The Lincoln County War that Billy fought in and that led to his demise was an Old West range war, fought over cattle, land, and power. But it had an Old World underpinning, and a sectarian one as well. The New Mexico range war pitted Irish-born Catholics who controlled Lincoln County vs. English-born Protestants who wanted to break up the political machine. Although he'd been born and raised Catholic, Billy the Kid was under-churched, you might say. In any event, he fought on the side of the Protestants.
The bloodshed would eventually engender White House intervention: President Rutherford B. Hayes sent the U.S. Army, which responded by escalating the violence. Hayes also appointed a new territorial governor, Lew Wallace, who issued amnesty offers. They only applied to those not under indictment for murder, which ruled out Billy the Kid. He wrote Wallace requesting a pardon, but events had moved too far along for that.
Billy was violent, but he did not, as legend has it, kill 20 men, mostly Apaches and Mexicans. This kind of pulp fiction was the invention of Pat Garrett and his ghost-writer, another local newspaperman, along with a thousand imitators. The annoying and aggrandizing frontier scribe has been the inspiration for numerous less-than-flattering Hollywood depictions. But when it comes to Billy the Kid, the fictions peddled by the motion picture business are pretty wild, too.
Among those who have played The Kid, usually as a noble if misguided young anti-hero, are Audie Murphy, Robert Taylor, Roy Rogers, Buster Crabbe (more than a dozen times), Paul Newman, Kris Kristofferson, Emilio Estevez, Donnie Wahlberg, and Val Kilmer.
There's an interesting footnote to Val Kilmer's portrayal. That made-for-television movie, based on a screenplay by Gore Vidal, was made four years before Kilmer's over-the-top (and quite wonderful) portrayal of Doc Holliday in the 1993 blockbuster "Tombstone." In that film, it is Holliday who kills Johnny Ringo.
