Inventing Billy The Kid: Visions Of The Outlaw In America, 1881–1981 by Stephen Tatum (review)

Reviews 357 There is folklore in Cowboy Riding Country as well. The author remi­ nisces about the songs that he heard and sang in the bunkhouses, songs like “When the Work’s All Done This Fall” and “Brown-Eyed Lee,” or that favorite of cowboys, “Little Joe the Wrangler,” not actually a folk song but the work of “Jack” Thorpe, another of the bookish cowboys of southeastern New Mexico. Like J. Frank Dobie in The Longhorns, Sinclair devotes an entire chapter to the “crackly, smelly, long-lasting, wonderful rawhide” that provided the cowboy with ropes, whips, buckets, trunks, and lashings to hold virtually anything together, from corral rails to split wagon tongues. Although Sinclair ends his book with the assertion that “Cowboy Riding Country will ride on forever,” the reader may not agree, having been affected by the ubi sunt theme of the last two chapters. “Packhorse to Plumb Paradise” tells of an abortive plan to homestead in what is now a central part of the White Sands Aiissile Range, and “Light on Dark Mountain” recalls the impact of the first atomic bomb test that forever changed a portion of Sin­ clair’s favorite territory. The reader is likely to view with nostalgia those pleasant times Sinclair treats in his earlier chapters but to realize that nothing will ever be so simple — or so good — again. ROBERT E. FLEMING University of New Mexico Inventing Billy The Kid: Visions Of The Outlaw In America, 1881-1981. By Stephen Tatum. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. 242 pages, $19.95.) The remarkably viable legend of Billy the Kid lives in the hearts and minds of generations of Americans who, as Stephen Tatum carefully points out, have told and retold the story to fit their ever-changing needs through any and all of the media available to them. Tatum’s thesis is effectively summed up in the final paragraphs of his study: Given the Kid’s century-long endurance in the popular imagination because of his dual appeal as a timeless conventional outlaw and a timely invented outlaw, I do not think it is too much to suggest that as an extended metaphor the Kid and Garrett together are America, that their violent skirmish in the last century will always provide, as is the case with the visions of Jesse James and General Custer, an index to the American scene. After providing a brief overview of the Billy the Kid legend and some of the many materials written about it, Tatum settles into an impressive effort to order all of the known facts about Billy the Kid’slife and times, a task which is, as Tatum himself later acknowledges, as fruitless as it is frustrating. He then takes the reader on a multi-media journey of the various and sundry depictions 358 Western American Literature of the legend. Tatum’s study is particularly noteworthy for its richness of detail and example, tracing the story from ballad to ballet. His evidence is quite convincing that we have altered and shaped the basic facts into many conflicting and contradictory patterns; the only conclusion we can come to is that in the process we are revealing much more about ourselves and our cul­ tural needs than we are about Billy the Kid and/or the nineteenth-century American West. What emerges from Tatum’s study is a clearer understanding that the historical truth of historians is perhaps not as important as the stories we tell ourselves about the historical truth. John Cawelti has pointed out in his work that some stories are noteworthy because they seem to fulfill so many changing social and psychological needs through time by changing themselves to meet those needs. But Tatum goes beyond Cawelti’s linkage of the popular story form and societal attitudes and values to suggest the interpretation of the legend of Billy the Kid as a touchstone for changing intellectual thought, thus further emphasizing the usefulness of popular story forms in helping us to come to terms with changes in our environment. For Tatum it is not worthwhile to attempt to distinguish between history and legend in the case of Billy the Kid, because legend has become...