There are many misconceptions regarding the death of Billy the Kid. I received this series of comments recently on YouTube, and I thought it was so well done that it deserved a public rebuttal. What follows is my humble attempt to clarify some key details regarding Billy's death. Consider this an addendum to my previous post going over many of the same points.

The commenter identifies himself as a former sheriff's deputy and police officer, and he frames his case the way an investigator would: witness credibility, corroboration, chain of custody, totality of the circumstances, etc. Fair enough. I'm going to respond in kind, point by point, citing primary sources wherever possible. First, here is the original comment in full, word for word, so nobody can accuse me of arguing with a strawman. My point-by-point rebuttal follows below it.

The Original Comment (verbatim)

I'm a former sheriff's deputy and police officer. I worked patrol, conducted investigations as part of my regular duties, and worked alongside detectives on cases. I'm evaluating the Brushy Bill Roberts evidence the same way I would evaluate any disputed case: through witness credibility, corroboration, physical evidence, chain of custody, motive, inconsistencies, and the totality of the circumstances.

The problem with calling Brushy Bill a simple impostor is that the skeptical case repeatedly isolates individual pieces of evidence, offers a hypothetical objection to each one, and then avoids explaining why so many different lines of evidence converge on the same conclusion.

1. "Brushy Bill was too young." Based on what? The Roberts family Bible and records associated with the identity he allegedly assumed?

That is circular reasoning. The allegation is that Billy the Kid assumed the identity of another person. If that happened, the birth date attached to the Roberts identity would describe the original Roberts, not necessarily the man later using that name. A family Bible proves that a Roberts identity existed. It does not independently prove that the elderly claimant was the same biological individual recorded as a child.

To establish that, skeptics would need a continuous evidentiary link between the child in those records and the elderly Brushy Bill. That could include early photographs, fingerprints, military records containing stable physical identifiers, DNA, or reliable witnesses who knew him before the alleged identity substitution. You cannot use the disputed identity to authenticate itself.

If someone successfully assumes another person's identity, documents under the assumed name are exactly what investigators would expect to find.

1. "His family said he was Roberts." The principal family witness commonly cited was reportedly born after the alleged identity substitution and knew Roberts only as a child before he moved away. She could testify to what name the family used and what family history she inherited. She could not independently testify to who he had been before she was born. That is derivative family knowledge, not firsthand identification of his original identity. If a person successfully assumes an identity, later relatives, documents, and family traditions will naturally reflect that assumed identity. That is the whole point of identity substitution. A family Bible and later family recollections may establish continuity of the Roberts identity. They do not necessarily establish that the man using it was the person originally born under that name.
2. Multiple people who personally knew Billy identified Roberts. Several contemporaries who claimed personal familiarity with Billy met Roberts and signed sworn affidavits identifying him as William H. Bonney. These were not random spectators comparing two photographs. They included people who said Billy visited their homes, socialized with them, or was personally known to them during the Lincoln County period. Some reportedly questioned Roberts for hours about people, places, events, habits, conversations, and private details before signing their statements. A skeptic can question an individual witness's memory. But merely saying "they were old" does not explain why multiple witnesses reached the same identification after personal interaction. To rebut this evidence seriously, each witness should be addressed individually. How well did the witness know Billy? What did the witness ask Roberts? What private details did Roberts know? Were the meetings conducted separately? What physical characteristics, mannerisms, speech patterns, or habits did the witness recognize? Why did the witness agree to sign a sworn statement? Generalized speculation about memory is not a rebuttal to multiple detailed identifications made under oath.
3. Witness refusals are not contrary testimony. Some people approached by Morrison declined to sign affidavits. A refusal to participate is not the same as signing an affidavit stating, "This man is not Billy." An elderly witness declining involvement because of age, uncertainty, legal concerns, or fear of publicity does not cancel affirmative sworn identifications by other witnesses. The evidentiary record is not several witnesses for Roberts versus several witnesses who denied his identity. It is multiple affirmative identifications, accompanied by some refusals and later secondhand skepticism. Those are not equivalent. A grandson writing a skeptical letter on behalf of an elderly relative is also not equal in evidentiary value to a sworn firsthand identification.
4. Roberts knew obscure personal details. The Maxwell family scarf and tintype exchange is particularly important. A preexisting letter reportedly documented a private exchange involving Billy and Deluvina Maxwell. Billy gave her a tintype photograph, and she reportedly gave him a scarf. Roberts later described the same obscure personal event. This was not general Wild West trivia. It involved a private interaction within the Maxwell household. The letter predates Morrison's investigation of Roberts. A Maxwell descendant later discussed the exchange in an interview, confirming that the account existed within the family. If Roberts independently knew the same private detail before it became publicly associated with his claim, the question becomes unavoidable. How did an impostor know it? The usual response is to imagine that somebody somehow told him. But unless someone can identify the source, explain when the information was transmitted, and show that Roberts had access to it, that is not evidence. It is an unsupported rescue theory. This becomes even more significant when added to the other private details Roberts reportedly knew during hours of questioning by people who had personally known Billy.
5. The courthouse account is predictive corroboration. This is, in my opinion, the most damaging evidence against the ordinary impostor theory. Roberts said Deputy James Bell was shot near the top of the Lincoln County courthouse staircase and then fell or moved downward. Garrett's accepted account placed the critical shooting differently. Roberts made that statement roughly sixty years before modern forensic testing reportedly detected blood evidence near the top of the staircase. That is not Roberts adjusting his story after a discovery. It is a specific account documented decades before the physical testing and later corroborated by physical evidence. In an ordinary criminal investigation, if someone correctly identified the location of blood evidence, a buried body, a weapon, or another hidden physical fact before investigators discovered it, that person would immediately be treated as possessing firsthand or inside knowledge. An impostor cannot reasonably be dismissed as merely lucky after giving a specific, testable account that later forensic evidence supports. He was not psychic. He did not have a crystal ball. The question is simple. How did he know?
6. Garrett's credibility was damaged by the same forensic evidence. The courthouse evidence does not merely help Roberts. It also hurts Garrett. If Garrett's version of the courthouse shooting was materially contradicted by later physical evidence, historians should reassess the reliability of his other unsupported statements. Garrett was not a neutral witness. His reputation, career, legal exposure, and reward claim were tied to the assertion that he had captured and killed Billy. Once a central participant is shown to be wrong about a specific, verifiable detail, and the competing claimant supplied the more accurate version decades before the testing, that participant no longer deserves automatic credibility. This does not mean every statement Garrett ever made was false. It does mean "Garrett said so" cannot be treated as decisive evidence.
7. Roberts had physical characteristics and scars consistent with Billy. Morrison documented an extensive pattern of scars and injuries on Roberts. The claim is not that historians possessed a complete medical chart listing every injury Billy ever received. The relevant point is that among the scars documented on Roberts were particular wounds and physical traits consistent with injuries known or remembered by people familiar with Billy. At least one witness reportedly described specific scars he remembered seeing on Billy and identified corresponding scars on Roberts. The argument is not simply, "An old farmer had scars." The argument is that Roberts had numerous documented injuries, and some of those injuries corresponded in location and character with known or remembered wounds suffered by Billy. A serious rebuttal would examine each claimed match, its anatomical location, its description, and its independent documentation. Saying "farmers get scars" does not address specific physical correspondences.
8. The photographic comparison is corroborative evidence. The favorable facial comparison is not DNA, and nobody serious claims that it is. It is another line of technical evidence supporting structural similarity between Roberts and Billy across extreme aging. By itself, it would not prove identity. But it does not exist by itself. It sits beside sworn recognitions, physical correspondences, private knowledge, and the courthouse account later supported by forensic testing. Evidence must be weighed cumulatively. A photographic comparison can be questioned on methodology, image quality, aging, and angle. That is fair. What is not fair is treating it as meaningless merely because it is not DNA.
9. The literacy and Spanish arguments are often repeated more confidently than they are proven. Critics frequently say Billy was literate and spoke Spanish, while Roberts was illiterate and could not speak Spanish. But Morrison and Roberts corresponded in writing, which at minimum requires explanation. There are also accounts that Roberts communicated in Spanish. Before treating this as a decisive contradiction, skeptics should establish the factual premise. Was Roberts actually unable to read and write? Were his letters dictated? Was he ever formally tested? Did he understand or speak Spanish? Who personally observed his language abilities? What level of Spanish is being claimed? A repeated assertion is not automatically an established fact.
10. "Roberts told other questionable outlaw stories." This is a legitimate credibility issue, but it is not a universal solvent. A person can exaggerate, misremember, joke, protect others, or make false claims about one subject while telling the truth about another. The correct method is to evaluate each claim against independent evidence. Even if Roberts told questionable stories about Jesse James or other outlaws, that does not explain the sworn identifications, the physical scar correspondences, the Maxwell detail, the photographic comparison, or the courthouse account later supported by physical evidence. "Sometimes he told stories" cannot erase separately corroborated facts. If anything, confirmed details should be separated from unconfirmed claims, not thrown into the same pile.
11. The official Fort Sumner identification was not airtight. Garrett's identification occurred in darkness and relied heavily on alleged voice recognition. Deputy John Poe, who was present, immediately questioned whether Garrett had shot the wrong man. That is an extraordinary fact. One of the lawmen at the scene reportedly expressed immediate doubt, while Garrett's confidence depended heavily on recognizing a voice during a sudden nighttime shooting. There was no authenticated death photograph. The dead man's personal effects and weapon were not preserved through a clear evidentiary chain. The body was buried quickly. The burial was closed-casket, meaning attendance at the funeral was not equivalent to firsthand identification of the corpse. Later Fort Sumner residents and family traditions reportedly contradicted the official identification. So the statement that "the people of Fort Sumner knew it was Billy" is an oversimplification. Some people never viewed the body. Some were repeating what Garrett or others told them. Some later said the dead man was not Billy. Some may have had reasons to protect Billy if they believed he survived. Community repetition is not the same as independent identification.
12. The contemporary description of the corpse supports the wrong-man accounts. A contemporary newspaper article described the man killed at Fort Sumner in terms that appear inconsistent with Billy's familiar youthful and lightly bearded appearance. The dead man was reportedly described as darker-complexioned and having heavy black facial hair. There were also reports suggesting that his skin appeared darkened or dyed. Later Fort Sumner accounts said Garrett killed another man, commonly identified as Billy Barlow, who was reportedly of mixed Hispanic and Anglo ancestry and physically resembled Billy. Those two lines of evidence should be considered together. First, there is a contemporary physical description of a darker, heavily bearded corpse. Second, there are later local accounts identifying the victim as a partly Hispanic Billy look-alike. That does not conclusively establish that the dead man was Billy Barlow. It does create a significant identification anomaly and may independently corroborate the local wrong-man account. The official side should answer basic questions. Why did the corpse's reported appearance differ from contemporary descriptions of Billy? Who directly examined the face? How many supposed identifications were genuinely firsthand? How many people were simply repeating Garrett's conclusion? Why did later Fort Sumner residents identify another man as the victim? Why should a disputed official record automatically outweigh physical descriptions and contrary local testimony?
13. The coroner's jury record is not clean evidence. Defenders of the official story often cite the coroner's jury as though it conclusively identified Billy the Kid. But the inquest record has serious provenance, documentation, and chain-of-custody problems. The original documentation was reportedly missing, improperly filed, or unavailable. A later replacement or reconstructed record was created in connection with Garrett's effort to obtain the reward. Questions have also been raised about changed witness information and language drafted to establish the legal conclusion necessary for payment. That does not automatically prove fraud. It does mean the surviving record cannot be treated as an untouched, neutral document created and preserved in the ordinary course. The jury evidence raises additional practical questions. Who actually viewed the face? Which jurors personally knew Billy beforehand? Were they making independent identifications, or accepting Garrett's assertion? Were all listed witnesses genuinely present? Why was the original record unavailable? Why was a replacement document necessary? Why should a reconstructed or procedurally irregular record outweigh Poe's immediate doubt, conflicting physical descriptions, later Fort Sumner testimony, and the absence of a reliable body or property chain? A compromised official record does not become strong evidence merely because it carries an official label.
14. The cumulative case cannot be answered by separate hypothetical excuses. Any individual item can be attacked in isolation. One witness might be mistaken. One scar might be coincidental. One photographic comparison might be imperfect. One obscure detail might conceivably have been leaked. One forensic result might be questioned. One official record might contain an innocent mistake. But that is not how investigations or trials work. Evidence is weighed collectively. The real question is whether all of these things happened together by coincidence: Multiple sworn identifications. Extended questioning involving intimate knowledge. Specific physical correspondences. Facial structural similarity. Private Maxwell family information. A courthouse account documented decades before forensic testing supported it. Weaknesses in Garrett's identification. Poe's immediate doubt. Conflicting descriptions of the corpse. Later Fort Sumner testimony naming another possible victim. Irregular official documentation. A closed-casket burial. No authenticated death photograph. No clean chain of custody for the dead man's weapon or personal effects. At some point, "coincidence" becomes less plausible than the straightforward explanation that Roberts possessed this knowledge and these characteristics because he really was Billy. If someone walked into a casino and hit jackpots on several machines in a row, each jackpot would technically be possible. Investigators would still look for a single explanation for the pattern. They would not analyze each jackpot separately and declare that no investigation was necessary because each event was individually possible. The same reasoning applies here.
15. The skeptical case applies unequal standards. The Roberts evidence is frequently held to an almost impossible standard. The affidavits are dismissed because the witnesses were elderly. The scars are dismissed because farmers have scars. The photographic comparison is dismissed because it is not DNA. The courthouse evidence is minimized as coincidence. Private knowledge is dismissed by imagining that someone must have told him. Family recognition is discounted unless it satisfies modern forensic standards. At the same time, Garrett's dark-room voice identification, compromised paperwork, disputed jury record, closed-casket burial, and interested testimony are treated with extraordinary deference. That is not neutral skepticism. It is selective skepticism. The same evidentiary standards must be applied to both sides. If Roberts's witnesses can be mistaken, Garrett can be mistaken. If Roberts had motives, Garrett had motives. If Roberts's records require authentication, Garrett's records require authentication. If Roberts's claims must be corroborated, Garrett's claims must be corroborated. The official narrative does not get a free pass merely because it became official.

