Billy the Kid's Bullet Holes: FACT vs FICTION
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- čas přidán 3. 06. 2024
- Thousands of people every year travel to Lincoln, New Mexico to stand in the footsteps of an American legend…Billy the Kid. One of the many things that draws them to the “Most Dangerous Street in America,” is a chance to see a grizzly calling card reportedly left by the young outlaw. But was the hole at the bottom of the Courthouse staircase really caused by a bullet from Billy’s gun, or is it just a fictional part of his international mystique? Join us as we explore the real history behind the legendary bullet hole in the historic Lincoln County Courthouse, and try to separate fact from fiction!
To learn more, check out our new book at the link below, Billy the Kid's Courthouse: The Construction, History, and Preservation of an American Architectural Treasure. Thanks for watching!
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#billythekid #wildwest #history #newmexico
I've visited the courthouse years ago, I was told the put the plexi over it because people would chip off a piece of the wall for souvenirs... people can't help themselves, they just have to destroy things...
Can’t wait to read y’all’s book on the court house history, we got married on the top floor…
That's pretty cool! Let us know what you think about the book!
Great Video, I visited Lincoln from the UK in July, fascinating place to visit, particularly the Courthouse, I found standing next to the window that Billy fired the shotgun killing Olinger a highlight of a very packed visit to the US. Anybody reading this just be aware that the Courthouse and also excellent museum/visitors centre only opens on a Thursday. So would be a BIG disappointment if you arrive and cannot enter. I have been lucky enough to have visited Tombstone many years ago and Dodge last year. Lincoln does have a feeling of a place that has not changed that much over the years.
I have been to this courthouse a few times as a kid. It’s changed a lot since then. Who really knows what changes have been made since billy the kids time? I was there in the 80s.
I visited the Lincoln County Courthouse in 2022, looking down the stairs at the bullet holes where Bell lost his life and looking out the window where Bob Ollinger was shot dead in the street was a very erie feeling! I recommend those that haven’t visited the town of Lincoln, New Mexico to please go see it, it’s well worth to buy a ticket to view the old buildings and feel the history!
We can't wait to come and see Lincoln, New Mexico ourselves. Love your informative videos! Thanks for sharing!
Thank you! Hope to see you in town one of these days.
Could listen to you description any day of the week. Excellent presentation and content.
Glad you enjoy it!
Fantastic video and research. I wish you all would put out more content. This channel could be huge.
We're working on it! The next one is a big undertaking but it's well underway. Stay tuned.
Well done! Thank you for this information. Very interesting.
❤❤💘😴🐪🙆🙅🏽♂️😢😅😅😅❤❤❤❤
Glad you enjoyed it!
Very cool. Your book looks interesting, I will order one.
Thank you! We hope you like it, and please leave us a review.
Good work, great research!
I visited Lincoln several years ago and was impressed with the area.
Thank you! We hope you can visit again sometime.
Excellent. I was there in 1992. Will be back again i hope one day.
Great place to go we saw it in 210, the funny part was Billy sure was fun
some people need to take lessons from Billy and he was was hero 😊😊😊😊😅
Thank you. It was quite the video.👍
Thank you for watching!
Tim is the best historian in America.
Great job! Can't wait to hear more. Do you know if there were Aragon's living there during the Lincoln County War?
There were few if any Aragons in Lincoln during the war. Maybe none. At least according to the 1870 and 1880 census data.
Right on ... well said ...
Well done! I wonder how many references there were over that period of time to ANY firing of weapons inside the Courthouse? From a non-historian point of view, it makes more sense than not that it is probably linked to that fateful day, but we may never know for sure. Looking forward to watching more of your videos, especially on Billy the Kid.
Thank you! We found no references to any other weapons being fired in the building other than those we mentioned. For now, there's still plenty of mystery surrounding the bullet holes.
Reasonable example of using historical scholarship to lessen conjecture about the providence of the holes. I suppose you’d have to question if nobody every repaired or repainted the wall soon after the event?
Thank you! And yes, so far the historical record has been silent about the status of the bullet hole for decades after it was created. The search continues.
@@badhossmaps which would definitely throw some suspicion on it being legit. I could very much see that the actual hole was basically a small indent (it had just passed through a human body after all) and was enhanced later - paint or no paint. So perhaps that is what the daughter remembered? Even the earlier records of the bullet hole being there, didn’t indicate (at least as far as you read) how large the hole was. And what happened to the second hole? We probably won’t ever know for sure. But the museum is probably justified to indicate to guests that either we don’t know or it seems to be an enhanced feature.
