An intriguing clue comes from Clark Hust, a cowboy who had worked as a boy for Pat Coghlan, an Irish immigrant rancher in Tularosa, New Mexico. Coghlan was born in Ireland in 1822 and moved to New York City when he was 26; he drove his first cattle to New Mexico in 1872.
Hust recalled in a 1954 interview that the childless Coghlans had a surrogate daughter, their niece Mary, from Ireland. She did not speak English, and thus she could communicate only with the Coghlans…and Billy the Kid. The Kid acted as a translator between the niece and the ranch hands, including Hust.
In examining all the extant territorial newspapers from this period, I came across a mention in a Mesilla newspaper that stated the Coghlans and their niece had been in town visiting. The homesick niece ended up back in Ireland.
Coghlan, who died in 1911, bequeathed in his will what was left of his ranch to his nephew and two nieces in Ireland and Scotland, both of whom had the first name of Mary, and one of them must have been the niece Hust recalled.
Chuck Usmar is the author of the forthcoming book, They Fought Billy the Kid: The Lives of Lawrence G. Murphy and James J. Dolan, which promises to rebalance the prevailing view of the Murphy-Dolan side in New Mexico’s Lincoln County War.
For more True West coverage on Billy the Kid, follow the links below:
“What if everything we know about Billy the Kid is wrong?” by Frederick Nolan
Is This a Photograph of Billy Playing Croquet? by Bob Boze Bell
How Did Henry Get His Alias? by Mark Lee Gardner
Seeking the Creation of the Kid’s Death Record by Dr. Robert Stahl
Billy Bonney’s Bad Bucks by Steve Sederwall
How Did the Kid Get the Gun? by Frederick Nolan
Drooperdoo on April 2nd, 2017 at 10:33 UTC »
According to a biographical sketch on Billy the Kid by Jorge Luis Borges, Billy's dad died when he was young and his mom passed on when he was 15. After which, he was looked after by an African-American lady (named Sarah Brown, I think.)
If the biographical sketch of him I read is accurate, it's very likely that his Irish immigrant parents spoke Gaelic at home. (The timing is right for this, since they would have come over around the whole potato famine thing.) Gaelic was a lot more common in Ireland in the 1850s than it is today (especially among the poor--as Billy's parents were.) See language map of Ireland here: http://i.imgur.com/jjwsZO4.jpg
And since Billy grew up in a densely-Irish section of New York, his Gaelic would have been reinforced by the kids he played with in the streets.
So if the story on this thread is true, it would imply that he retained his original language even after his parents died and he moved out west. Which is very probable, given the fact that his mom expired when he was 15.
(Billy is also known to have spoken Spanish, too, after having moved out west.)
_bangalore on April 2nd, 2017 at 09:49 UTC »
Maith an fear
ImTheRealMadHatter on April 2nd, 2017 at 09:40 UTC »
The article is vague. I was expecting a lot more about Billy.