Conclusion

This does not mean every statement Roberts ever made was accurate. It does not establish identity with mathematical certainty. It does mean the "obvious impostor" label is not supported by a fair evaluation of the total evidence.

The skeptical case leans heavily on records belonging to the very identity Roberts allegedly assumed. It treats witness refusals as though they were denials. It applies generalized memory objections to sworn identifications. It minimizes physical correspondences. It dismisses private knowledge through unsupported speculation. It avoids the significance of Roberts correctly describing the courthouse shooting location decades before forensic evidence supported him.

It also gives extraordinary deference to Garrett despite immediate doubt from Poe, compromised documentation, conflicting corpse descriptions, later local testimony, and the absence of clean physical identification evidence. The burden is not satisfied by saying, "The family Bible gives a different birth date." That argument assumes the disputed identity is genuine and then uses the same identity records to prove the assumption. The real question is this: What explanation accounts for the entire evidentiary pattern with the fewest unsupported assumptions? The impostor theory requires multiple witnesses to be mistaken, private details to have leaked through unknown channels, matching scars to be coincidental, the photographic similarity to be meaningless, the courthouse corroboration to be luck, Garrett's incorrect account to be innocent, the jury irregularities to be harmless, Poe's doubt to mean nothing, the corpse description to be irrelevant, and the later Fort Sumner accounts to be universally unreliable. The alternative explanation is much simpler. Garrett shot the wrong man, intentionally or unintentionally allowed Billy to disappear, and Brushy Bill Roberts later emerged with the physical characteristics, personal knowledge, witness recognition, and corroborated details expected of the real Billy the Kid.

After examining the totality of the circumstances, the claim that Brushy Bill Roberts was Billy the Kid is substantially stronger than this video acknowledges. The official Pat Garrett narrative is considerably weaker than it is usually presented.

Calling Roberts a "lying liar" without seriously confronting the cumulative evidence is not a neutral historical investigation.

It is advocacy for the official narrative.

The Rebuttal

1. "Saying Brushy Bill was too young is circular reasoning"

"Brushy was too young...Based on what?" Based on all of the available evidence. We have census records, marriage and divorce records, a WWI draft registration, and oral traditions passed down within the Roberts family. All of which show that Ollie Roberts was far too young to have been Billy the Kid. And we do have a continuous evidentiary link.

• 1880 federal census, Bates County, Arkansas: one-year-old Oliver, living with Henry Oliver Roberts and Sarah Elizabeth Ferguson Roberts
• 1900 federal census, Hopkins County, Texas: a 20-year-old Oliver P. Roberts living with those same parents
• Marriage record, Van Zandt County, Texas, July 11, 1909: Oliver marries Anna Lee (they appear together on the 1910 census, living near his parents; divorced November 10, 1910)
• Marriage record, Van Zandt County, Texas, August 21, 1912: Oliver marries Mollie Brown, a marriage Brushy himself admits to in Alias Billy the Kid: "In 1912 I met Molly Brown and we were married"
• WW1 draft registration, Little River County, Arkansas, December 12, 1918: Oliver Pleasant Roberts, born August 26, 1878
• 1920, 1930, and 1940 censuses: birth years of 1879, 1878, and 1870 respectively
• Death certificate and original grave marker, 1950: Ollie L. Roberts, born December 31, 1868

Same man, same wives, same parents, same counties, from age one to the grave. The only evidence to the contrary is a vague story Brushy told William Morrison about a conveniently dead cousin. A story with no date, no location, no funeral, no missing-person account, and no corroboration from a single Roberts family member (All of these records, by the way, are publicly available on genealogy sites like Ancestry).

By Brushy's own admission (Alias Billy the Kid), he was using the name Oliver Roberts by his 1912 wedding, so the "swap" had to have happened before then. But it couldn't have happened too early, as Brushy claimed he was fighting in Cuba with the Rough Riders in 1898, fighting Mexican soldiers in 1899, running his own Wild West show from 1902 to 1904, and fighting in the Mexican Revolution from 1907 to 1914 ("We left Mexico in 1914, coming across the border at Brownsville, Texas"). Meanwhile, the real Ollie Roberts was getting married in Van Zandt County in 1909, appearing on the 1910 census, getting divorced in 1910, and marrying again in 1912.

So if the real Ollie died sometime after November 1910, you're asking me to believe that Brushy, a 52-year-old, weather-beaten man claiming an 1859 birth, presented himself to Ollie's mother, Sarah Elizabeth (born 1856, just three years older than Brushy), and she accepted a man her own age as her 32-year-old son. And the rest of the family, including Ollie's living father, just went along with it.

