What if everything we thought we knew about Billy the Kid was wrong?
Author, Frederick Nolan, to speak at Lincoln Historic Site on Nov. 11th
Historian and foremost Lincoln County War and Billy the Kid author, Frederick Nolan, will be at Lincoln Historic Site on November 11, 2014 as a part of Lincoln Historic Site’s Historian-in-Residence program. Sponsored by the Museum of New Mexico Foundation, Mr. Nolan will give a talk on his original research and recent discoveries into the origins of the famed Lincoln County outlaw.
More than fifty years ago, amateur historians Robert N. Mullin and Philip J. Rasch published their finding of the marriage record of Billy’s mother Catherine McCarty and William H. Antrim who, on an April day in 1873 were pronounced man and wife at the First Presbyterian Church of Santa Fe, N.M.
Apart from the minister, his wife and their daughter, the witnesses who signed the marriage record were Henry McCarty, Josie McCarty and Harvey Edmonds. Rationalizing this information, Mullin and Rasch reasoned that the witnesses were in fact Catherine’s sons William and Joseph, and that Harvey Edmonds was just an uninvolved passer-by or a church member who obliged as a witness. And that set of “facts” was warmly welcomed into the historical calendar and has remained unchallenged for more than fifty years.
Until now.
All will be revealed on Tuesday, November 11th at 2:00pm in the San Juan Mission at Lincoln, NM when Frederick Nolan, Susan Stevenson, and Gary Jones, the latter two descendants of Lincoln County pioneers, present their new discoveries into the origins of Billy the Kid. Seating is limited and first come first serve.
Frederick Nolan is the author of many books about the Lincoln County War, Billy the Kid, and the American West, including The Life and Death of John Henry Tunstall (2009), The Lincoln County War: A Documentary History (2009), and The West of Billy the Kid (1998).
Lincoln Historic Site is located along US-380, 12 miles east of Capitan at mile marker 98. Historic Site museums are open daily from 8:30am to 4:30pm. Admission is $5 for adults, children 16 and under and veterans are free. Admission tickets can be purchased at the Visitor Center or Courthouse Museum, cash or check only. For more information, please call 575-653-4025, or visit http://www.nmhistoricsites.org/lincoln or Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/LincolnHistoricSite.
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