For over a century, comic books, dime novels, and movies depicted Billy the Kid as left-handed, all because the one surviving photograph of him was a ferrotype, a process that produces a mirror image. That reversed picture is the perfect metaphor for a man whose real story has been paved over by legend. In this episode we strip away the Hollywood veneer and follow the documented life of Henry McCarty, also known as William H. Bonney.

We start with his bleak beginnings as the child of Irish immigrants who died of tuberculosis in Silver City, leaving him orphaned at 14 with no safety net. We follow his first arrest for stealing food, his escape up a jailhouse chimney, the saloon shooting of the bully Windy Cahill, and his arrival in Lincoln County, where the English rancher John Tunstall became a father figure. Then we unpack the Lincoln Coun ...