Question: Why did Billy the Kid look weird?
Let’s see:
- He led a hard life – Henry McCarty’s (his real name) father died when he was10 and the family went deeper into poverty. That meant food was limited, medical care was scarce, and grooming supplies weren’t in abundance. Things that can be taken care of today like missing teeth, bad skin, facial blemishes, etc. were ignored because they were either too expensive to remediate or because they didn’t effect the person’s overall quality of life.
- He led a hard life #2 – There were several occasions when McCarty was hiding out from the law or on the run where he nearly starved to death because he couldn’t risk revealing himself. That meant sleeping outside, eating things that likely caused him bouts of diarrhea, and spending as much time walking his horse as he did riding it. That’s a brutal life today and it would have been even more so nearly 150 years ago. his appearance reflected his difficulties.
- He led a hard life #3 – What a lot of people forget is that the majority of people who lived at that time had one or more chronic illnesses. The treatments for those (like TB, intestinal parasites, rheumatic fever, etc.) were still 50–75 years in the future. McCarty almost certainly suffered from one of those illnesses and that affected his appearance.
- He was a cowhand and a drifter – When he did work, it was rough jobs which led to injuries and illnesses. If you look at real ranch hands of today ( who have access to modern medical care) you see where years of hard labor have left then bent and stooped and none of them look the television and film actors who portray Western characters today. If McCarty had lived in a town or city and had what might have been an upper class lifestyle, he might have been more presentable. He didn’t.
- He wasn’t Emilio Estevez – By this, I mean that most people’s impression of Billy The Kid was from the various popular films about the character, the most prominent of which was the Young Guns franchise of the late 1980s and early 1990s. When people see that Henry McCarty was so unattractive that he couldn’t have been a movie extra, much a less star, they are…disappointed. McCarty looked like the average poor working person in that era and that meant that he was less attractive than even the “normal” people of today.
Soooo…
This was Henry McCarty in the only known legitimate photo of him:
This is NOT Billy The Kid: