Working on Billy
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
This document is an interim report on the work I've been talking about, on the restoration and rediscovery of Billy the Kid. The images in here, except for the original unretouched photograph, are all proprietary to me and may not be copied or reproduced without written permission from me.
The illustration to the left shows the original about twice its actual size.
All the illustrations in this little report are entirely unretouched, but in the bottom two I have drawn around some points of interest with yellow.
The second illustration, below, shows a portion of the same image, scanned in at 600 dpi; it shows an area of his hip and the Colt in its holster, with Billy's hand hanging down next to it.
The original tintype is filthy in this area, so his hand and the cuff of his shirt appears quite dark and dingy. You can see, at this magnification, that the bullets are not uniform in size, being handmade. Billy gambled for bullets as often as for money, because he spent a lot of time practising. One can also see that the mouth of the holster is well worn. Another interesting feature is the way the gunbelt has been spliced. Evidently such items were heavily recycled!
There are two yellow brackets on this image, which are markers to show where I have extracted and magnified two bits.
This extract is an extreme close-up of one area of the belt, including the bottom of his leather vest. Most of you have heard me talking about my belief that he was wearing a sash: under the vest I have circled embroidery stitching. And the dotted lines encircle two blurred impressions, either of that grommeted thing on his gunbelt or of a starlike pattern on the sash. Some blurred horizontal marks above the belt are the belt again, where it moved. The diagonal line that appears to float over the grommet thing is a scratch on the surface of the tintype.
Now this illustration is really intriguing. I have marked in yellow two edges of the same thing, likely the sash (but I'll listen to other theories), which was bordered with small studs the size of our modern snaps. Well, it might be a cord. Because look very closely in Billy's hand -- he's HOLDING something! The top of it is a loop of cord, but what is the rest of it? It's also obscured by scratches. I'll be hitting the reference books, to see what it could have been.
This is how I have his features re-assembled. Digital surgery marks are still visible in several places. The teeth are anatomically impossible -- too large -- but these are the actual features on the face except put where they belong. There is no ear visible on the left, just a few ragtag impressions. But, rearranged like this, specular highlights suddenly become organised, and the face aquires depth and intelligence. And one can begin to sense the charisma for which he was noted.
Here is an extract from the original article I wrote for True West in which I collect most of the known descriptions of Billy. I have since heard, on a video, that Frank Coe also said he had the most beautiful eyes Frank had ever seen on a man.
The people who knew Billy describe someone quite different from the person we see in the tintype. Henry Hoyt was a young medical doctor who made friends with Billy. His description of the Kid should be given special weight because, in those Victorian years, a physician’s evaluation of a patient depended largely on a trained eye for surface observation. The times were furthermore pervaded by a belief in phrenology, the assessment of character according to the shape of the subject’s head. A doctor’s observations were analytic, diagnostic, indicative of health, intelligence and personality. Hoyt described Billy in detail in 1878 as “a handsome youth with smooth face, an athletic and symmetrical figure, and clear blue eyes that could look one through and through. Unless angry, he always seemed to have a pleasant expression with a ready smile. His head was well-shaped, his features regular, his nose aquiline [humped], his most noticeable characteristic a slight projection of his upper two front teeth.”
Billy would have been eighteen at this time — "only a beardless boy," as Hoyt put it.
Paulita Maxwell, one of the Kid’s many girlfriends, recounted later that “he was not handsome but he had a certain sort of boyish good looks. He was always smiling and good-natured and very polite and danced remarkably well, and the little Mexican beauties ... were very vain of his attentions.”
And here’s a reporter from the Las Vegas Gazette on December 27 1880, when Billy had surrendered to Pat Garrett and was being transported in irons through Las Vegas (NM) on the way to Santa Fe: “...There was nothing very mannish about him in appearance, for he looked and acted a mere boy. He is about five feet eight or nine inches tall, slightly built and lithe, weighing about 140; a frank, open countenance, looking like a school boy, with the traditional silky fuzz on his upper lip; clear blue eyes with a roguish snap about them; light hair and complexion. He is, in all, quite a handsome looking fellow, the only imperfection being two prominent front teeth protruding like squirrel’s teeth, and he has agreeable and winning ways.”
Finally, we have the description of George Bowman, Clerk of the Court at Mesilla in April 1881, when Billy was on trial: “Rather pleasant looking was Billy, wavy hair, dark eyes, sullen and defiant now, but looking as though they were made for laughter and sunshine and the happy smiles of children. There was the mark of a keen intellect in that forehead, and the clean cut sweep of the jaw, but there was the mark of brutishness in his face, a coarseness stamped across his features. ... It looked almost ridiculous, all those armed men sitting around a harmless looking youth with the down still on his chin.”