One more thing. Brushy claimed his real father was J.H. "Wild Henry" Roberts, a veteran of Quantrill's Raiders; his mother was Mary Adeline Dunn of Kentucky; and his grandfather was Ben Roberts. No such family has ever been located in any official record, anywhere, outside of Brushy's own stories. He also claims that Catherine Antrim was his aunt, but this, too, is completely uncorroborated. The entire saga hangs by the thinnest of threads: An uncorroborated story about a phantom cousin.

2. "Family testimony is only derivative knowledge"

By that standard, nobody can know anything about any ancestor they didn't personally witness being born. I never knew my own grandfather, but I've heard a lifetime of stories about him from people who did know him, and I've seen the official documents (WW2 records, census records, etc) that back those stories up.

The Roberts family didn't just passively inherit a name. His niece, Geneva Roberts Pittman, confirmed his identity as Oliver P. Roberts and his birth date as 1879, as recorded in the family Bible. As she put it: "I know for a fact my uncle was born in 1879, and Billy the Kid was supposed to have been shot by Pat Garrett in 1881. That would have made him 2 years old." His half-sister Martha Roberts Heath, who appears on the 1880 census as a six-year-old alongside one-year-old Oliver, told her grandson flatly that her brother was not Billy the Kid and that his claims were "the imagination of his mind." And a Roberts family relative, Roy L. Haws, wrote an entire book on it: Brushy Bill: Proof That His Claim to be Billy the Kid Was a Hoax.

3. "Multiple people who personally knew Billy identified Roberts under oath"

Happy to address them individually. Morrison obtained five affidavits. Here they are, one by one:

• Mrs. Martial Abel: claimed that she and her husband John used to feed Billy at their home near Pecos, Texas. Only problem is she was only about ten or eleven years old in 1881, living hundreds of miles away, and she never claimed to have personally met the historical Billy the Kid. Her belief traces to her late husband, who was long dead by the time Brushy came around.
• DeWitt Travis: wasn't born until eight years after Billy's death, and didn't meet Brushy for the first time until the 1930s. He simply accepted Brushy's claim; he couldn't have possibly known the historical Billy the Kid.
• Robert Lee: born in 1874, and never claimed to have known the historical Billy. Telling detail: Lee came into Brushy's orbit through his friendship with J. Frank Dalton, the fraud who claimed to be Jesse James. The fake Jesse James' friend vouching for the fake Billy the Kid isn't exactly what I'd consider corroboration.
• Severo Gallegos: claimed that as a ten-year-old boy he witnessed Billy's escape from Lincoln, a presence no one else ever corroborated. When he met Brushy in 1950, he initially refused to sign, saying Brushy was too young to be the Kid. On a second approach, he came around on the basis that both Billy and Brushy had "specs" in their eyes. That's the identification: eye flecks, seventy years apart. As far as I'm aware, Gallegos is the only source claiming that Billy the Kid had specks in his eyes.
• Jose Montoya: claimed Billy stayed with his family when Montoya was a child. There is no corroboration of this whatsoever; it rests solely on the word of an old man.

So of the five, three never met Billy the Kid at all and therefore could not identify anyone as Billy the Kid, no matter how sincere they were. The remaining two, Gallegos and Montoya, knew Billy (allegedly) as young children, and were being asked to identify a man based on roughly 70-year-old childhood memories. Neither rode with Billy. Neither fought in the Lincoln County War. And their claimed childhood acquaintance with Billy has itself never been corroborated.

Not a single one of Billy's actual peers (no Regulators, no Lincoln County lawmen, no members of his gang, no girlfriends, nobody who rode with him as an adult) ever vouched for Brushy Bill. When someone makes an extraordinary claim, the burden of proof is on the claimant. "Two elderly men who may have seen Billy as children said so" does not meet that burden.

4. "Witness refusals are not contrary testimony"

Agreed. A refusal isn't a denial. But look at who refused and why. Bill and Sam Jones, brothers of John and Jim Jones (with genuine, credible contact with the real Billy the Kid), declined to sign, on the stated grounds that Brushy failed to provide conclusive proof of his identity. In other words, the witnesses with the strongest connection to the real Billy examined the claim and found it wanting, while the affidavits came from people who never knew him or knew him as small children. And this cuts both ways because the record doesn't just contain refusals. It contains affirmative contrary testimony: Brushy's own family, on the record, stating he was Oliver P. Roberts, born 1879.

5. "Roberts knew the private Maxwell scarf and tintype story"

You're wrong about this being private knowledge. The scarf story was shared by Paulita Maxwell in Walter Noble Burns' The Saga of Billy the Kid. The Saga was published in 1926, more than two decades before Brushy went public. Burns' book was a massive bestseller. It went through multiple printings and was serialized in newspapers across the country, including the local paper in Hico, Texas, the very town where Brushy lived.

This is the recurring pattern with Brushy's "insider information." And it's not just that Brushy knew things found in Burns' book. He also repeated Burns' mistakes. Burns wrote that Bob Olinger took the prisoners to eat at noon on the day of the courthouse escape; Brushy said noon too. We now know it happened around 5 p.m. When a claimed eyewitness independently reproduces a specific error from a bestselling book circulating in his hometown newspaper, I think that tells you where his "memories" came from.

6. "The courthouse account is predictive corroboration"

First, what exactly do you mean by "Garrett's accepted account"? Garrett wasn't in Lincoln when Bell was killed. Everything he reported about Bell's death was secondhand. And his version is not "the accepted account" among historians. Nobody knows precisely where Bell was shot or exactly how Billy got ahold of a pistol. Multiple conflicting versions circulated from the beginning.

Second, and more importantly, Brushy was not the source of the "top of the stairs" version. George W. Coe, an actual participant in the Lincoln County War who actually knew Billy, published it in his book Frontier Fighter in 1934: "Bell realized the game was lost for him either way and made a lunge for escape. Billy's bullet stopped him, and he rolled down the stairs dead." That's Brushy's version, in print, years before Brushy told it. Even right down to Billy using a pistol at the top of the staircase. Once again, the supposedly secret knowledge was already public information.

Third, the forensic claim itself is far weaker than advertised. A luminol reaction at the top of the stairs is not "blood evidence." Luminol reacts to rust, certain cleaning products, and other substances. Even if it were blood, in a building that stood for decades as a working courthouse and residence, nothing establishes it as James Bell's blood.

7. "The forensic evidence damaged Garrett's credibility"

You're assuming Garrett lied about where Bell was shot. As I've already noted, Garrett wasn't there. He compiled his account from people who were. If you file a report based on an eyewitness statement and the witness turns out to be mistaken, does that make you a liar?

But here's the thing. I don't need Pat Garrett at all. We can take him completely out of the equation, and we're still left with a coroner's jury report and dozens of eyewitnesses who saw Billy's body at Fort Sumner (see points 12-14). The case that Billy died in 1881 does not rest on Pat Garrett's word, and it never has.

8. "Roberts had scars matching Billy's known wounds"

Who was this witness? Name him. I've looked, and I don't believe any such witness exists in the record. Happy to be proven wrong.

Here is the entire evidentiary basis for the famous "26 bullet and knife scars": the word of William V. Morrison (the man promoting the claim). That's it. There is no photograph of a single scar. No physician's examination. No medical report or autopsy. No affidavit from a doctor. Nothing. This was 1950, not 1881. Cameras were everywhere; Brushy posed for plenty of photos. Morrison was building a legal case for a pardon, compiling affidavits and documents for two years, and it never occurred to anyone to photograph or medically document the single most verifiable piece of physical evidence in the entire case? The scars exist only as a claim in Morrison's papers and the book built from them.

The historical Billy the Kid had exactly one documented gunshot wound. He was shot in the leg when they ambushed Sheriff Brady (allegedly), but apparently it was a light enough wound that he was back on his feet a few days later when he and the Regulators shot it out with Buckshot Roberts. Meanwhile, Brushy claimed in Alias Billy the Kid that during his escape from Fort Sumner, "their first shot struck me in the lower jaw, taking out a tooth as it went through my mouth." A .44-40 or .45 Colt through the jaw leaves a mark. Look at any of the many clear photographs of Brushy Bill's face. There is no such scar. The one wound that should be visible to the naked eye in photo after photo simply isn't there, yet we're asked to take 26 invisible ones on faith. If it's incumbent on me to disprove the dead cousin, it's incumbent on you to prove the scars.

