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Me & Billy the Kid Well, it wasn't quite like pulling the sword from the stone, but to an eight-year-old boy, it was a hell of a thrill. The year was 1963, and I was poking around in the dirt on my grandparents' Hill Country farm. Previous expeditions had recovered an impressive cache of animal skulls, fossils, cool rocks, and other stuff, but this time I unearthed a hunk of rusted iron that my fertile imagination proved to be an old, completely rusted Colt .45 sixshooter! Naturally I jumped to the exciting conclusion that the gun had belonged to none other than Billy the Kid, who was the hero of many an eight-year-old boy at the time. I'm older and wiser now, and that gun has long since gone the way of my collection of cat's eye marbles and other boyhood treasures, but I've never forgotten it. More importantly, I've never forgotten the thrill of finding that chunk of Wild West history by merely poking around in Hill Country dirt. That experience reinforced the idea that the place where I lived was special. Exciting things had happened here. After all, the town I lived in, Johnson City, was also the hometown of LBJ. We even attended the same church. Many times I literally stood in the shadow of this giant man, and the experience left an indelible impression on my mind. I grew up reading stories in national magazines that focused on the hardscrabble Texas Hill Country as not only the place where the leader of the free world was born and raised, but considered the environment that had molded and shaped his great vision and insight. That made me proud. I grew up with the odd, egocentric conceit that small towns and rural areas are not, after all, insignificant. That where you're from, and the things that happened there, matter. Thirtysomething years after digging up that sixgun and looking up at LBJ, I'm still poking around for connections to the past. As a novelist and freelance writer, I try to put the material I find into profitable use, in both fiction and nonfiction work, but I know I'd keep digging even if there wasn't a dime in it. I love the thrill of stumbling over some heretofore unrealized story or surprising link to the past. For example, the subject of my previous column, the Coke-Davis Controversy of 1874 ("A Capitol Standoff," 10/1/97), was completely unknown to me until, one day, ten years or so past, I literally tripped over a plaque commemorating this bizarre incident, and I felt as if I'd just dug up another rusty sixshooter. It's that spirit of surprise and serendipity and déja vù I hope to infuse in future "Texana Ranger" columns. By the way, I later learned that, in all likelihood, Billy the Kid never passed through my grandparents' farm. However, he did have some Texas connections. I'll expound on some of those in a future column. In the meantime, you can make your own connections with Billy by dropping in on the Billy the Kid Outlaw Gang (cool site, cool links). |
Billy the Kid Outlaw Gang home page
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