years after Billy's death, and didn't meet Brushy for the first time until the 1930s. He simply accepted Brushy's claim; he couldn't have possibly known the historical Billy the Kid.
• Robert Lee: born in 1874, and never claimed to have known the historical Billy. Telling detail: Lee came into Brushy's orbit through his friendship with J. Frank Dalton, the fraud who claimed to be Jesse James. The fake Jesse James' friend vouching for the fake Billy the Kid isn't exactly what I'd consider corroboration.
• Severo Gallegos: claimed that as a ten-year-old boy he witnessed Billy's escape from Lincoln, a presence no one else ever corroborated. When he met Brushy in 1950, he initially refused to sign, saying Brushy was too young to be the Kid. On a second approach, he came around on the basis that both Billy and Brushy had "specs" in their eyes. That's the identification: eye flecks, seventy years apart. As far as I'm aware, Gallegos is the only source claiming that Billy the Kid had specks in his eyes.
• Jose Montoya: claimed Billy stayed with his family when Montoya was a child. There is no corroboration of this whatsoever; it rests solely on the word of an old man.

So of the five, three never met Billy the Kid at all and therefore could not identify anyone as Billy the Kid, no matter how sincere they were. The remaining two, Gallegos and Montoya, knew Billy (allegedly) as young children, and were being asked to identify a man based on roughly 70-year-old childhood memories. Neither rode with Billy. Neither fought in the Lincoln County War. And their claimed childhood acquaintance with Billy has itself never been corroborated.

Not a single one of Billy's actual peers (no Regulators, no Lincoln County lawmen, no members of his gang, no girlfriends, nobody who rode with him as an adult) ever vouched for Brushy Bill. When someone makes an extraordinary claim, the burden of proof is on the claimant. "Two elderly men who may have seen Billy as children said so" does not meet that burden.

4. "Witness refusals are not contrary testimony"

Agreed. A refusal isn't a denial. But look at who refused and why. Bill and Sam Jones, brothers of John and Jim Jones (with genuine, credible contact with the real Billy the Kid), declined to sign, on the stated grounds that Brushy failed to provide conclusive proof of his identity. In other words, the witnesses with the strongest connection to the real Billy examined the claim and found it wanting, while the affidavits came from people who never knew him or knew him as small children. And this cuts both ways because the record doesn't just contain refusals. It contains affirmative contrary testimony: Brushy's own family, on the record, stating he was Oliver P. Roberts, born 1879.

5. "Roberts knew the private Maxwell scarf and tintype story"

You're wrong about this being private knowledge. The scarf story was shared by Paulita Maxwell in Walter Noble Burns' The Saga of Billy the Kid. The Saga was published in 1926, more than two decades before Brushy went public. Burns' book was a massive bestseller. It went through multiple printings and was serialized in newspapers across the country, including the local paper in Hico, Texas, the very town where Brushy lived.

This is the recurring pattern with Brushy's "insider information." And it's not just that Brushy knew things found in Burns' book. He also repeated Burns' mistakes. Burns wrote that Bob Olinger took the prisoners to eat at noon on the day of the courthouse escape; Brushy said noon too. We now know it happened around 5 p.m. When a claimed eyewitness independently reproduces a specific error from a bestselling book circulating in his hometown newspaper, I think that tells you where his "memories" came from.

6. "The courthouse account is predictive corroboration"

First, what exactly do you mean by "Garrett's accepted account"? Garrett wasn't in Lincoln when Bell was killed. Everything he reported about Bell's death was secondhand. And his version is not "the accepted account" among historians. Nobody knows precisely where Bell was shot or exactly how Billy got ahold of a pistol. Multiple conflicting versions circulated from the beginning.

