https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blandina_Segale
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe has opened a process to canonize Segale.
Letters that she would write to her sister back east were found and published in to a book titled "At The End Of The Santa Fe Trail" in 1948 by the Bruce Publishing Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Click on this image to make it larger
In the book it states up front on pages 11 and 12 "Nor did she quail when she asked Billy the Kid and his gang not to scalp Trinidad's four physicians, although Billy had come to Trinidad for the express purpose of killing these four men."
Note that there is no credible proof, nor other writings, indicating that Billy The Kid was ever in Trinidad nor any place north of Las Vegas, New Mexico nor any of his "gang" raiding on the Santa Fe Trail as this book indicates.
There are several references to Billy the Kid in her book. But we must remember that these references were in letters sent to her sister and really never meant to be published.
From the publication The American Catholic come this bit of information:
"One of the many outlaws who terrorized the area was Arthur Pond aka William LeRoy, sometimes known as Billy the Kid, and who was celebrated as the King of American Highwaymen by the “penny dreadful” novelist Richard K. Fox who released a heavily fictionalized biography of him immediately after his death, conflating his exploits with those of the more famous Billy the Kid. (Sister Blandina in later life confused LeRoy with William H. Bonney, the more famous Billy the Kid, who operated in New Mexico a few years later. Sister Blandina had known the outlaw only by his nickname and didn’t realize that there were two Billy the Kids, who died within months of each other in 1881.)"
Note: There is so much of this fantasy that passes for history in the United States it is hard for the average person not to swallow this stuff..... hook, line, and sinker.
2 comments:
Just reading your last two posts. Cowboy history. Yee ha! Good posts though.
I guess you could say we all have an interest in the past, maybe are fascinated by it, whether what we think about it is filled with cowboy myths or with more historically grounded sometimes less glamorous accounts of the kind you tell in your blog.
The Catholic Church, too, is interested in the past. It builds up their brand, for one thing. I think we share that aspect on a personal level.
And maybe the church allows and promote the beatification of gunslinging Italian nuns and bobcat wrestling pioneeresses, accurate or not, in order to connect more people to the church, draw them in, make it so they have a stake in it. There are reasons history is taught in the schools and made into movies that are similar, I think, but they both rely to some degree on the fact that we're interested in it.
As related to history I would quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan as he was fond of saying “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”
Post a Comment