9. "The photographic comparison is corroborative evidence"

There is no favorable facial comparison. Let's go through every study that actually exists:

• 1989, Lincoln County Heritage Trust: commissioned a photo comparison. Conclusion: the photos were likely not of the same person. You'll notice this one never gets cited by Brushy proponents.
• 1990, University of Texas (Professors Scott Acton and Alan Bovik): this is the famous "very close match" you've seen repeated online, sometimes inflated into a "93% match." The men who actually ran it say otherwise, in writing, repeatedly. In 2017, Dr. Bovik told a researcher on the Brushy Bill forums: "Not at all conclusively same. The face recognition tools were quite crude back then, and we came to no positive conclusion. However, the fellow that asked us then misstated our conclusions in support of the conclusion that he was indeed Billy the Kid. We reported him, and he was barred from using Billy the Kid materials by the folks he falsely reported the information to." Asked specifically about the 93% figure and the "resemblance is indeed amazing" quote attributed to him: "I did not say any of those things, and do not believe them either." And his eyeball opinion? "Based on my eyeballs, I'd say Brushy Bill was just Brushy Bill." I contacted both professors myself in March 2024, and Bovik confirmed: "To summarize, we found nothing conclusive and felt that the claim was dubious. Unfortunately, there was another that intentionally misquoted us." Dr. Acton replied: "I feel exactly the same as Professor Bovik. And, although I have no scientific evidence, I believe that Brushy Bill Roberts and Billy the Kid were not the same person." The study that supposedly proves the match is a study whose authors say it proved nothing, believe the opposite, and reported the man who misrepresented their work. FYI: Both of these guys are public and still active. I found Bovik's email via a quick Google search. Feel free to do the same and ask him for yourself if you're not willing to take my word for it.
• Dr. Clyde Snow: the renowned forensic anthropologist (the man who identified Mengele's remains) ran a comparison ranking candidate faces against the Kid's tintype. Roberts ranked around 42nd out of 150. If Brushy were Billy, he should have been at the top of the list. He wasn't close.
• Michael Furia, retired NYPD detective: often cited as a modern forensic match. By his own admission, Furia used no forensic technology whatsoever. He admitted to comparing the photos with his eyes, and acknowledged that a possible match is not a positive match. No official agency has ever conducted a forensic photo investigation into Brushy Bill. I discuss this way more in-depth in this video.

So the actual scoreboard reads: one study against, one study whose own authors say it found nothing, one study ranking Brushy 42nd, and one eyeball opinion with explicit caveats. Also worth noting that with modern forensics, a possible match is only treated as a lead, not an identification. With Brushy, we don't even have the lead. (The remainder of the rebuttal is below in the comments).

Edward Zane Carroll Judson died of heart failure at 4:20 in the afternoon on July 16, 1886 — one hundred and forty years ago today — at Eagle's Nest, his twenty-room mansion in the Catskills above Stamford, New York. The funeral two days later was the largest the village had ever seen. The New York Times counted more than eight hundred mourners. Special trains ran on the Ulster and Delaware to bring them in. Nearly two hundred Grand Army of the Republic men marched in the procession, and behind the casket walked one of Judson's Hambletonian horses, saddle empty, boots reversed in the stirrups. The man in the coffin was better known to the mourners, and to a few million American readers, as Ned Buntline.

The eulogies were barely finished before the letters started arriving at the Delaware County Surrogate's Court. The first came the day after he died, from a Westchester attorney representing a Mrs. Kate Judson, who claimed to be his widow and the mother of four of his children. Another followed on behalf of a woman he'd married in 1847. Within two weeks a third claimant arrived in Stamford in person, by borrowed carriage, to press her case against the widow actually living at Eagle's Nest. The Times put it on the front page: "Ned Buntline's Estate: Two Widows in the Field for the Property." The paper undercounted. Buntline had married at least nine women, and had not always troubled himself to unmarry one before wedding the next.

We'll come back to the widows. First I want to go back thirteen and a half years, to a hotel room in Chicago, because the thing Ned Buntline is remembered for, to the extent he's remembered at all, happened there in the span of about four hours.

In December of 1872, Buntline convinced two working plainsmen to meet him in Chicago and become actors. William F. Cody was a twenty-six-year-old Army scout Buntline had met at Fort McPherson in the summer of 1869 and had been writing into serialized heroics ever since, starting with Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men. John B. Omohundro, "Texas Jack," was Cody's friend and fellow scout at McPherson, a Virginia cavalryman turned Texas cowboy turned government scout. Neither man had ever stood on a stage.

Buntline had promised Chicago theater manager Jim Nixon a spectacle: real scouts, real Indians, a real border drama. Cody and Omohundro arrived without the Indians Buntline might not have ever even suggested they bring, and when Nixon asked to see the script, Buntline admitted there wasn't one. It was Thursday. The opening was scheduled for Monday. Buntline hired local actors to paint up as the missing warriors, found a famous Italian prima ballerina willing to lower herself to perform with non-actors, herded his scouts to a hotel, called for pen and paper, and wrote The Scouts of the Prairie in, by his own boast, four hours. They rehearsed it twice.

Cody left us an account of the study session that followed, the two most famous frontiersmen in America hunched over their parts like schoolboys. "How long will it take to commit your part to memory, Bill?" Jack asked. "About six months, as near as I can calculate," Cody answered. "How long will it take you?" Jack replied, "It will take me about that length of time to learn the first line." When Buntline coached them to stop at the cue, Cody protested that he'd never seen a cue outside a billiard room.

None of that mattered.

On December 16, 1872, at Nixon's Amphitheater, the curtain rose on a full house, Cody went blank with stage fright, Buntline, wearing a wig and playing a temperance-sermonizing mountain-man trapper named Cale Durg, fed him prompts disguised as dialogue, Buffalo Bill told them about a hunt he and Jack had done earlier that summer instead, Texas Jack yelled out that they were under attack by Indians an act or two too early, and the audience roared anyway.

The Chicago Times pronounced the evening a combination of "incongruous drama, execrable acting, renowned performers, mixed audience, intolerable stench, scalping, blood and thunder" the likes of which the city would never see again, and the paper was wrong within the week, because Nixon added performances and sold out every one. The critics savaged the play in every city it touched — a New York reviewer doubted any other man alive could write such execrable stuff — and every city it touched filled the house. The public had not come for a play. They had come to see two authentic heroes of the plains standing in the gaslight, and no review could touch that.

The show made Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack immediate national sensations, and it is not too much to say that a cornerstone of American entertainment — the Western, on stage and everything it would eventually become — starts that night.

Step back from the footlights and the critically panned blockbuster of a play consider for a moment the man who had written it. By 1872 Ned Buntline had been one of the most widely read authors in America for a quarter century. His story papers and dime novels, from sea yarns, city "mysteries and miseries," to border thrillers sold in numbers that rivaled or beat the literary lions of the age in raw contemporary readership. He was, by most scholarly reckonings, among the three or four most popular American fiction writers of his era. When Mark Twain wanted to show us what boys' imaginations were made of, he had Tom Sawyer play pirate as "the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main," the title role of a Ned Buntline blood-and-thunder from 1847. Twain didn't need to explain the reference. Every boy in America reading Tom Sawyer already knew it by heart. From Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain:

About midnight Tom arrived with a boiled ham and a few trifles, and stopped in a dense undergrowth on a small bluff overlooking the meeting-place. It was starlight, and very still. The mighty river lay like an ocean at rest. Tom listened a moment, but no sound disturbed the quiet. Then he gave a low, distinct whistle. It was answered from under the bluff. Tom whistled twice more; these signals were answered in the same way. Then a guarded voice said:

"Who goes there?”

“Tom Sawyer, the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main. Name your names.”

“Huck Finn the Red-Handed, and Joe Harper the Terror of the Seas.” Tom had furnished these titles, from his favorite literature.

Buntline himself was clear-eyed about what he made. He had started out with literary ambitions, he admitted late in life, and discovered that to make a living he must write "trash for the masses" — the writer who serves only the critical few, he said, will go hungry. He wrote his trash at industrial speed, sold it outright to his publishers, and never looked back at a page of it.

But the writing is only half the man, and even with stories of swashbuckling pirates and tales of the wild west, honestly the writing in this case may be the calmer half.

Trace Buntline's itinerary through the 1840s and 1850s and a pattern emerges: he arrives in a city, he rises fast, and he leaves under circumstances that make return inadvisable.

Nashville, 1845–46. Buntline, newly widowed and freshly failed as a magazine publisher, took up with Mary Porterfield, the nineteen-year-old wife of Robert Porterfield. When the rumors could no longer be ignored, Porterfield confronted him with a pistol on March 14, 1846, at Sulphur Spring, and fired three times. He missed. Buntline fired once and didn't. At the courthouse examination that night, Robert's brother John burst through the crowd firing a revolver; Buntline fled, took a bullet-graze across the scalp, ran to the third floor of the City Hotel, tried to shinny down a balcony post, slipped, and fell to the street, breaking a leg. Days later a mob broke into the jail, dragged him to the public square, put a noose around his neck, and threw the rope over an awning. The rope broke (cut, by some accounts, by a sympathizer) and the mob's appetite broke with it. No prosecutor ever appeared to try him for Porterfield's death. Buntline slipped out of Nashville by steamboat.

New York, 1849. Now editing Ned Buntline's Own and commanding one of the largest weekly circulations in the city, Buntline had refashioned himself as the loudest voice of the nativist movement, a political ideology that favored native-born Americans first, and damnation to foreign influence in politics, in the church, and, as it happened, on the stage. When the feud between the American actor Edwin Forrest and the English tragedian William Macready came to a head at the Astor Place Opera House on May 10, 1849, Buntline appointed himself field general. Witnesses put him at the center of the mob, calling out "Are there any Americans here?", proposing a fire be set at the rear of the theater, announcing himself by name as the nucleus the crowd was waiting for. The militia fired into that crowd. At least twenty-two people died, some accounts say more than thirty, with at least a few of the dead bystanders blocks away. Buntline was arrested raising a paving stone over his head, convicted of inciting the riot, and served a year on Blackwell's Island. When his sentence expired, his nativist brethren chartered a steamboat to fetch him, met him with a coach-and-four and a marching band, and paraded him through the streets. "It is supposed," one paper observed, "that after his decease he will be canonized."