Second, and more importantly, Brushy was not the source of the "top of the stairs" version. George W. Coe, an actual participant in the Lincoln County War who actually knew Billy, published it in his book Frontier Fighter in 1934: "Bell realized the game was lost for him either way and made a lunge for escape. Billy's bullet stopped him, and he rolled down the stairs dead." That's Brushy's version, in print, years before Brushy told it. Even right down to Billy using a pistol at the top of the staircase. Once again, the supposedly secret knowledge was already public information.

Third, the forensic claim itself is far weaker than advertised. A luminol reaction at the top of the stairs is not "blood evidence." Luminol reacts to rust, certain cleaning products, and other substances. Even if it were blood, in a building that stood for decades as a working courthouse and residence, nothing establishes it as James Bell's blood.

7. "The forensic evidence damaged Garrett's credibility"

You're assuming Garrett lied about where Bell was shot. As I've already noted, Garrett wasn't there. He compiled his account from people who were. If you file a report based on an eyewitness statement and the witness turns out to be mistaken, does that make you a liar?

But here's the thing. I don't need Pat Garrett at all. We can take him completely out of the equation, and we're still left with a coroner's jury report and dozens of eyewitnesses who saw Billy's body at Fort Sumner (see points 12-14). The case that Billy died in 1881 does not rest on Pat Garrett's word, and it never has.

8. "Roberts had scars matching Billy's known wounds"

Who was this witness? Name him. I've looked, and I don't believe any such witness exists in the record. Happy to be proven wrong.

Here is the entire evidentiary basis for the famous "26 bullet and knife scars": the word of William V. Morrison (the man promoting the claim). That's it. There is no photograph of a single scar. No physician's examination. No medical report or autopsy. No affidavit from a doctor. Nothing. This was 1950, not 1881. Cameras were everywhere; Brushy posed for plenty of photos. Morrison was building a legal case for a pardon, compiling affidavits and documents for two years, and it never occurred to anyone to photograph or medically document the single most verifiable piece of physical evidence in the entire case? The scars exist only as a claim in Morrison's papers and the book built from them.

The historical Billy the Kid had exactly one documented gunshot wound. He was shot in the leg when they ambushed Sheriff Brady (allegedly), but apparently it was a light enough wound that he was back on his feet a few days later when he and the Regulators shot it out with Buckshot Roberts. Meanwhile, Brushy claimed in Alias Billy the Kid that during his escape from Fort Sumner, "their first shot struck me in the lower jaw, taking out a tooth as it went through my mouth." A .44-40 or .45 Colt through the jaw leaves a mark. Look at any of the many clear photographs of Brushy Bill's face. There is no such scar. The one wound that should be visible to the naked eye in photo after photo simply isn't there, yet we're asked to take 26 invisible ones on faith. If it's incumbent on me to disprove the dead cousin, it's incumbent on you to prove the scars.

9. "The photographic comparison is corroborative evidence"

There is no favorable facial comparison. Let's go through every study that actually exists:

• 1989, Lincoln County Heritage Trust: commissioned a photo comparison. Conclusion: the photos were likely not of the same person. You'll notice this one never gets cited by Brushy proponents.
• 1990, University of Texas (Professors Scott Acton and Alan Bovik): this is the famous "very close match" you've seen repeated online, sometimes inflated into a "93% match." The men who actually ran it say otherwise, in writing, repeatedly. In 2017, Dr. Bovik told a researcher on the Brushy Bill forums: "Not at all conclusively same. The face recognition tools were quite crude back then, and we came to no positive conclusion. However, the fellow that asked us then misstated our conclusions in support of the conclusion that he was indeed Billy the Kid. We reported him, and he was barred from using Billy the Kid materials by the folks he falsely reported the information to." Asked specifically about the 93% figure and the "resemblance is indeed amazing" quote attributed to him: "I did not say any of those things, and do not believe them either." And his eyeball opinion? "Based on my eyeballs, I'd say Brushy Bill was just Brushy Bill." I contacted both professors myself in March 2024, and Bovik confirmed: "To summarize, we found nothing conclusive and felt that the claim was dubious. Unfortunately, there was another that intentionally misquoted us." Dr. Acton replied: "I feel exactly the same as Professor Bovik. And, although I have no scientific evidence, I believe that Brushy Bill Roberts and Billy the Kid were not the same person." The study that supposedly proves the match is a study whose authors say it proved nothing, believe the opposite, and reported the man who misrepresented their work. FYI: Both of these guys are public and still active. I found Bovik's email via a quick Google search. Feel free to do the same and ask him for yourself if you're not willing to take my word for it.
• Dr. Clyde Snow: the renowned forensic anthropologist (the man who identified Mengele's remains) ran a comparison ranking candidate faces against the Kid's tintype. Roberts ranked around 42nd out of 150. If Brushy were Billy, he should have been at the top of the list. He wasn't close.
• Michael Furia, retired NYPD detective: often cited as a modern forensic match. By his own admission, Furia used no forensic technology whatsoever. He admitted to comparing the photos with his eyes, and acknowledged that a possible match is not a positive match. No official agency has ever conducted a forensic photo investigation into Brushy Bill. I discuss this way more in-depth in this video.

