William H. Bonney, known as Billy the Kid (1859-1881), was the prototype of the American western gunslinger. He was the youngest and most convincing of the folk hero-villains.

On Nov. 23, 1859, William Bonney was born in New York City but moved as a young lad to Kansas. His father soon died, and his mother remarried and moved west to New Mexico. Having killed a man for insulting his mother, Bonney fled to the Pecos Valley, where he was drawn into the cattle wars then in progress. He became a savage murderer of many men, including Sheriff James Brady and a deputy, and scorned Governor Lew Wallace's demand that he surrender. "His equal for sheer inborn savagery," wrote journalist Emerson Hough, "has never lived." Such statements sent Bonney's reputation soaring and won him the nickname Billy the Kid.

Enjoying such notoriety, Billy the Kid gave no quarter to a hostile...