He converted the celebrity directly into a lecture tour, charging twenty-five cents a head to hear Ned Buntline rail against Catholics and immigrants, delivered in a coat hung with medals of dubious merit, with a brass band behind playing him. The tour took him west, preaching the American Party gospel down the Mississippi Valley, and in April 1852 it delivered him to St. Louis on election day, where he led a nativist mob through the German wards in an attempt to suppress non-American born voters. A saloon was burned with the keeper's wife and newborn carried out on a mattress; a young fireman named Joseph Stephens was shot dead; and a telegram went out over the national wires reporting that Ned Buntline had a horse killed under him and "acted like a man," which as a dispatch reads suspiciously as if its hero composed it himself.

Indicted for instigating the riot, Buntline made his bail, married a Mormon farmer's daughter across the river in Illinois while the court dates were postponed, and in January 1853, when the case was finally called, simply failed to appear. His friends forfeited their bonds and Ned Buntline once again moved on.

A nativist demagogue with a genius for self-promotion; a man who discovered that outrage and celebrity are the same currency, and spent freely in both; a hypocrite who preached morality; a leader of riots who blamed everyone but himself; a man whose supporters greeted his release from prison with a parade. I describe the 1850s. Any instances of history repeating itself is purely coincidental.

Here's the thing about jumping bail: the paperwork keeps. Twenty years after that St. Louis no-show, The Scouts of the Prairie rolled into St. Louis on its first triumphant tour, and on Christmas Eve 1872 a deputy marshal walked into the company's hotel and arrested the playwright. Cody and Omohundro found the whole thing more comic than alarming. "If we were out on the plains, we might have something to say," Texas Jack observed, "but here in the city it is no use. We must take what comes." A banker friend posted Buntline's bond in time for him to limp into the first act that same night at the St. Louis Opera House.

The tour rolled on, to Cincinnati and Cleveland and Pittsburgh and on east through the great houses of the seaboard, Niblo's Garden in New York packed past its thirty-five-hundred capacity — and it made everyone money, though as with everything in Buntline's orbit, exactly how much and exactly where it went are questions the principals answered differently ever after.

And then, having built the most successful theatrical novelty in America, Buntline lost it in a single summer.

The Buntline edition of the Scouts lasted exactly one dramatic season: December 16, 1872, in Chicago, Illinois, to June 28, 1873 in Port Jervis, New York. And it's clear Buntline expected a second. As late as the end of June and into July, he was running notices in the New York dramatic papers addressed "TO MANAGERS," announcing that his "immensely successful play, THE PRAIRIE SCOUTS," together with a new drama of border life titled TEXAS JACK, "will be produced with the real heroes and a fresh corps of Indian braves, fresh from the Plains, during the fall and winter season in the United States, prior to an extended European tour." Buffalo Bill, Texas Jack, Ned Buntline, and "a corps of the first actors and actresses in America" would fill the roles. Managers were to send dates and offers at once to Col. E. Z. C. Judson, Box 4,896, New York City.

It seems the real heroes had other plans. Back in Nebraska for the summer, Cody and Omohundro told the Omaha Evening Bee (in an article that ran July 28, 1873, while Buntline's notices were still soliciting bookings) that the scouts had "dissolved partnership with Ned Buntline, and will now go it alone. The boys think they have made enough money for other people, and now propose to paddle their own canoe. They have learned the eastern country and the ways of the world sufficiently to hereafter be their own guides." The item added that on the contemplated European trip the scouts would be accompanied by James B. Hickok, "the original 'Wild Bill'," and while Europe never happened, Hickok did indeed join his old friends on the boards that fall, in the scouts' own production, under the scouts' own management.

There's a poetry in the Bee's phrasing that no one seems to have planned. Two scouts, men whose profession was guiding others through country they didn't know, had just spent a season being guided through the theatrical East, and now judged themselves competent enough to serve as their own guides. They were right. The combination Cody and Omohundro ran without Buntline toured successfully for years, split amicably into two stars' separate companies, and led, after Texas Jack's death in Leadville in 1880, to the outdoor spectacle Cody launched in 1883 as the Wild West. Buntline, for his part, cobbled together a rival troupe with hired actors and Barnum's Indians and worked the smaller towns his former stars skipped. It lost money. The audiences knew what the critics never grasped: the words were replaceable. The men saying them were not.

What Buntline apparently never did was turn on them. Five years after the split, in the October 31, 1878, issue of Forest and Stream, the old showman weighed in on a sporting debate — whether long-range target shooting at the fashionable ranges actually unfitted a rifleman for quick, open work on game — and reached for his old costar to settle it. He never knew a first-class target shot worth a blessing after deer, elk, or antelope, he wrote, and offered a wager: "I'll put 'Texas Jack' against Mr. Hyde or Mr. Partello on the plains, and he will kill two to their one all the time, or more game on the same ground than both of them put together." He signed it E. Z. C. J.

Consider what that is. Charles E. Hyde and Dwight W. Partello were two of the most celebrated marksmen in the world, the Creedmoor medal-winners of the sporting press. And here is Ned Buntline, the man Texas Jack had walked away from, the man whose second season died in the dramatic columns, telling a national sporting audience that his old scout would outshoot both of them on the same ground. Whatever Buntline was, and he was a great many things, he was not small about the men he had put on stage.

The standard scholarly corrective on Buntline comes from Don Russell, whose landmark Lives and Legends of Buffalo Bill set out to deflate the notion that Buntline invented Buffalo Bill. Russell's facts are sound: Buntline's total output of Buffalo Bill dime novels was four; he didn't coin the nickname; Cody had a genuine and distinguished record as a scout that owed nothing to any writer; the discovery at Fort McPherson was, as Russell has it, quite coincidental. Cody himself, late in life, told an interviewer that Buntline had done him harm as much as good, painting him as a wholesale killer of Indians and cheapening him "in the estimation of people worth knowing."

All of that is true, and all of it is beside the point. Yes, others wrote far more Buffalo Bill than Buntline ever did. Prentiss Ingraham alone may have contributed more to the printed legend than any man living. But inasmuch as "Buffalo Bill" the character and William F. Cody the man can be separated, "Buffalo Bill" is a Ned Buntline story. Saying otherwise is like saying Arthur Conan Doyle didn't contribute much to the film and television legacy of Sherlock Holmes. Sure. But it misses the point. If William F. Cody and John B. Omohundro hadn't existed, Buntline couldn't have made "Buffalo Bill" and "Texas Jack" sensations. But if Buntline hadn't written them into his stories and then taken them onto the stage, they'd number among the countless other possibly extraordinary, but ultimately unremembered, men and women who lived and died in the West.

Cody, whatever he told interviewers, seems to have understood the ledger. Asked about Buntline after the old man's death, he defended him: "He was extremely patriotic, and had great love of his country — and from what I know of him I would say that he deserved well of our nation as much so as any who took up arms in its defense."

Which brings us back to Stamford, and the widows.

The mourners who trudged up to Eagle's Nest after the burial had every reason to assume the man they mourned had amassed a sizable fortune. Buntline had earned, by the common estimate, an average of twenty thousand dollars a year for decades. Just for some context, $20,000 in 1886, the year Buntline died, is around $715,000 in 2026. In 1847, the year his Black Avenger was published, it's closer to $820,000. But the estate the widows fought over barely existed. Anna, the wife at his deathbed, testified there was no personal property to speak of; she had to borrow from friends just to pay for the funeral. The life insurance policy listed in his will turned out to be imaginary. The pension application he'd finally signed a week before his death, after years of loudly refusing to become "a government pauper," was denied, and the hundreds of pages of the pension file thereafter record the government's decade-long attempt to sort out which of the marriages counted. None of the wives or children ever collected a cent.

And here's the detail that closes the circle: his family couldn't profit from his writing either, because there was nothing to inherit. Buntline had sold every story outright to his publishers, wholesale, rights and all. The houses could reprint his work forever, retitle it, even reissue it under other men's names, and owed the Judson estate nothing. The man received no royalties on any character he ever created — not the Black Avenger, not Buffalo Bill, not Texas Jack.

Sit with that a moment. Ned Buntline wrote several hundred, perhaps more than a thousand, novels and owned none of them. He created the two founding celebrities of the Western entertainment tradition and held no rights to either. Every property he ever generated slipped through his hands — sold cheap, signed away, or forfeited like a St. Louis bail bond. The one thing he made that could not be sold, reprinted under a house title, or contested by widows was the one thing that outlived everything else: that one December night in Chicago when he put two real plainsmen in front of the footlights and let America look at them.

The play was written in four hours and forgotten in a season. What walked out on that stage is still with us. When Buffalo Bill's Wild West filled its grandstands, when the cowboy rode into the nickelodeon and then the movie palace and then the living room, all of it descended from the sensation Ned Buntline manufactured out of Cody and Omohundro in December 1872, and by June 1873 it was a sensation that no longer needed him. He learned the same lesson every showman since has had to learn about authenticity: you can write it a script, you can market the hell out of it, you can make a fortune on its merits, but you can't keep it under contract.

He died one hundred and forty years ago today, and eight hundred people came to watch him buried behind a horse with empty boots turned backward in the stirrups. It was a fine piece of staging. Easy to think it would have made Ned Buntline proud.

