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True Tales of the American Southwest: Pioneer Recollections of Frontier Aventures, by Howard Bryan, Clear Light Publishers, Santa Fe, N.M., 1998, $24.50 cloth, $14.95 paper.

In 1955, 100-year-old Vicente Otero told Howard Bryan: “I knew Billy the Kid and I saw him dead at Fort Sumner. I was there when he was killed….Billy was just a little fellow who didn’t look dangerous at all. They say he killed quite a few people, but he always was very nice to me.” Otero’s account, according to the author of this pleasing collection of recollections, helps to put to rest the fanciful stories that said the Kid wasn’t really killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett in Fort Sumner, New Mexico Territory, in July 1881. In 1951, pioneer Marietta Wetherill told Bryan how Geronimo had given a hind quarter of beef to her and how she in turn had given the soldiers following the Apache leader a “bum steer.” Because she could speak Apache, Geronimo had thought she was an Apache girl. A veteran Albuquerque journalist and a popular historian, Bryan had the good fortune in the 1950s to interview Otero, Wetherill and many other pioneering old-timers who lived in the Southwest in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Those interviews, drawn from Bryan’s personal archives, provide a wealth of true stories and anecdotes. Where else can you hear from the likes of George Crocker, who walked past the St. James Hotel in rowdy Cimarron, New Mexico Territory, on the night in 1876 that gunman Clay Allison shot down Pancho Griego in the hotel’s notorious bar? “I never drank whiskey myself,” Crocker told Bryan in 1950. “I found that I could yell just as loud as the rest of them on lemonade.”