Reading John LeMay’s Tall Tales & Half Truths of Pat Garrett (The History Press, $21.99) you get the idea everyone living in New Mexico in the 1880s, as well as those descended from them, had or has a story about Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. And that most of those stories are different. For example, Pat Garrett killed his first man, a young buffalo hunter, in self-defense and regretted it. Or, Garrett killed the man in cold blood and for no good reason. Just as he did in Tall Tales & Half Truths of Billy the Kid, LeMay sorts through this maze of lies, rumors and distortions, which makes for great fun and some valuable lessons in human nature.
—Ollie Reed Jr., an editor and a contributor to Max Evans & a Few Friends
Related Articles
-
Western author Emerson Hough (photo) was a friend of Pat Garrett, the man who shot…
-
Marshall Ashmun Upson—“Ash”—was an itinerant journalist (and heavy drinker) in the years after the Civil…
-
October 6, 1899. Pat Garrett and two men went to the Bill Cox ranch in…
