With their pistols and stolen horses, the characters of the Wild West are an oft-romanticized clan. Writer Mark Lee Gardner is a Wild West expert and enthusiast -- in addition to writing books about the time period, he also performs music of "the western experience." Gardner, who grew up in this region, will visit the Plaza Branch of the Kansas City Public Library on Thursday to talk about his latest book To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West.
We caught up with him over e-mail to chat about outlaws in real life, Hollywood and around here.
The Pitch: What's a way in which the true story of
Billy the Kid differs from popular conception?
Gardner:
One popular conception is that Billy was the Robin Hood of the
Southwest. Another is the he was a psychopath. He was neither. He was a
horse thief, cattle rustler, and, at times, a cold-blooded killer. But
Billy had charm, charisma. He loved music and dancing. And he had many
sympathizers in New Mexico. It was a violent time and place, however,
and he let the law catch up to him one too many times.
Can you think of a modern equivalent to Billy the Kid?
There
are no real modern-day equivalents that I can think of. The closest are
the "public enemies" of the 1930s: Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger,
Pretty Boy Floyd, and so on. Interestingly, Clyde was a huge Old West
outlaw fan. After Bonnie and Clyde were gunned down in a Louisiana
ambush, they found a copy of Walter Noble Burns' The Saga of Billy
the Kid in the back seat of their car.
What are your
favorite Hollywood depictions of Wild West outlaws?
I really
like the Brad Pitt film The Assassination of Jesse James by the
Coward Robert Ford. It's by far the best Jesse James movie, even
though it wasn't filmed in Missouri. I also like Pat Garrett and Billy
the Kid, the Sam Peckinpah picture starring Kris Kristofferson as Billy
and James Coburn as Garrett. Like all movie treatments, it has
inaccuracies, but it is a bona fide classic and well worth watching.
What
do you hope readers take away from your book?
I hope they
will take away a better understanding of these two men, the Kid and
Garrett, and the true-life exploits that made them both legends in their
own time. I also hope that Garrett will seem more human, more real to
readers. He's often seen today as the villain of the story, when he was
really simply a duly-elected sheriff doing his job -- and that job was
far from an easy one.
Your next book is about Jesse James,
right? He was killed in St. Joseph, Missouri, where according to a city
slogan "the West officially starting getting wild." Have you spent a lot
of time in St. Joseph?
My next book is on the 1876
Northfield raid by the James-Younger gang. I grew up just 60 miles east
of St. Joseph in the little town of Breckenridge. St. Joseph was where
we went to shop when we needed things that could not be found in the
small towns near where we lived. I've been to the home where Jesse was
killed several times, and I have also been to Jesse's birthplace near
Kearney a great many times as well. I picked the Northfield raid as my
next subject because I wanted to revisit the James lore of my youth. I'm
very excited about it.
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