Enjoyed this presentation very much, did you say Joe Bell fell dead at the bottom of the stairs? Thought he fell outside?
We were quoting a historic interpretive script. You are indeed correct, James Bell collapsed after exiting the back door.
He’ll make you famous, he’ll make the wall famous too 😉
i first would like some one verify where billy and bell were standing when he fired. if so that would explain the location of the bullet hole. plus where was bell standing in reference to the wall was he close to the wall when shot or perhaps on the first few steps. bloody hand print could be he stumbled back against it. from seeing the hole a little high i would say they both were on the stairs and close to each other.
Garrett said Bell was killed by "a poor shot" a rebound off the top of the stairs entering his right side ....trajectory doesn't align with the" bullet hole" : Brushy said it was by accident he shot Bell at the top of the stairs - at a range of just a few yards - BTK would not have missed as Garrett established.
Garrett wasn’t present to witness anything and crime scene forensics wasn’t really a thing at the time. I believe Garrett was very often a liar but why do you think Billy couldn’t have missed?
Imagined a bullet hole getting the spotlight hahahahaha.Who knows it's only a nail hole made to hang Billy's underwear hahahaha....?.
Great story. The angles look wrong to me. Like they were from a level shooter.
Why not take DNA samples from the blood in the bullet holes if there is enough to be useable and match the DNA to Bell's relatives.
For me it's enought to know that Billy the kid was in the court house . From two big holes to only one big hole,hm ?🤔
Why not use some kind of X-ray to detect any patches and if any wood behind patch has a circular hole?
did they ever retrieve the slugs out of the wall
Pat Garrett claims to have done so, yes.
@@badhossmapsPat Garret claimed lots of things that were simply not true. For instance Killing the kid. 😉 I enjoyed your video! I just went through Lincoln 3 weeks ago. There’s a feeling you get in the places you know Billy shot it out with adversaries vs. the nothing felt at his supposed grave site in Fort Sumner.
I think if you cut this man's index fingers off he wouldn't be able to talk 😁.
I think The only way to find out Would be to ask kid himself And he is deadIf it passed through a man's body it would have slowed downConsiderablyDon't know if it would've made that big of a holeAnd it would have generated a lot of money come see the whole that believe the kid madeJust like it Jesse James mom going down to the gun store buying old guns and telling people this was Jesse James Gunn and selling itHe was shooting a pistol thatAdd the barrel cutIt would not have had the same powerBut we will never know unless we bring Is bad boy Billy back From the dead
pat lied about the entire thing starting with billy shooting the deputy and where that even took place was all wrong, he either was a fool or he was or did help billy escape IMO
It's funny that the word fiction means almost the same as fact today, and they both have lost all meaning.
Billy the Kid was my great great grand uncle from Inchigeelagh Cork, Ireland. His given name was Henry McCarthy and growing up my grandparents spoke of his mother leaving Cork with Billy emigrating to the New York. She may have left her husband. As a child in Ireland and later NYC he suffered much but always sought adventure and wound up on the wrong side of the law. My relatives never really enjoyed talking about him.
McCarty
Is the ball still in the wall ?if so a metal detector should reveal it
That’s what I wondered?
No. Pat Garrett said there was only one bullet hole, and that he removed the bullet in the days immediately following the shooting.
Great great job !! Very historic place first murphy dolan store then lincoln courthouse !! Great to see it was all freshly painted and new exhibits !! Sadly i do not believe the hole in the wall was put there from bonney - bell skirmish doesnt hold water its simply a tourist attraction much like hole in the wall at jesse james house no go there either great job guys !! Im a suscriber now
Nope, saved everyone the trouble.
Garrett's own description is interesting. He maintains that the ball that killed Bell had "caromed" off the wall first. He based that on the ball being "indented and creased" and that flesh was imbedded in them, believing that to mean the damage originated before the ball entered Bell. He does imply marks on the wall show this to be the case, and also that the ball entered the adobe wall after exiting Bell. We know he got the place of Bell's shooting off, but even Garrett frames the story as coming largely from Gauss and that it was the "popular conclusion" of the events. Take or leave that for what it's worth. I think that, Bell being shot at the top of the stairs, it is possible the angle is such that the ball may have travelled in a direction that it imbedded itself in one of the holes in that wall below. I don't think their provenance to the incident can be proven 100%, while it remains quite possible.