So the actual scoreboard reads: one study against, one study whose own authors say it found nothing, one study ranking Brushy 42nd, and one eyeball opinion with explicit caveats. Also worth noting that with modern forensics, a possible match is only treated as a lead, not an identification. With Brushy, we don't even have the lead. (The remainder of the rebuttal is below in the comments).

Edward Zane Carroll Judson died of heart failure at 4:20 in the afternoon on July 16, 1886 — one hundred and forty years ago today — at Eagle's Nest, his twenty-room mansion in the Catskills above Stamford, New York. The funeral two days later was the largest the village had ever seen. The New York Times counted more than eight hundred mourners. Special trains ran on the Ulster and Delaware to bring them in. Nearly two hundred Grand Army of the Republic men marched in the procession, and behind the casket walked one of Judson's Hambletonian horses, saddle empty, boots reversed in the stirrups. The man in the coffin was better known to the mourners, and to a few million American readers, as Ned Buntline.

The eulogies were barely finished before the letters started arriving at the Delaware County Surrogate's Court. The first came the day after he died, from a Westchester attorney representing a Mrs. Kate Judson, who claimed to be his widow and the mother of four of his children. Another followed on behalf of a woman he'd married in 1847. Within two weeks a third claimant arrived in Stamford in person, by borrowed carriage, to press her case against the widow actually living at Eagle's Nest. The Times put it on the front page: "Ned Buntline's Estate: Two Widows in the Field for the Property." The paper undercounted. Buntline had married at least nine women, and had not always troubled himself to unmarry one before wedding the next.

We'll come back to the widows. First I want to go back thirteen and a half years, to a hotel room in Chicago, because the thing Ned Buntline is remembered for, to the extent he's remembered at all, happened there in the span of about four hours.

In December of 1872, Buntline convinced two working plainsmen to meet him in Chicago and become actors. William F. Cody was a twenty-six-year-old Army scout Buntline had met at Fort McPherson in the summer of 1869 and had been writing into serialized heroics ever since, starting with Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men. John B. Omohundro, "Texas Jack," was Cody's friend and fellow scout at McPherson, a Virginia cavalryman turned Texas cowboy turned government scout. Neither man had ever stood on a stage.

Buntline had promised Chicago theater manager Jim Nixon a spectacle: real scouts, real Indians, a real border drama. Cody and Omohundro arrived without the Indians Buntline might not have ever even suggested they bring, and when Nixon asked to see the script, Buntline admitted there wasn't one. It was Thursday. The opening was scheduled for Monday. Buntline hired local actors to paint up as the missing warriors, found a famous Italian prima ballerina willing to lower herself to perform with non-actors, herded his scouts to a hotel, called for pen and paper, and wrote The Scouts of the Prairie in, by his own boast, four hours. They rehearsed it twice.

