tintype of Billy the Kid in Wild West Magazine

[Richard Weddle]

The August issue now on sale everywhere. Hitherto unpublished documentation on the tintype of Billy the Kid from my research on the LCHT's photo-analysis project. One of three papers on the tintype I have coming out this year.

If there are any questions about the tintype I will be happy to answer them here.

Richard

[Margaret-Anne Moore]

the article in Wild West is written by Richard Weddle.  Is he any relation to Jerry Weddle who wrote 

Antrim is My Stepfather's Name?

[Richard Weddle]

Margaret-Anne Moore,

Thank you for remembering that old monograph. Yes. We are one and the same. My full name is Jerry Richard Weddle. I go by Richard legally and personally, so my forthcoming articles and books will be signed Richard Weddle.

The photo I use for an avatar is an alleged likeness of the Kid taken in Silver City NM that was published for the first time by Robert N. Mullin in his monograph The Boyhood of Billy the Kid (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1967).

You're not related to Clayton "Lone Ranger" Moore, are you? Or perhaps you're related to Roger "007" Moore? Just kidding ....

Looking back on it, Antrim Is My Stepfather's Name is so awkward I can hardly stand to read it now. I wanted to clarify what happened and didn't happen during the time the Kid lived in Silver City and Arizona. So I worked on that period until I felt I understood it. I thought I had the paper ready for publication in 1987, but I hesitated over historical issues I could not resolve.  I went ahead with it in 1989 since I had been sharing the research with other historians anyway. Hardwood P. Hinton got by behind it, and so did C.L. Sonnichsen who would have written the introduction if he had lived. The Arizona Historical Society finally published it in 1993. It has problems. Apart from some awkward writing, too much reasoning is taken out of the narrative and buried in the footnotes, which no one reads. There are several dropped words -- important words like "probably," "may have," "the," "and" and so on, which no one ever notices. This was the fault of a newly employed and inexperienced book designer, but in the end the author takes responsibility for such things. There are two sentences I didn't write and didn't agree with.  "Antrim evidently thought he had discharged his parental responsibility" being one of them. Janet Napolitano's contract for the AHS gave the final wording to the AHS and left the author with no rights other than to put his name on the book.

Although only a short monograph, I believe Antrim Is My Stepfather's Name changed the way people perceived the Kid, to some extant. Certainly it changed how people perceived his mother and stepfather. The longer I studied Catherine McCarty Antrim the more I came to respect her and her sacrifice for her children. I no longer believed the speculation that she was a prostitute. I had to dismiss Donald Cline's ugly and souring conclusions completely. There was a lot of resistance to Antrim Is My Stepfather's Name at the time but I'm very proud of the fact that my appraisal of the Kid's years in Silver City and Arizona has been considered and upheld by other historians, including Utley, Gardner and Wallis among others.

I've been sitting on a revised and expanded version which offers some new findings. I have to decide whether to publish that on its own or to wait and incorporate it into the larger biography.

Richard

[Richard Weddle]

The pea under the mattress appears to be that someone else published an article on the Billy tintype -- at least that's the impression I get -- and reminds me of Ambrose Bierce's remark that "calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others." Best, Dan

Go climb your thumb, Daniel Buck. The impression you get is the impression that serves you personally and has nothing to do with me. You don't know what you're talking about. You have no insight worth a damn. I withdraw all the compliments I ever made about you. Best, Richard