Bushy Bill Roberts said he fall and shot the wall and then it hit Bell in the neck.
@@SULLIEDASP Brushy was only two or three years old at the time, and probably in Texas. Still, what you state is awfully similar to what Garrett wrote- caromed off the wall and struck Bell- which was the basis of my post. You don't suppose Brushy read Garrett's book and took that story from him, do you? Seems Brushy and Garrett are on the same page here, other than the location of the wound.
@@Rollin_Lbrushy was not 2 or 3 years old at the time he took the name of his cousin who was 2 or 3 years old , brushy was born in texas in 1859
Get your facts right and stop quoting others that got that wrong !
@@user-hg4bq8mp4b Who are YOU quoting? Answer that for us all.
Other that William V Morrison's unsubstantiated claims about what Brushy told him, what evidence do you have of when or where Brushy was born and under what name? What we are told are "Brushy's own words" come only from hearsay evidence of what Brushy supposedly told Morrison, but there is no public record of anything from Brushy himself as of this time. We'd all like to see the primary evidence. You can spout the Brushy Bill talking points as much as you want, but no one has ever produced a single primary document to support the tale. There's literally nothing. And by the way, Buffalo Gap, Texas was not yet founded in 1859, so there's another one you need to explain.
Another question, if Brushy was really 58 years old as of September 12,1918, why did he sign his legally required draft registration card for all men 18-45 years old? That record exists, it's available for anyone to view, and no one believes he was pretending to be about 40 at the time to disguise an age of 58.
On top of that, the supposed birth year of 1859 for the Kid comes exclusively from Pat Garrett, while you Brushy people keep insisting that everything Garrett said was a lie. How do you explain that one? May I borrow a phrase from you: Get your facts right and stop quoting others that got it wrong!
"We know he got the place of Bell's shooting off"
What's off with it? I'm quite new to the subject so I'm genuinely curious. If the blood at the top of the stairs is what's proving it off, what evidence is there that the blood belonged to Bell, and not some other bloke with a broken nose some time before or after that?
DNA?
This is wrong please go to your video at the seven minute mark and look at the guy on the steps then look at the height of the holes in the wall which shows if Billy was coming down the steps when he shot the deputy then the bullet holes would of been much lower on the wall as Billy was firing from a downward angle.The lowest of them two holes is at shoulder height with the top one being above or at head height which makes it absolutely impossible that those are from Billy.Thanks for your video and proving those holes are a lie.It is so funny at the one minute seven second mark in your video you can see a guy standing next to the holes with one being well above his head yet again Billy was firing down the steps.
Hey mane is da book out yet i be going 2 get it if it be
Wrong. Blood stains on wooden floors are impossible to remove. Impossible.
With todays technology can't the holes be checked by forensics? Traces of metal could be found. Maybe evidence of blood.
Ken Mains has done this, they found blood at the top of the stairs.
@@Dragonette666 At the top of the stairs. I'm talking about the wall with bullet holes. Once a projectile passes thru a body does it not carry dna with it.
@@incaboy1951 seems like I watched a video where they said that those bullet holes were added when the courthouse was remodeled.
Also keep in mind evidence has to be preserved in climate controlled areas. After about 150 years and probably countless people putting their finger in it, I don't think so.
They could be, yes, but there are a few problems with forensics testing. First there would be a lot of red tape getting permission from the State, which owns the building. The second and bigger issue is that the Courthouse has had 150 years of tourists touching and poking everything, numerous wall-to-wall remodels including new plaster and floors, and it was even a school for many years. It's very unlikely the original bullet(s) would have made holes anywhere near that large in a solid, plastered adobe wall after already having passed through the chest cavity of an adult male. So if they are real, they've certainly been made larger from all the fingers wanting to touch or take a little piece of history. This is why the protective plastic eventually had to be placed over them.
@@badhossmaps I seem to remember a group of experts used luminal and discovered blood in the floor boards and basement shower area in Lizzie Bordens house. This was about 150 years after the event.
What a bunch of tourist bait. Better read the Bell autopsy report.
I cant get enough of Brushy Billy! 🤠
So do you believe that Billy the Kid was from Hamilton Texas and grew old and died in Hico Texas?!? 🤠👍
What became of the bullets?
Pat Garrett said he removed a bullet during his investigation days after the incident. There's no other mention of bullets in the wall from the historical record.
Billy the Kid didn't die ,look into Rustic Bill he was the kid.
How tall was Bell?
It’s common sense he. Escape his hole