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This slightly paraphrased interview is a “distilled” version of that found interspersed in the piece published in the Las Vegas Gazette on January 20th, 1881. I’ve paraphrased some of the journalist’s questions to make it more palatable to the question-and-answer interview format:

Las Vegas Gazette: I must remark on the tidiness of your cell.

William H. Bonney: Oh, this is a palace as compared with that place they put fellows in in Vegas. We’ve been scrubbing up today.

Gazette: Have you had a chance to read the piece on you that was published in the Police News?

Bonney: I’m getting a terrible reputation. I got hold of the paper first when it was brought in. But I was ashamed to let the other fellows see it. Wasn’t it savage, though?

Gazette: It was, indeed.

Bonney: I never had any beautiful Mexican girl with me. It was as much as I could do to take care of myself. But – she was game, though. See the way she stood off all the crowd after me?

B.S. Jack (fellow prisoner): I say, boss, ain’t you got any influence with the U.S. government to get it to give me a hat?

Gazette: Have you any hat?

Jack: No, nor I ain’t had any for sixteen months, ever since I was put in here.

Billy Wilson (or Tom Pickett): He’s had hard luck, that fellow has. He’s been in here for sixteen months waiting trial for something that his Rudabaugh did.

Dave Rudabaugh: Yes, they’ve kept him in for what I did. None of them men they’ve got in jail had anything to do with robbing the stage or the train. I’m in for it now, and might as well tell the truth. The Stokes boys are perfectly innocent, and so are all the men who were mistrusted of being mixed up in both affairs. I don’t propose to tell who did do either, but they haven’t got any of the men but me.

Jack: I was broke and down with rheumatism. I couldn’t have walked as far as where the coach was robbed and back to my room again. That’s the way with some of us poor devils who haven’t any friend. They just pounce down on us because they think no one would believe a word we would say.

Rudabaugh: They’ve got another innocent man in jail in Vegas: Webb. He ain’t any more guilty of killing Kelliher than you are. I saw the whole affair and if my word is worth anything, I say that man didn’t do the killing.

Gazette: Well, Billy, what do you think of your notoriety?

Bonney: I don’t see any money in it. Everything that has been done in that country is laid to me.

Gazette: If you get out, you could get up a show like Buffalo Bill; you have had advertising enough.

Bonney: If…