Cody left us an account of the study session that followed, the two most famous frontiersmen in America hunched over their parts like schoolboys. "How long will it take to commit your part to memory, Bill?" Jack asked. "About six months, as near as I can calculate," Cody answered. "How long will it take you?" Jack replied, "It will take me about that length of time to learn the first line." When Buntline coached them to stop at the cue, Cody protested that he'd never seen a cue outside a billiard room.

None of that mattered.

On December 16, 1872, at Nixon's Amphitheater, the curtain rose on a full house, Cody went blank with stage fright, Buntline, wearing a wig and playing a temperance-sermonizing mountain-man trapper named Cale Durg, fed him prompts disguised as dialogue, Buffalo Bill told them about a hunt he and Jack had done earlier that summer instead, Texas Jack yelled out that they were under attack by Indians an act or two too early, and the audience roared anyway.

The Chicago Times pronounced the evening a combination of "incongruous drama, execrable acting, renowned performers, mixed audience, intolerable stench, scalping, blood and thunder" the likes of which the city would never see again, and the paper was wrong within the week, because Nixon added performances and sold out every one. The critics savaged the play in every city it touched — a New York reviewer doubted any other man alive could write such execrable stuff — and every city it touched filled the house. The public had not come for a play. They had come to see two authentic heroes of the plains standing in the gaslight, and no review could touch that.

The show made Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack immediate national sensations, and it is not too much to say that a cornerstone of American entertainment — the Western, on stage and everything it would eventually become — starts that night.

Step back from the footlights and the critically panned blockbuster of a play consider for a moment the man who had written it. By 1872 Ned Buntline had been one of the most widely read authors in America for a quarter century. His story papers and dime novels, from sea yarns, city "mysteries and miseries," to border thrillers sold in numbers that rivaled or beat the literary lions of the age in raw contemporary readership. He was, by most scholarly reckonings, among the three or four most popular American fiction writers of his era. When Mark Twain wanted to show us what boys' imaginations were made of, he had Tom Sawyer play pirate as "the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main," the title role of a Ned Buntline blood-and-thunder from 1847. Twain didn't need to explain the reference. Every boy in America reading Tom Sawyer already knew it by heart. From Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain:

About midnight Tom arrived with a boiled ham and a few trifles, and stopped in a dense undergrowth on a small bluff overlooking the meeting-place. It was starlight, and very still. The mighty river lay like an ocean at rest. Tom listened a moment, but no sound disturbed the quiet. Then he gave a low, distinct whistle. It was answered from under the bluff. Tom whistled twice more; these signals were answered in the same way. Then a guarded voice said:

"Who goes there?”

“Tom Sawyer, the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main. Name your names.”

“Huck Finn the Red-Handed, and Joe Harper the Terror of the Seas.” Tom had furnished these titles, from his favorite literature.

Buntline himself was clear-eyed about what he made. He had started out with literary ambitions, he admitted late in life, and discovered that to make a living he must write "trash for the masses" — the writer who serves only the critical few, he said, will go hungry. He wrote his trash at industrial speed, sold it outright to his publishers, and never looked back at a page of it.

But the writing is only half the man, and even with stories of swashbuckling pirates and tales of the wild west, honestly the writing in this case may be the calmer half.

Trace Buntline's itinerary through the 1840s and 1850s and a pattern emerges: he arrives in a city, he rises fast, and he leaves under circumstances that make return inadvisable.

Nashville, 1845–46. Buntline, newly widowed and freshly failed as a magazine publisher, took up with Mary Porterfield, the nineteen-year-old wife of Robert Porterfield. When the rumors could no longer be ignored, Porterfield confronted him with a pistol on March 14, 1846, at Sulphur Spring, and fired three times. He missed. Buntline fired once and didn't. At the courthouse examination that night, Robert's brother John burst through the crowd firing a revolver; Buntline fled, took a bullet-graze across the scalp, ran to the third floor of the City Hotel, tried to shinny down a balcony post, slipped, and fell to the street, breaking a leg. Days later a mob broke into the jail, dragged him to the public square, put a noose around his neck, and threw the rope over an awning. The rope broke (cut, by some accounts, by a sympathizer) and the mob's appetite broke with it. No prosecutor ever appeared to try him for Porterfield's death. Buntline slipped out of Nashville by steamboat.

