Billy the Kid Was Quite A Guy! | Eastern North Carolina Now

    I wrote this bit of foolishness about 6 years ago. I was being silly by bothering to blog about such foolishness but not as silly as the Governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, was in 2010 by taking up the issue of a pardon for such a well known and documented bad guy.

    Governor Richardson ultimately decided not to pardon Billy but, to add craziness to all of this silliness, he stated on December 31, 2010 (his last day as Governor) that he had been working on this issue for 8 years.

    Here is my December 30, 2010 blog posting...

Rewriting History Again
    I see where the Governor of New Mexico is hankering (that's old west talk for yearning to) pardon Billy the Kid. The Smartfella always finds himself hankering to understand why his fellow man gets himself all tangled up about such things. Such happenings always bring up questions in my often confused mind...
    • Why bother taking the time to hanker to do it?
    • Should not the governor be devoting his time to more pressing issues?

    If little Billy is actually pardoned, it seems just as logical to consider other equally silly actions that ought to follow right behind...
    • Should we not forgive Ivan the Terrible for being terrible?
    • Once little Billy is pardoned should we not then declare that the 21 people he killed did not become dead?
    • Should not the descendants who were not born to the 21 people who were not killed then be given compensation for the life that they did not lead?

    In doing my extensive research for this Foolishness, I spend 20 minutes reading a site on the Internet about Billy the Kid called Fact vs. Myth. This was very enlightening and confusing. I found out that everything we know about little Billy is not true, starting with he was not little...
    • He did not kill 21 people.
    • He was not ugly.
    • He lived to a ripe old age (probably on a Brussels Sprouts Farm with Butch Cassidy & Elvis). I admit I made up the contents of these parentheses...Or did I?
    • He did not have a bad temper.
    • He had a good sense of humor.
    • He was not a big time cattle rustler.
    • He did not join Jesse James' Gang.
    • He did not kill his first man because that man insulted his mother.
    • He was not chubby.
    • He was not left-handed but was ambidextrous and primarily right-handed.
    • He was not illiterate.
    • He did not shoot a man in a hotel for snoring too loud.
    • He did not drink too much.

    Heck, this guy was a saint! The least the Governor could do would be to change his name to Billy the Adult.

    Would I kid u?
    Smartfella

    Lagniappe: To be fair to Governor Richardson, he was not thinking about pardoning Billy for all of his murders. The issue at issue was that Governor Lew Wallace in 1879 had promised Billy a pardon for all his crimes up to that point if he testified in a murder trial brought about by a murder Billy was witness to of a Lincoln County lawyer named Chapman. After the Kid testified in court on April 14, the local district attorney revoked Wallace's bargain and refused to set the outlaw free. The Kid escaped from jail and returned to his criminal ways, which included killing additional men.

    Lagniappe Part 2: Did some of you just say to yourselves, "I have heard the name Lew Wallace before". If you don't remember where you heard that name before, I'll refresh your memory. Charlton Heston told you all about him. Lew Wallace was a Union General in our Civil War and he wrote the novel Ben Hur.