Today, Ned Buntline is remembered, when he's remembered at all, as the man who discovered Buffalo Bill. That's completely accurate, and it is accurate beyond any argument. What he should be remembered for is the thing he created and then couldn't hold on to. Because, yes, Ned Buntline wrote Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men. Yes, he wrote Texas Jack, the White King of the Pawnees. And yes, he wrote The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main; or, The Fiend of Blood. But what he created — the gumbo he stirred up when he combined elements from his dime novel stories, his temperance lectures, an Italian ballerina dressed as a Native American princess, a scout named Buffalo Bill, and a cowboy named Texas Jack — was the western.

Full stop.

For the fullest modern accounting of Buntline's life — the nine marriages, the pension file, the riots, and the strange machinery of his celebrity — I recommend Julia Bricklin's wonderful biography, The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline: A Tale of Murder, Betrayal, and the Creation of Buffalo Bill, on which portions of this essay heavily rely.

Hi everyone! I wanted to share a documentary I made about Monument Valley.
Instead of focusing only on the famous viewpoints, I tried to explore the history, culture, and lesser-known parts of the valley, including Hunts Mesa and a hidden slot canyon, while spending time with members of the Navajo Nation.
I’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Thanks for taking the time to watch!
🎥 https://youtu.be/EnXEMt8oJEk

Another 54mm metal Wild West project.

These figures represent Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I converted the original poses to make them look like they're running and firing, trying to create a more dynamic snapshot inspired by the closing moments of the Old West.

Painted with acrylics.

this one was done by Howard Pyle and is titled “It was a Comrade from His Own Regiment”

Honestly probably my favorite painting

Take a gander at the brand new trailer for the series finale of THE RETURN OF JAKE SUNRISE!

🤠 🌕 🐺

OUR SERIES FOLLOWS JAKE'S EXPLOITS AS HE ENCOUNTERS MYSTIC CULTS, POLTERGEISTS, CANNIBAL MUTANT HILLBILLIES, ️A VAMPIRE CIRCUS, A SASQUATCH, AND THE REANIMATED DEAD. SEEN FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE SURVIVORS, A SKETCH OF THE MAN WHO IS JAKE SUNRISE BEGINS TO FORM.

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All Ages Of Geek

The Cowboy They Built

On the night of June 3rd, 1876, one hundred and fifty years ago, the curtain came down at the Grand Opera House in Wilmington, Delaware, and Texas Jack Omohundro and Buffalo Bill Cody walked offstage together for the last time.

There was no announcement that this was an ending. No reviewer marked it. The two men had stood on stages together for four years, played hundreds of shows from Maine to Texas, and turned themselves from a scout and a cowboy into what Cody called "first-class stars." That June night looked like any other stop on a long tour. But Cody's five-year-old son, Kit Carson Cody, had died of scarlet fever six weeks earlier, and the grief had hollowed out whatever appetite Bill still had for greasepaint and footlights. He had confided to his friend that he just couldn't keep doing it. Jack understood. They dissolved the joint combination. Before the summer was up both men were back in the saddle as army scouts, drawn west again by the news from the Little Bighorn.

They parted as friends, and remained friends until Jack's death four years later. Cody mourned him for the rest of his long life. But they never again stood on a stage together. In the forty years between that show in Wilmington and Cody's death in 1917, no man would ever again share a stage or an arena with Buffalo Bill as an equal. Cody himself wrote the line that fits best: they were "Pards of the Plains for Life."

What I keep coming back to, a century and a half on, is not the ending itself but what the partnership had already done by the time it ended. Because in those four years between a notoriously shaky Chicago debut and a Wilmington farewell, two men who could barely act invented something that outlived both of them, outlived the frontier they came from, and is still with us every time a figure in a hat rides across a screen. They invented the western. They invented The Cowboy.

It's worth remembering that in 1872 the cowboy was not a hero. He was a laborer.

The word described a young man, very often a poor one, who did hard and dangerous seasonal work moving cattle north out of Texas. He was dusty, broke, frequently looked down upon, and entirely absent from the national imagination. There were no cowboy novels worth the name, no cowboy songs in the parlor, no cowboy on the stage. The men who captured the public's fascination in the years after the Civil War were scouts and gunfighters and soldiers. Men like Wild Bill Hickok, the cavalry officers of the Indian Wars, and hunters. The cowboy was the man who did the work nobody wrote about.

John Baker Omohundro was, improbably, all of these things at once. Born in Virginia in 1846, he rode as a scout and courier for J.E.B. Stuart's Confederate cavalry during the war. When it was over, he went to Texas, became a cowboy and then a trail boss, and drove longhorns up the Chisholm and Goodnight-Loving trails. On a drive into Tennessee, someone called him "Texas Jack," and the name stuck to the Virginian for good. He met Wild Bill Hickok in Kansas and Buffalo Bill Cody in Nebraska, hired on as a civilian scout for the Fifth Cavalry, and earned a reputation as one of the best trackers and marksmen on the plains.

In other words, the man who would put the cowboy on the stage had personally been the cowboy, the soldier, and the scout. He had lived all the roles the public already admired and the one it had overlooked. When Ned Buntline pulled Cody and Omohundro into a Chicago theater in December of 1872 for The Scouts of the Prairie, the two were billed as scouts, because that was the thing audiences came to see. But Texas Jack brought the cowboy in the door with him, put him on the stage, and the cowboy never left.

They were not good actors. Everyone said so, including them. The reviews of that first Chicago night were merciless about the bad acting and rapturous about the real heroes, and that gap — bad actors, irresistible figures — turned out to be the whole point. Audiences weren't coming for a play. They were coming to be in a room with men who had actually done the things the dime novels described, and the theater gave them a way to sell their authenticity night after night.

What Texas Jack added was a vocabulary. He is generally credited as the first man to perform cowboy rope tricks on a stage, turning a working skill — the lasso, the daily tool of his old trade — into spectacle. He brought the horse onto the stage in a way no one had managed before; one New York critic admitted that the horse had always been a failure on stage until Texas Jack handled it, and another wrote that watching him work a horse on the boards was worth double the price of admission. Roping, riding, marksmanship, the easy southern drawl, the buckskin, the practiced competence: piece by piece, across four years and hundreds of performances, the partnership assembled the grammar of how a cowboy looks and moves and behaves in front of an audience.

And they did it as a true partnership. They split the money equally, made decisions together, and traded top billing city by city. Cody's name first up north where the Union veteran drew the crowd, Jack's was first in the South where audiences wanted to see the Confederate scout. That detail matters more than it looks. A Yankee soldier and a Rebel cavalryman standing shoulder to shoulder, equal partners, eleven years after Appomattox, was its own kind of argument. To northern crowds it said the southern man was as capable as anyone; to southern crowds it said friendship across the old divide was possible. West of the Mississippi, where their story was set, the Mason-Dixon line did not exist. The Cowboy was, from the very beginning, a figure who stood outside the country's deepest wound. And that may be part of why the whole nation could claim him.

By the time they reached Wilmington in June of 1876, the work was essentially done. The template existed. It just didn't have anyone left to carry it at scale.

When the partnership ended, Texas Jack didn't stop. For a long time historians assumed his career more or less trailed off after 1876, but the newspaper record tells a different story: between that Wilmington farewell and his last known performance in Leadville in 1880, Jack staged hundreds of his own shows. His combination drew crowds and reviews that rivaled anything Cody was doing, and when it premiered in Chicago, eleven generals turned out to watch, an implicit endorsement that rang out across the newspapers.

Look closely at who Texas Jack surrounded himself with in those years, and you are looking at every element of the Wild West show, already assembled, years before there was a Buffalo Bill's Wild West. Jack brought the Warm Springs scout Donald McKay onto the stage with him, a genuine Native frontier figure, and a famous one from his service during the Modoc War, alongside his daughter Minnie, who became a draw in her own right. That was 1876, nearly a decade before Sitting Bull and a company of Lakota would travel with Cody.

Jack hired Maud Oswald, a trick rider from P.T. Barnum's Hippodrome, to perform feats of horsemanship for his audiences, years before Annie Oakley made the celebrated woman performer a fixture of the Wild West.

And in the summer and fall of 1878, Jack teamed with the marksman Doc Carver for a string of open-air exhibitions up and down the East Coast, timed to coincide with state fairs and local gatherings: shooting, riding, roping, staged not in a theater but outdoors before huge crowds. Five years before Cody opened the first Wild West, these were a working test of the whole format.

The point is not that Texas Jack invented Buffalo Bill's Wild West. He didn't. But every piece of it — the co-starring Native warrior, the woman performer, the outdoor arena of marksmanship and horsemanship and rope work, the military men in the seats lending it the authority of the real — was present in his endeavors first, and was then gathered up, codified, and mosaiced together into a single enormous spectacle by men who had stood beside him while he was working it out.

Doc Carver makes the lineage almost embarrassingly literal: the man loading Jack's rifles at those 1878 exhibitions was the same W.F. Carver who, in 1883, co-founded the first Wild West with Buffalo Bill Cody. Jack drew the blueprint. He simply didn't live to see the cathedral built from it.

Texas Jack died of tuberculosis and pneumonia in Leadville in 1880, a month shy of thirty-four. It was a quiet death, the kind that doesn't echo. There was no assassin, no Deadwood, nothing for the dime novels to seize on, and so the man who had invented the stage cowboy began to fade almost immediately from the story he had started.

