Billy The Kid – Dead Man Riding!

Everyone thought that Billy the Kid had skedaddled to Mexico. Of course, this was after he killed his two guards and escaped hanging in Lincoln, New Mexico in April of 1881. in Lincoln, New Mexico in April of 1881. And, you know, everybody said, well, he obviously went to Mexico to escape for good. And that probably was the best option he could have taken.
But instead, he rode north. And first to Capitan Gap, where he stopped at a friend’s place to take off the shackle that was still on his foot. And then he made his way to the Fort Sumner area. Now, if you know the story of Billy the Kid at all, you know that Billy the Kid was captured near there, and he had been hanging out there in 1880 when his former friend, Pat Garrett, tracked him down at Stinking Springs, also styled as Stinking Spring, singular, and took him to jail.
He spent quite a bit of time in Santa Fe, about three months, and then he was taken to Mesilla, where he was tried and convicted for the killing of William Brady during the Lincoln County War. He said, and I think this is a good quote, he said, I think it hard that I’m the only one to suffer the consequence from this when hundreds of people were killed.
I’m paraphrasing. And I’m the only one to take the full force of justice, which he was right about. And so a lot of people were rooting for him when he escaped hanging. In fact, it was written up in the New York Times. This was a big story that someone would escape hanging by killing their two jailers and escape.
And of course, his former friend, Pat Garrett, which we need to back up a little bit. One of the things that I kind of admire about Pat Garrett is that, yes, they were friends. Paulita Maxwell told Walter Noble Burns in the 1920s when she was still alive and was interviewed for his book, The Saga of Billy the Kid, she said that it was well known in Fort Sumner that Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid were friends. In fact, he was called Tall Juan and Little Casino.
Billy the Kid was Little Casino, so they had a nickname. But where you got to give some street cred to Pat Garrett is that he, when he was chosen by John Chisholm, the cattle king of New Mexico, to, quote, clean out that squad east of Sumner who were decimating his herds, he picked Pat Garrett probably partially because he knew all the bad guys from that area and had played cards with them, etc. But what I admire about Pat Garrett is that he met with them.
He set up a meeting and he met with Charlie Beaudry and the kid and several others and just said, hey, we’ve been friends. I just want to tell you, if I’m coming for you, I’m going to come a shooting. And I just want to be straight up about that. And that was, I believe, an honorable thing to do.
And of course, after he killed his two guards escaped and went back to Fort Sumner, at first his ploy was to hide out in sheep camps, both east and west of Old Fort Sumner. And if you know that Cap Rock area, it’s not Colorado country. It’s escarpments and kind of low country. But he was hiding out at sheep camps where there was a lone sheep herder, probably Hispanic, and he would stay out in the hills all day, come into the camp, which was probably just a wagon, and eat and then stay there.
Well, this worked effectively for about two months. But then, like most young American red-blooded males who were just graduated from their second decade of living on this planet, from their second decade of living on this planet, he wanted to meet the opposite sex and, you know, have some quality time.
And so he started venturing into Fort Sumner, and he had a girlfriend there, and she was 15, some say 17, and she was the sister of Pete Maxwell, who was basically the el jefe of the old fort. And we need to set that stage because Old Fort Sumner was, in fact, a fort. It was a tried experiment where the U.S.
government decided to round up all of the Native Americans in the entire area and put them on a place and teach them how to farm. And this is when we get the Kit Carson Trail of Tears. He goes to Navajo country, which is the four corners of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. And he rounds up all the Navajos and herds them to this kind of crappy place out in the middle of nowhere to teach them the farm.
And, of course, this was a horrible experience. And the various tribes were fighting each other, and it didn’t work. And so they gave up, and they let it go. And so now you have this abandoned fort out in the middle of nowhere. And so now you have this abandoned fort out in the middle of nowhere. And then you get Lucian Maxwell, who basically his son ends up running the place and buys it for a hefty price to the property and all the fort buildings.
So you have this parade ground and these buildings that are starting to sag a little bit. And Pete Maxwell takes up the officer’s headquarters, a big long building on the parade ground.And it’s here that Billy the Kid goes to meet his querida. And querida is Spanish for beloved.
And it’s a little bit interesting because, as I mentioned, when Walter Noble Burns interviewed Paulita Maxwell, she denied that she was his girlfriend. But then, you know, you have to kind of wonder when women get older, they kind of clean up their past a little bit. Not that we don’t do that as men, but women have that tendency of, oh, I never attended Woodstock. No, I wasn’t there.
