"A Well-Mannered Bandit and a Killer": Little Berta Ballard Remembers Billy the Kid

Abstract: The New Deal tried to end the Depression by spending government money to employ the jobless. One of its most ambitious efforts, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), put 8.5 million people to work between 1935 and 1943, mostly on projects that required manual labor, but also on projects for artists, writers, actors, and musicians. At its peak, the Federal Writers Project employed about 6,500 men and women, some of whom later became famous. In the late 1930s the project's writers began a series of "life histories," recording the experiences of diverse Americans from Florida to Alaska. Sometimes they recorded people's words verbatim; other times they rewrote them into narratives. In this example, Berta Ballard Manning recalled meeting the famous outlaw "Billy the Kid" as a child in New Mexico. He was unassuming and gentle, with good manners, but she also remembered him as a bandit and killer who kept their county in turmoil

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