Notoriety
Like many gunfighters of the "Old West", Billy the Kid enjoyed a reputation built partly on exaggerated accounts of his exploits. McCarty was credited with the killing of between 15 and 26 men, depending on varying sources. Wallis has speculated that the Dolan faction created the Kid's image to distract the public's attention from their activities and those of their influential supporters in Santa Fe, notably the regional political leader Thomas Benton Catron.
The notoriety that McCarty gained during the Lincoln County War effectively doomed his appeals for amnesty. A number of the Regulators faded away or secured amnesty, but McCarty could not accomplish either. His negotiations with governor Lew Wallace (a famed Civil War general and author of the novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ) for amnesty came to nothing. A string of negative newspaper editorials referred to him as "Billy the Kid". When a reporter reminded Wallace that the Kid was depending on the governor's intervention, the governor supposedly smiled and said, "Yes, but I can't see how a fellow like him can expect any clemency from me."
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Famous quotes containing the word notoriety:
“Our books are false by being fragmentary: their sentences are bon mots, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature,—being some curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature, and purposely framed to excite surprise, as jugglers do by concealing their means.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)