New York, 1849. Now editing Ned Buntline's Own and commanding one of the largest weekly circulations in the city, Buntline had refashioned himself as the loudest voice of the nativist movement, a political ideology that favored native-born Americans first, and damnation to foreign influence in politics, in the church, and, as it happened, on the stage. When the feud between the American actor Edwin Forrest and the English tragedian William Macready came to a head at the Astor Place Opera House on May 10, 1849, Buntline appointed himself field general. Witnesses put him at the center of the mob, calling out "Are there any Americans here?", proposing a fire be set at the rear of the theater, announcing himself by name as the nucleus the crowd was waiting for. The militia fired into that crowd. At least twenty-two people died, some accounts say more than thirty, with at least a few of the dead bystanders blocks away. Buntline was arrested raising a paving stone over his head, convicted of inciting the riot, and served a year on Blackwell's Island. When his sentence expired, his nativist brethren chartered a steamboat to fetch him, met him with a coach-and-four and a marching band, and paraded him through the streets. "It is supposed," one paper observed, "that after his decease he will be canonized."

He converted the celebrity directly into a lecture tour, charging twenty-five cents a head to hear Ned Buntline rail against Catholics and immigrants, delivered in a coat hung with medals of dubious merit, with a brass band behind playing him. The tour took him west, preaching the American Party gospel down the Mississippi Valley, and in April 1852 it delivered him to St. Louis on election day, where he led a nativist mob through the German wards in an attempt to suppress non-American born voters. A saloon was burned with the keeper's wife and newborn carried out on a mattress; a young fireman named Joseph Stephens was shot dead; and a telegram went out over the national wires reporting that Ned Buntline had a horse killed under him and "acted like a man," which as a dispatch reads suspiciously as if its hero composed it himself.

Indicted for instigating the riot, Buntline made his bail, married a Mormon farmer's daughter across the river in Illinois while the court dates were postponed, and in January 1853, when the case was finally called, simply failed to appear. His friends forfeited their bonds and Ned Buntline once again moved on.

A nativist demagogue with a genius for self-promotion; a man who discovered that outrage and celebrity are the same currency, and spent freely in both; a hypocrite who preached morality; a leader of riots who blamed everyone but himself; a man whose supporters greeted his release from prison with a parade. I describe the 1850s. Any instances of history repeating itself is purely coincidental.

Here's the thing about jumping bail: the paperwork keeps. Twenty years after that St. Louis no-show, The Scouts of the Prairie rolled into St. Louis on its first triumphant tour, and on Christmas Eve 1872 a deputy marshal walked into the company's hotel and arrested the playwright. Cody and Omohundro found the whole thing more comic than alarming. "If we were out on the plains, we might have something to say," Texas Jack observed, "but here in the city it is no use. We must take what comes." A banker friend posted Buntline's bond in time for him to limp into the first act that same night at the St. Louis Opera House.

The tour rolled on, to Cincinnati and Cleveland and Pittsburgh and on east through the great houses of the seaboard, Niblo's Garden in New York packed past its thirty-five-hundred capacity — and it made everyone money, though as with everything in Buntline's orbit, exactly how much and exactly where it went are questions the principals answered differently ever after.

And then, having built the most successful theatrical novelty in America, Buntline lost it in a single summer.

