Alias Billy the Kid: The Man Behind the Legend by Donald Cline (review)

74 Western American Literature Davy Crockett: A Handbook. By Richard Boyd Hauck. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. 169 pages, $6.95.) li&uck’sHandbook, originally published in 1982 as part of the Greenwood Press series of popular culture bio-bibliographies, combines a factual biog­ raphy of Crockett, a study of materials dealing with his life and legend, the history of his image and idiom in popular culture, and a helpful chronology. Hauck makes a good case for his thesis that “the legendary Crockett is a collective invention which the real Crockett initiated and which his audience has perpetuated.” Even in the book’s factual segment, one sees Crockett savor­ ing his own legend. At an 1833 performance of Paulding’s Lion of the West with James Hackett playing the Crockett-like hero, Hauck tells us: The curtain rose and Hackett stepped forward, dressed in the resplendent costume of Colonel Nimrod Wildfire. He bowed to Crockett. Crockett rose and bowed to Hackett. The audience went crazy. As he greeted his image, which was greeting him, what thoughts must have crossed Crockett’s mind? Perhaps he was dis­ turbed by recognizing that he had begun, all too explicitly, to meet himself coming back. Hauck sometimes becomes mired in detail, giving more than the reader wishes about the putative genealogy of the phrase “half-horse, half-alligator,” for example. Additionally, the prose is transiently infected by the hero’s pen­ chant for hyperbole. Of the television series starring Fess Parker, Hauck assures us, “In no time at all, every kid on every block in every town in the United States was singing at the top of his or her lungs, ‘Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier.’” Despite these flaws, the book is largely interesting, and it gives the reader moved to learn more about Crockett facts or fictions a useful guide. JANE H. MADDOCK Western Montana College Alias Billy the Kid: The Man Behind the Legend. By Donald Cline. (Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 1986. 145 pages, $12.95, paper.) When John Poe, who was with Pat Garrett on the night the Kid was killed, published in 1922 in Los Angeles his account of the final hunt for the Kid, the controversy over whether the Kid did in fact die in 1881 was appar­ ently finished. In the words of another writer hearing the news, “one can at least realize that he [the Kid] is dead enough to stay dead.” In retrospect, however, the Kid had the good sense during his short life to distort or refuse to provide information regarding his parents, birthplace, early years, first crimes—even his real name. Such gaps in our knowledge of the Kid’s biog­ raphy have been instrumental in his not being good enough to stay dead, for Reviews 75 an impressive number of investigators have tried and failed to provide the truth about the Kid’slife and death. What we do know about the Kid now is basically the result of a few devoted researchers (Koop, Rasch, Mullin, Fulton) who worked in the 1950s and 1960s on tracking the Kid’s trail from New York to Fort Sumner. Alias Billy the Kid is but another effort to discover the Kid who is said to have existed behind or beneath or beside or beyond the legend, and it displays the typical problems besetting this genre, one which is dominated by the belief that breeding details together will result in history just as putting a Hereford bull and heifer together at the right time will eventually produce a calf. Much of the book simply rehashes the previous work of Kid researchers. Much of the book is written in the pedestrian manner of research notes and, when the author feels he has landed upon a new fact or two, the tone becomes strident and wearying. More importantly, as is the case with other books like this that sport the words “true,” “authentic,” or “real” in the title, notwithstanding the author’s protestations of objectivity, it eventually becomes clear that the “facts” are being marshalled to support a thesis formed in advance. This book views the Kid as a totally degenerate specimen of American youth, and decries the...