Cody did not fade. In 1883 he launched Buffalo Bill's Wild West, and over the next thirty-four years he took it across America and then across an ocean, performing for crowds of thousands and for the crowned heads of Europe. He folded in Lakota warriors, Mexican vaqueros, Russian Cossacks, riders from around the world. But the beating heart of the Wild West, the moment the audience waited for, was always the arrival of the cowboys, galloping in to rescue the besieged settler's cabin. It almost never happened that way; cowboys and Native people rarely came to blows. But it was not conjured out of nothing. Once, in April of 1872, months before either man had set foot on a stage, Cody and Texas Jack rode out of Fort McPherson after a band of Miniconjou Sioux who had run off horses from a railroad station.

In the fight that followed, a warrior leveled his rifle at Cody at close range; Jack caught the glint of the barrel and fired first, and the bullet that should have killed Buffalo Bill only grazed his scalp. The cowboy had saved the scout from an Indian under fire. That afternoon on the Loup Fork is the seed of the whole thing: Cody would spend the rest of his life magnifying that one real moment into a spectacle he sold around the world, and beneath all of it, the cowboy riding to the rescue was Texas Jack. He was not showing the West as it was. He was showing the West as Texas Jack had taught audiences to want it, and he broadcast that vision to more people, in more countries, than any frontier figure before or since.

The cowboy, who began as a menial laborer on the dusty trails of Texas, was assembled into a hero on stage by Omohundro between 1872 and 1880, and was carried to the world by Cody between 1883 and 1917, had become, by the time Buffalo Bill died, the central figure of how America imagined itself.

Here is the part that should be strange and somehow isn't. The cowboy never went away. The man faded, the show closed, the frontier was fenced and paved. But the figure they built only got bigger.

When the movies arrived, the cowboy was waiting for them, fully formed. The earliest narrative film most people can name, The Great Train Robbery, was a Western, made in 1903 while Cody was still touring. The first true movie star to be marketed as a star, Broncho Billy Anderson, was a cowboy. Tom Mix and William S. Hart built the silent Western; John Wayne and the studio system industrialized it; the singing cowboys put it on the radio and the cereal box; television filled the 1950s and '60s with so many men in hats that for a stretch the Western was simply what American entertainment was. The genre crested, broke, was declared dead more than once, and kept coming back. Eastwood's drifters, the revisionist Westerns that tried to tell the harder truth, Lonesome Dove, Unforgiven, the Coens, and now a streaming landscape where Yellowstone and its sprawl of spin-offs have made the cowboy, improbably, one of the most-watched figures on television in the 2020s.

And it isn't only the screen. The cowboy is American shorthand now, a piece of visual language understood everywhere on earth. He sells trucks and jeans and cigarettes. He stands in for self-reliance, for the frontier, for a particular idea of American manhood that politicians borrow and advertisers rent. Strip a costume down to a hat and boots and a certain way of standing, and people on the far side of the planet know exactly what you mean. That legibility, that the cowboy reads instantly as the cowboy, isn't natural. It's learned. It was taught. And the first teachers were two men who couldn't act, working out the grammar of it on a stage in the 1870s.

Pull the thread on any of it, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, the Marlboro Man, Kevin Costner on a Montana ranch, and it runs back through Cody's arena to a Wilmington stage on the third of June, 1876, and to the four years before it. The cowboy on your screen is standing on the broad shoulders of Texas Jack.

So when I think about that final show now, a hundred and fifty years later, I don't think of it as the night a friendship's stage partnership ended, though it was that. I think of it as the night the work was finished. The thing had been made. Two men had taken a dusty, disregarded occupation and four overlapping identities — cowboy, soldier, scout, showman — and fused them into a single figure durable enough to outlast themselves and the West itself.

Texas Jack would carry it alone for four more years and then die young and largely forgotten. Buffalo Bill would carry it for forty more and become the most famous American on earth. But the thing they were carrying, they built together, and it was essentially complete by the time the curtain fell in Wilmington. Everything that came after, the Wild West, the dime novels, the films, the television, the hat that means one thing in every language, is just the long echo of a story those two men told on the stage together.

Buffalo Bill said that he and Texas Jack were "Pards of the Plains for life." And, as it turns out, the architects of an American icon that has outlived their partnership by more than a century and a half, and shows no sign of riding off into any sunset.

If you love Westerns, Horror, and Art made by HUMANS, take a gander! If you like what you see, pick up something and show your support! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jakesunrise/a-horror-western-series-finale

TL;DR: No, there has never been an NYPD, FBI, CIA, or Interpol study concluding that Brushy Bill Roberts was Billy the Kid. The rumor traces almost entirely to a documentary built around a facial recognition expert from the NYPD who, by his own written disclaimer, used no agency software, no facial recognition technology of any kind, wasn't conducting an investigation, wasn't given all the available photos, and explicitly labeled his conclusion a "possible match," not a positive one. On top of that, one of the six photos he certified as the same person is a documented Rough Rider named William D. Wood, whose photos are held and labeled by Harvard's Houghton Library. The older 1990 University of Texas study, which people sometimes confuse with the FBI, was inconclusive and disavowed by the actual researchers who conducted it.

Ok, now for the meat and potatoes. I get some version of this question nearly every week. Somebody emails or comments to ask about "the FBI study" or the "NYPD study" that proved Brushy Bill was Billy the Kid. Sometimes it's the CIA. Sometimes Interpol. The agency rotates, but the claim pretty much stays the same.

There is no NYPD study. There is no CIA study. There is no FBI study. No federal agency, no intelligence service, no national crime bureau has ever conducted a photo analysis concluding that Brushy Bill Roberts was Billy the Kid. It simply has never happened.

The overwhelming majority of the time, when someone tells me "the NYPD proved it," what they're actually referring to is a documentary by Dan Edwards titled Billy the Kid: The Silver City Photo.

For those of you not familiar, Edwards runs a YouTube channel called Alias Billy the Kid and has published a book titled Billy the Kid: An Autobiography. I've read the book cover to cover, seen the documentary multiple times, and I've personally corresponded with Mr. Edwards. I want to be clear upfront: this isn't a hit piece. I have no problem with the man. We simply disagree about Brushy Bill, that's it.

The documentary itself is built around a newly discovered photograph that Edwards believes shows Billy the Kid in Silver City. It also includes a forensic analysis by an NYPD detective named Michael Furia, described in the documentary as a facial recognition expert and a "world-leading forensic artist."

Around the 23-minute mark, Detective Furia is shown six photographs and told they all depict the same person at different stages of his life. For clarity, two of the images are of Brushy Bill Roberts as an older man. One is of a child. One appears to be a teenager, one is Brushy Bill when he was allegedly 27 years old, and one is of a man wearing a cowboy hat who looks to be in his mid-30s.

Detective Furia is then asked to compare those six photos to the man in the Silver City photo. After examining all seven images, he states that he's "highly confident that is the same person." In other words, he's highly confident that the man in the Silver City photo is the same person depicted in the six photos that Mr. Edwards presented, all of whom are supposedly Brushy Bill Roberts at various ages (important to note that Furia was not told they were Brushy Bill; he was simply told that they all depicted the same person at different stages of life).

Skip ahead ten minutes later (at around the 34-minute mark), and Furia is shown the famous tintype of Billy the Kid, which he also compares to the Silver City photo.

I want to be careful not to misrepresent anyone, but although Detective Furia never outright claims that the Silver City photo depicts Billy the Kid, he does seem to be leaning heavily in that direction. He doesn't flatly state that he's highly confident they're the same person, as he did with the photos of Brushy Bill Roberts, but he does spend several minutes pointing out various similarities and saying things like, "I'm comfortable with this," and "everything's consistent. When directly asked, "so think it would be highly likely that's the same person" he asks to see the photos again, points out that their thighs and knees are hips similar, notes that they're both wearing pinkie rings, and says, "yeah, looks pretty good, I like it, I do like it."

Once again, he never just outright claims that the Silver City guy is Billy the Kid, but he does spend the next few minutes walking through various similarities (the chin, the stance, the way the feet point, etc), and appears to agree that it's likely they're the same person. I'll let you watch the documentary and decide for yourself, but I think most reasonable people will come away with the same impression that I did.

Hopefully, this isn't too confusing, please bear with me, but just to sum things up: Detective Furia compared 6 photographs, all of which allegedly depict Brushy Bill Roberts at various ages, and determined that it's HIGHLY LIKELY that they're the same person as the guy in the Silver City photo. He then directly compares the Silver City photo to the Billy the Kid tintype and appears to come to the same conclusion. Therefore, Brushy Bill Roberts is Billy the Kid. Case closed.

Now, interestingly enough, Detective Furia published his own video about this analysis on his personal YouTube channel. In it, he posted a disclaimer that reads as follows, verbatim:

**My opinions are my own and do not reflect the opinions of my employer. This project was for entertainment purposes only and was originally explained to be a genealogy project of subjects I had no knowledge of. I was not paid for the photo analysis done. All analysis was on my own time and I am not employed by Author, Dan Edwards. A possible match does not mean it is a positive match. It is simply a belief or hypothesis based on experience and training. THIS WAS IN NO WAY A FULL INVESTIGATION. I was given multiple photos BUT NOT ALL AVAILABLE PHOTOS. COMPARING HISTORICAL PHOTOS is NOT the same as IDENTIFYING LIVE CRIMINALS AGAINST A REPOSITORY. MY EMPLOYERS PRACTICES DO NOT INCLUDE 1 TO 1 PHOTO COMPARISON. No Facial Recognition Technology of any kind was used in the comparison of the photos. My beliefs are based solely on my experience *****\*

So by Detective Furia's own admission, he wasn't conducting an NYPD investigation, nor did he use any type of sophisticated software. He thought he was helping with a family tree project, and he explicitly states that a "possible match" is not a "positive match." His own department doesn't even do one-to-one photo comparisons. And in capital letters: no facial recognition technology of any kind was used.