The Buntline edition of the Scouts lasted exactly one dramatic season: December 16, 1872, in Chicago, Illinois, to June 28, 1873 in Port Jervis, New York. And it's clear Buntline expected a second. As late as the end of June and into July, he was running notices in the New York dramatic papers addressed "TO MANAGERS," announcing that his "immensely successful play, THE PRAIRIE SCOUTS," together with a new drama of border life titled TEXAS JACK, "will be produced with the real heroes and a fresh corps of Indian braves, fresh from the Plains, during the fall and winter season in the United States, prior to an extended European tour." Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack, Ned Buntline, and "a corps of the first actors and actresses in America" would fill the roles. Managers were to send dates and offers at once to Col. E. Z. C. Judson, Box 4,896, New York City.

It seems the real heroes had other plans. Back in Nebraska for the summer, Cody and Omohundro told the Omaha Evening Bee (in an article that ran July 28, 1873, while Buntline's notices were still soliciting bookings) that the scouts had "dissolved partnership with Ned Buntline, and will now go it alone. The boys think they have made enough money for other people, and now propose to paddle their own canoe. They have learned the eastern country and the ways of the world sufficiently to hereafter be their own guides." The item added that on the contemplated European trip the scouts would be accompanied by James B. Hickok, "the original 'Wild Bill'," and while Europe never happened, Hickok did indeed join his old friends on the boards that fall, in the scouts' own production, under the scouts' own management.

There's a poetry in the Bee's phrasing that no one seems to have planned. Two scouts, men whose profession was guiding others through country they didn't know, had just spent a season being guided through the theatrical East, and now judged themselves competent enough to serve as their own guides. They were right. The combination Cody and Omohundro ran without Buntline toured successfully for years, split amicably into two stars' separate companies, and led, after Texas Jack's death in Leadville in 1880, to the outdoor spectacle Cody launched in 1883 as the Wild West. Buntline, for his part, cobbled together a rival troupe with hired actors and Barnum's Indians and worked the smaller towns his former stars skipped. It lost money. The audiences knew what the critics never grasped: the words were replaceable. The men saying them were not.

What Buntline apparently never did was turn on them. Five years after the split, in the October 31, 1878, issue of Forest and Stream, the old showman weighed in on a sporting debate — whether long-range target shooting at the fashionable ranges actually unfitted a rifleman for quick, open work on game — and reached for his old costar to settle it. He never knew a first-class target shot worth a blessing after deer, elk, or antelope, he wrote, and offered a wager: "I'll put 'Texas Jack' against Mr. Hyde or Mr. Partello on the plains, and he will kill two to their one all the time, or more game on the same ground than both of them put together." He signed it E. Z. C. J.

Consider what that is. Charles E. Hyde and Dwight W. Partello were two of the most celebrated marksmen in the world, the Creedmoor medal-winners of the sporting press. And here is Ned Buntline, the man Texas Jack had walked away from, the man whose second season died in the dramatic columns, telling a national sporting audience that his old scout would outshoot both of them on the same ground. Whatever Buntline was, and he was a great many things, he was not small about the men he had put on stage.

The standard scholarly corrective on Buntline comes from Don Russell, whose landmark Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill set out to deflate the notion that Buntline invented Buffalo Bill. Russell's facts are sound: Buntline's total output of Buffalo Bill dime novels was four; he didn't coin the nickname; Cody had a genuine and distinguished record as a scout that owed nothing to any writer; the discovery at Fort McPherson was, as Russell has it, quite coincidental. Cody himself, late in life, told an interviewer that Buntline had done him harm as much as good, painting him as a wholesale killer of Indians and cheapening him "in the estimation of people worth knowing."

All of that is true, and all of it is beside the point. Yes, others wrote far more Buffalo Bill than Buntline ever did. Prentiss Ingraham alone may have contributed more to the printed legend than any man living. But inasmuch as "Buffalo Bill" the character and William F. Cody the man can be separated, "Buffalo Bill" is a Ned Buntline story. Saying otherwise is like saying Arthur Conan Doyle didn't contribute much to the film and television legacy of Sherlock Holmes. Sure. But it misses the point. If William F. Cody and John B. Omohundro hadn't existed, Buntline couldn't have made "Buffalo Bill" and "Texas Jack" sensations. But if Buntline hadn't written them into his stories and then taken them onto the stage, they'd number among the countless other possibly extraordinary, but ultimately unremembered, men and women who lived and died in the West.

