In praise of Montague Richard Leverson (1830-1925): Part 4
Did Leverson the lawyer represent Billy the Kid?
Esther Rantzen on 'Who Do You Think You Are?' 2008 said that:
“Having escaped the hands of justice, Montague Richard reinvented himself. First, he worked as a lawyer in the Wild West; some say that he represented Billy the Kid.”
This is untrue. In the USA Leverson had moved on to his second career and did not practice as a lawyer. In 1873 he moved to Colorado and in 1878, while a business associate of John Chisum, he got involved in attempts to restore law and order in New Mexico at the time of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Frederick W. Nolan, in “The Lincoln County War: A Documentary History”, University of Oklahoma Press, 1992, devotes an entire appendix to Leverson.
In 1879 Leverson moved from Colorado to California. Coincidentally to Leverson’s arrival in California, Henry George had recently completed the manuscript for “Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy”. Though George’s book was destined to sell millions of copies and spark the “Progressive Era”, he was struggling to find a publisher. The role of Leverson is mentioned in the biography of George by his son, Henry George Junior:
The other circumstance of importance was the conversion of a scholarly Englishman, Dr. Montague E. Leverson, who had personally known and studied under William Ellis and John Stuart Mill, and who had in 1876 published in New York a primer of political economy for grammar and high schools and the lower colleges [“Common sense; or First steps in Political Economy”]. He had come to California to arrange for the publication and introduction of the book on the Pacific Coast, but learning of “Progress and Poverty” through Professor Joseph Le Conte of the University of California, he declared, immediately on reading it, that he had met his master in the study and that not another copy of his primer should be issued until the work had been re-written. This manifestation of rare intellectual honesty was never forgotten by Mr. George.
By 1882 Leverson served in the California legislature.