That is the entire foundation of "the NYPD authenticated Billy the Kid," when all that happened was that an NYPD employee, off the clock, using nothing but his eyes, looking at a curated set of photos he was told were a genealogy project, offered a personal opinion he himself labeled a "possible match."

This isn't a knock on Detective Furia, by the way. He didn't do anything wrong. He was simply asked for an opinion, he gave one, and he went the extra mile on his own channel to make sure nobody misunderstood.

The documentary frames Furia's analysis as a blind, unbiased test. But in the actual video itself, Edwards tells Furia in advance that the six photos are of the same person. The verbatim line: "I told you it was the same guy at different times in his life." Then Furia is asked to confirm it.

I'm not sure that's what I'd describe as a blind test, but either way, he did make a mistake. You see, one of the six photos that Furia was told was "the same guy at different times in his life," (Brushy Bill Roberts) and which he certified as a match with high confidence, is actually a man named William Dibrell Wood.

And we know this because the same exact image used for the documentary is held at Harvard's Houghton Library, where the man in question is clearly labeled as Wood. There are actually two separate photos (here's the 2nd one), and they both identify him as Wood. You can find the same images in Teddy Roosevelt's book The Rough Riders (probably available at your local library). In fact, Roosevelt even calls Mr. Wood out by name, praising his talents. There's also a photo of Wood, circa 1905 (collection of Leora Wood Werner), that bears a very strong resemblance to the man featured in the Bronco Buster photos.

Wood is not an alias used by Brushy Bill. Nor is he an obscure figure or a hypothetical. Truth be told, his life was pretty well documented. Not only is he featured in Roosevelt's book, but he's also listed on the Rough Rider muster rolls as William D. Wood of Bland, New Mexico. He served in Troop G, 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, enlisted June 23, 1898, at Santa Fe, New Mexico, mustered out September 15, 1898, at Montauk Point, New York (confirmed by a soldiers' home admission register).

You can find Wood and his service with the Rough Riders mentioned in the Albuquerque Journal, April 20, 1900, and his obituary in the April 19, 1935, edition of The Arizona Daily Star. His service is further corroborated by his registration paperwork for the disabled volunteer soldiers home in Los Angeles. Even his tombstone has an official marker corroborating said service. You can locate William D. Wood on at least 4 separate U.S. federal censuses. He has marriage records in Cochise County, Arizona, and Bent County, Colorado; he's listed on city directories in at least two different states, and his name is clearly listed on his wife's death certificate from Wilcox, Arizona, July 12, 1928.

He eventually settled in Cochise County, Arizona, married, worked as a line rider and watchman for the Calumet and Arizona Mining Company, and passed away in Los Angeles on April 15th, 1935.

Brushy Bill Roberts was, by his own account, living in Texas during the years Wood was working in Arizona. Two different men, two different states, two separate, documented lives. Wood is 100% not a Brushy Bill alias.

Nevertheless, the eyeballing method deployed by Detective Furia confidently certified Wood and Brushy Bill Roberts as the same person. It also seemed to have certified Wood as Billy the Kid. We know, for a fact, that this is not the case. Wood was 14 years old in 1880 and working as a cowboy in Bent County, Colorado.

Ok, so why doesn't eyeballing photos work? Or, to be more precise, why did Detective Furia's eyeballs betray him?

Human brains are wired to find patterns even when none exist. It's called pareidolia, the same wiring that makes people see the Virgin Mary on a piece of burnt toast. Stare at two old photos long enough, looking for similarities, and your brain will invariably find them. This is exactly why real forensic identification doesn't run on gut feelings or guesses.

But if our naked eyes aren't reliable, what about the facial recognition software used by forensics experts? Surely we can use forensics to settle the Brushy Bill/Billy the Kid debate once and for all, right? (And don't call me Shirley).

Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but modern facial recognition was built for one job: to match a clean, modern, high-resolution photo against a database of other clean, modern, high-resolution photos. Mugshots, passport photos, driver's licenses, etc.

The only problem is that 19th-century tintypes contain just a tiny fraction of the resolution that those modern systems need. They're monochrome (early wet-plate chemistry was oversensitive to blue and nearly blind to red, which is why eye color can't be reliably read from them). They were also shot with harsh single-source lighting and long exposures that blur features.

The most serious tool that semi-works on old photos (at least that I've encountered) is Civil War Photo Sleuth, built by Kurt Luther at Virginia Tech. And even then, it doesn't work the way people assume. The facial recognition software simply narrows down a candidate list. Once that's accomplished, a human steps in and makes the actual identification using everything from uniforms, service records, and provenance. According to Kurt Luther himself, the software is "a starting point in their research, rather than a one-stop shop," and "while computer algorithms can filter out noise and highlight the best options, only humans can provide the careful analysis and synthesis required for an airtight identification." His team even built in features specifically to fight confirmation bias, because they found that when people want a photo to be of a particular person, they'll talk themselves into it (sound familiar?).

And here's the kicker on accuracy: in Luther's own published testing, when the software was handed a duplicate (the same photograph matched against itself, the best-case scenario), it still returned an average of 611 wrong candidates alongside the right one. For ordinary photos of white soldiers, it averaged 477 false positives per search before any human filtering. The tool is genuinely good at ranking the right match near the top when that person is in the database, but it buries the answer in hundreds of wrong ones, which is why human expertise and provenance research do the actual identifying.

That's one of the best examples of what the technology can do on this kind of imagery, and even that requires a database, service records, and human judgment that Edwards's documentary doesn't necessarily have.

Now, you may be thinking, "Well, that might be true for some guy running a website for Civil War photos, but the technology used by groups like the NYPD or FBI is way more sophisticated!"

Well, maybe. But just for funsies, let's go ahead and take a look at the FBI's own standards.

People sometimes wave the FBI's name around as if "FBI facial recognition" is magic. It isn't, and the FBI itself documented as much. In their Next Generation Identification System Requirements Document, obtained by EPIC through a FOIA lawsuit, the bureau set the accuracy standard for the system's facial recognition this way: "NGI shall return an incorrect candidate a maximum of 20% of the time."

That's the FBI's own internal spec. One in five times, the system points at the wrong person. And that's modern facial recognition, running on millions of high-resolution digital photographs under controlled conditions. Not a naked-eye comparison of a 19th-century tintype.

It's also worth noting that even if detectives with the NYPD receive a possible match in their system, it's treated as nothing more than a lead. Much like with the Civil War photos, real humans still have to go out knocking on doors, collecting evidence, and speaking with witnesses. They don't just arrest the suspect and lock them in prison based on facial recognition results. This isn't how the courts work, and it's not how history works.

But what about the 1990 study conducted at the University of Texas?

Now I think some people, when they say that "the FBI," or "the NYPD" verified that Brushy Bill and Billy the Kid are the same person, are reaching even further back, to a 1990 photo analysis done at the University of Texas. And somewhere along the way, "University of Texas" got laundered into "the FBI, CIA, NYPD, etc."

This is purely anecdotal, as I don't feel comfortable releasing private emails to the public, but I've spoken to the men who conducted that study. Professors Alan Bovik and Scott Acton. Professor Bovik, when I asked him if Brushy and Billy were a close match, responded, in part, by saying, "To summarize, we found nothing conclusive and felt that the claim was dubious." Professor Acton was more pointed: "I believe that Brushy Bill Roberts and Billy the Kid were not the same person."

FYI, I'm not the only person who's reached out to these guys. They're still public, and it took me about 5 minutes to find a working email address. A user on the Brushy Bill forum got similar results in 2017 (his post is actually what inspired me to reach out on my own). Don't just take our word for it, though. Feel free to ask the Professors yourself (and while you're at it, feel free to reach out to the Houghton Library at Harvard and inquire about the photo negatives of William Wood).

I say all that to say this: The 1990 study people invoke as proof was disavowed, on the record, by the people who actually conducted it. And the most recent "NYPD study" is admittedly just one person, off duty, using no agency software, no facial recognition technology, giving a personal opinion on what he was told was a genealogy project, an opinion he himself labeled a possible match, not a positive one. And when that opinion is checked against the documentary's own evidence, it erroneously certifies a Rough Rider named William D. Wood, held and labeled by Harvard, as Billy the Kid.

Every road this rumor travels ends at the same place. A guess, dressed up as proof. Or, in the case of the 1990 study, an outright misrepresentation.

Meanwhile, the actual evidence about Billy the Kid himself hasn't changed. He died at Fort Sumner at the hands of Pat Garrett on the night of July 14, 1881. There was a coroner's inquest, a public wake, a public funeral, and multiple people who knew him personally identified the body. On the other side, for Brushy Bill Roberts, we have census records, marriage records, family stories, and a World War I draft registration, all indicating he was a small child in 1881.

A possible match is not proof. It's a lead. And in this case, it's a lead that falls apart the moment anyone actually follows it.

But what do you think? Am I way off base? Am I getting something wrong? Please chime in, as I'm hoping to make a video about this, but I want to ensure accuracy. If I'm missing anything, please do not hesitate to correct me.

Hey guys, I’ve just finished reading national geographics old west book and looking for more good books on the the history of the west or about western figures. Thanks in advance for any recommendations