Billy the Irish

An intriguing clue comes from Clark Hust, a cowboy who had worked as a boy for Pat Coghlan, an Irish immigrant rancher in Tularosa, New Mexico. Coghlan was born in Ireland in 1822 and moved to New York City when he was 26; he drove his first cattle to New Mexico in 1872. Hust recalled in a 1954 interview that the childless Coghlans had a surrogate daughter, their niece Mary, from Ireland. She did not speak English, and thus she could communicate only with the Coghlans…and Billy the Kid. Th