Cowboy, army guide, farmer, peace officer, and character in his own right, John P. Meadows arrived in New Mexico from Texas as a young man. During his life in the Southwest, he knew or worked for many well-known characters, including William “Billy the Kid” Bonney, Sheriff Pat Garrett, John Selman, Hugh Beckwith, Charlie Siringo, and Pat Coghlan. Meadows helped investigate the disappearance of Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain, and he later bought part of downtown Tularosa, New Mexico, where he served a term as mayor. The recollections gathered here are based on Meadows’s interviews with a reporter for the Alamogordo News, a partial transcript of his reminiscences given at the Lincoln State Monument, and a talk he gave by invitation in Roswell, New Mexico, to refute inaccuracies in the 1930 MGM movie Billy the Kid.

Meadows helped investigate the disappearance of Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain, and later bought part of downtown Tularosa, New Mexico, where he served a term as mayor." "These recollections are an authentic voice of the frontier West. They inform the modern reader about what one man saw and heard in his long career in southern New Mexico."--Jacket.

Long before Sam Peckinpah finished shooting his 1973 Western, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, there was open warfare between him and the studio. In this scrupulously researched new book Paul Seydor reconstructs the riveting history of a brilliant director fighting to preserve an artistic vision while wrestling with his own self‐destructive demons. Meticulously comparing the film five extant versions, Seydor documents why none is definitive, including the 2005 Special Edition, for which he served as consultant. Viewing Peckinpah’s last Western from a variety of fresh perspectives, Seydor establishes a nearly direct line from the book Garrett wrote after he killed Billy the Kid to Peckinpah’s film ninety-one years later and shows how, even with directors as singular as this one, filmmaking is a collaborative medium. Art, business, history, genius, and ego all collide in this story of a great director navigating the treacherous waters of collaboration, compromise, and commerce to create a flawed but enduringly powerful masterpiece.

Pat Garrett, the sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico, claimed responsibility for the death of the notorious outlaw, Billy the Kid. This charge would not be his first lie, nor would it be his last, but it would be, by far, the most prominent. In a departure from the overwhelming literature that takes lawman Pat Garrett’s story—that he killed The Kid in a happenstance meeting in an isolated cabin—as historical truth, W.C. Jameson presents evidence to the contrary.

While many lionize Billy the Kid, the man who killed him, Sheriff Patrick Floyd Garrett, has a rarely told but riveting true story all his own. His adventurous life spawned many a far-fetched, exciting legend. In 1896, Garrett's investigation of the still-unsolved murder of Albert J. Fountain on the White Sands led to nothing but a gunfight and a dead deputy. Some say that Garrett faked the details the night the Kid was brought to ultimate justice, while others swear another wannabe hero did him in. In perfect irony, Garrett's own 1908 death is shrouded in mystery. Some report he died by the hand of Billy the Kid himself. Author John LeMay exposes fabricated tales for what they are and focuses on memories long forgotten about Billy the Kid's personal grave digger, Sheriff Pat Garrett.

“So richly detailed, you can almost smell the gunsmoke and the sweat of the saddles. ” —Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers No outlaw typifies America’s mythic Wild West more than Billy the Kid. To Hell on a Fast Horse by Mark Lee Gardner is the riveting true tale of Sheriff Pat Garrett’s thrilling, break-neck chase in pursuit of the notorious bandit. David Dary calls To Hell on a Fast Horse, “A masterpiece,” and Robert M. Utley calls it, “Superb narrative history.” This is spellbinding historical adventure at its very best, recalling James Swanson’s New York Times bestseller Manhunt—about the search for Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth—as it fills in with fascinating detail the story director Sam Peckinpah brought to the screen in his classic film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

A central character in legends and histories of the Old West, Billy the Kid rivals such western icons as Jesse James and General George Armstrong Custer for the number of books and movies his brief, violent life inspired. Billy the Kid: A Reader’s Guide introduces readers to the most significant of these written and filmed works. Compiled and written by a respected historian of the Old West and author of a masterful new biography of Billy the Kid, this reader’s guide includes summaries and evaluations of biographies, histories, novels, and movies, as well as archival sources and research collections. Surveying newspaper articles, books, pamphlets, essays, and book chapters, Richard W. Etulain traces the shifting views of Billy the Kid from his own era to the present. Etulain’s discussion of novels and movies reveals a similar shift, even as it points out both the historical inaccuracies and the literary and cinematic achievements of these works. A brief section on the authentic and supposed photographs of the Kid demonstrates the difficulties specialists and collectors have encountered in locating dependable photographic sources. This discerning overview will guide readers through the plethora of words and images generated by Billy the Kid’s life and legend over more than a century. It will prove invaluable to those interested in the demigods of the Old West—and in the ever-changing cultural landscape in which they appear to us.

In this series, private investigators pick up where the historians left off, taking on a series of major cold cases in history, starting with the mishandling of evidence relating to the life and times of Billy the Kid.Cold Case: Billy the Kid tackles the myths and legends about the notorious outlaw one by one, considering the evidence from contemporary sources and looking at the physical evidence still extant today to consider the veracity of historical claims and considering the evidence through the lens of a legal investigation. In this first book, the writers tackle the evolution of an outlaw in myth and lore, claiming that Billy the Kid as a notorious outlaw is a manufactured concept. They offer evidence that the Kid was little more than one of several small time cattle and horse thieves whose rustling netted him only a small amount of intermittent income. He killed no fewer, and probably no more, than four or five men. For the most part he worked on ranches, notably those of John Chisum and John Henry Tunstall. The Kid, as a cattle thief, was known to many in southern New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle, along with a number of other troublesome rustlers.