Billy the Kid

Henry McCarty — known to history as Billy the Kid — was born in a New York City tenement in 1859 and was orphaned by the time he was fourteen. He drifted west through Arizona and into New Mexico Territory, where he found work as a cattle hand on John Tunstall's ranch in Lincoln County. When Tunstall was murdered in February 1878 by a rival faction in what became known as the Lincoln County War, the Kid swore vengeance and rode with the so-called Regulators on a months-long campaign that left the territory's sheriff and his deputy dead.

The Regulators lost. Most fled, surrendered, or were killed. The Kid did not. Over the next two years he survived posses, escaped from custody twice (once by killing both his guards while shackled), and rustled cattle for survival across the dust country between Fort Sumner and the Mexican border. The Eastern press loved the story. By 1880 dime novels were already printing illustrations of "Billy the Kid" — a name he himself never used until newspapers gave it to him — leveling six-shooters at lawmen, his real biography vanishing into invented gunfights.

Sheriff Pat Garrett tracked the Kid to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, on the night of July 14, 1881, hid in a darkened bedroom belonging to a friend of the Kid's, and shot him dead when he walked in asking — in Spanish — who was there. He was 21. Garrett published a self-serving account the following year that fixed the myth: the Kid had killed 21 men, one for each year of his life. The real number was probably four to nine, depending on how disputed killings are counted. The myth stuck anyway.