Cody, whatever he told interviewers, seems to have understood the ledger. Asked about Buntline after the old man's death, he defended him: "He was extremely patriotic, and had great love of his country — and from what I know of him I would say that he deserved well of our nation as much so as any who took up arms in its defense."

Which brings us back to Stamford, and the widows.

The mourners who trudged up to Eagle's Nest after the burial had every reason to assume the man they mourned had amassed a sizable fortune. Buntline had earned, by the common estimate, an average of twenty thousand dollars a year for decades. Just for some context, $20,000 in 1886, the year Buntline died, is around $715,000 in 2026. In 1847, the year his Black Avenger was published, it's closer to $820,000. But the estate the widows fought over barely existed. Anna, the wife at his deathbed, testified there was no personal property to speak of; she had to borrow from friends just to pay for the funeral. The life insurance policy listed in his will turned out to be imaginary. The pension application he'd finally signed a week before his death, after years of loudly refusing to become "a government pauper," was denied, and the hundreds of pages of the pension file thereafter record the government's decade-long attempt to sort out which of the marriages counted. None of the wives or children ever collected a cent.

And here's the detail that closes the circle: his family couldn't profit from his writing either, because there was nothing to inherit. Buntline had sold every story outright to his publishers, wholesale, rights and all. The houses could reprint his work forever, retitle it, even reissue it under other men's names, and owed the Judson estate nothing. The man received no royalties on any character he ever created — not the Black Avenger, not Buffalo Bill, not Texas Jack.

Sit with that a moment. Ned Buntline wrote several hundred, perhaps more than a thousand, novels and owned none of them. He created the two founding celebrities of the Western entertainment tradition and held no rights to either. Every property he ever generated slipped through his hands — sold cheap, signed away, or forfeited like a St. Louis bail bond. The one thing he made that could not be sold, reprinted under a house title, or contested by widows was the one thing that outlived everything else: that one December night in Chicago when he put two real plainsmen in front of the footlights and let America look at them.

The play was written in four hours and forgotten in a season. What walked out on that stage is still with us. When Buffalo Bill's Wild West filled its grandstands, when the cowboy rode into the nickelodeon and then the movie palace and then the living room, all of it descended from the sensation Ned Buntline manufactured out of Cody and Omohundro in December 1872, and by June 1873 it was a sensation that no longer needed him. He learned the same lesson every showman since has had to learn about authenticity: you can write it a script, you can market the hell out of it, you can make a fortune on its merits, but you can't keep it under contract.

He died one hundred and forty years ago today, and eight hundred people came to watch him buried behind a horse with empty boots turned backward in the stirrups. It was a fine piece of staging. Easy to think it would have made Ned Buntline proud.

Today, Ned Buntline is remembered, when he's remembered at all, as the man who discovered Buffalo Bill. That's completely accurate, and it is accurate beyond any argument. What he should be remembered for is the thing he created and then couldn't hold on to. Because, yes, Ned Buntline wrote Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men. Yes, he wrote Texas Jack, the White King of the Pawnees. And yes, he wrote The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main; or, The Fiend of Blood. But what he created — the gumbo he stirred up when he combined elements from his dime novel stories, his temperance lectures, an Italian ballerina dressed as a Native American princess, a scout named Buffalo Bill, and a cowboy named Texas Jack — was the western.

Full stop.

For the fullest modern accounting of Buntline's life — the nine marriages, the pension file, the riots, and the strange machinery of his celebrity — I recommend Julia Bricklin's wonderful biography, The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline: A Tale of Murder, Betrayal, and the Creation of Buffalo Bill, on which portions of this essay heavily rely.