I didn’t do acid. No, that picture of me on the top of it. No, that’s not me. The topless? No, not me. Anyway, I digress. But anyway, so she said they’re living in the officer’s quarters. Okay. Now, let’s back up to what Pat Garrett’s doing. He’s been chagrined. He was in White Oaks getting lumber for the gallows to hang Billy the Kid.
When he was away, he gave instructions to his guards, J.W. Bell, no relation, Bob Olinger, you know, do not, do not let this guy get away. And, of course, not only did he get away, he killed them both and got away. And so Garrett’s chagrined. And so he spends some time, he’s headquartered in Roswell, New Mexico, which is about 60 miles east of Lincoln, New Mexico.
And he’s querying people, wondering where the kid is. You know, of course, like I said, everybody thought he went to Mexico. But then John W. Poe, who was also a lawman in the area, he got a letter from Wayne Brazel. Now, Wayne Brazel was the guy who owned Stinking Springs. He was the person that was, he had a ranch near Stinking Springs.
And when the kid was captured, he was afraid the kid would blame him, Wayne Brazel, for being able to ID that that’s how the kid got captured. And of course, he was hearing the rumors, as all the locals were, that the kid was in the area. And so he was a little nervous about that. And so he wrote this letter to John Poe, who then in turn takes a letter to Garrett.
And they’re like, I’m wondering if we should go up there. Well, it’s about a hundred mile run up the Pecos from Roswell. And so on, actually, Garrett gets word through a vaquero who came through Fort Sumner and was quoting Pete Maxwell. And for a long time, we thought it was Beaver Smith.
Beaver Smith had the saloon in Old Fort Sumner. And in fact, we think that that’s where the only known photo of Billy the Kid was taken. It’s a little unclear. In fact, that picture has created such a bizarre legacy for the kid because what happened is that the photo was taken, the kid standing there with his Winchester and his pistol.
And, of course, for a long time, it’s a tin type and it’s reversed. And so people thought the kid was left-handed. That’s where you get Paul Newman and the left-handed gun. The kid was left-handed. That’s where you get Paul Newman and the left-handed gun. And there was also this idea that left-handed people were juvenile delinquents.
This is the 1950s. And so you got the left-handed gun and the thing. And then probably a woman looks at the photo and goes, you know what? The buttons are on the wrong side of that vest. And then they went, oh oh yeah, it’s reversed. So scratch all of the previous ideas about the kid being left-handed.
Now he’s right-handed. But the other thing that happened with the taking of that photograph and it being the only known photograph of the kid. And I know what you’re going to say, oh, what about the croquet photo? What about them? There’s probably a dozen. I get images every month, okay? Here it is.
It’s a new picture of Billy the Kid. Why? Well, because the only known photo sold at auction in Denver back in 2010 for $1.2 million. And, of course, you know, everybody, oh i i’ve got a picture of billy the kid but here’s what happened is that that only known photo uh immediately artists were trying to replicate it uh and clean it up in quotes and make it uh respectable to put in publications and that includes the police gazette and and that includes Garrett’s own book on the authentic life. But what happened is, if you look at the old
illustrations of people trying to capture that, and I’m going to show you them now, is that they make him look like a moron. I blame it on the artist. I’m a cartoonist, so I can take some of that blame myself. I understand how it happened. They were trying to improve it, and they, of course, made him look like a moron.
uh billy the moron and so that didn’t help anything in the public perception because uh he he was this awful killer and he looked stupid okay and of course nothing could be further from the truth which sets up this tension and dynamic on the vision of who billy the Kid was because on the one hand, he’s an all-American boy.
And on the other hand, he’s a cold-blooded killer. And so those two don’t go together. In fact, I compare it to a car battery. You have a positive charge and a minus charge, a negative charge, and they don’t do anythingby themselves, but you put them together and you get sparks and it uh a negative charge and they don’t do anything by themselves but you put them together and you get sparks and it runs a car and i believe that that’s a good part of why billy the kid is so iconic is because he’s these two things that don’t go together they’re non-sequiturs
it doesn’t go uh so now you have this um who had his photo taken at Beaver Smith’s. And this is all conjecture because we don’t really know who the photographer is. Now, let’s go here. If you are poo-pooing everything I’ve said up to now, because you’re a brushy, real guy and you don’t think that Pat Garrett killed him on July 14th, 1881, I see this online all the time.
It’s like, oh, here’s the photo. I didn’t take a photo of him. He’s dead. Well, that’s because Fort Sumner wasn’t a town. They didn’t have a church. They didn’t have a courthouse. So Pat Garrett and his two deputies ended up at Pete Maxwell’s house around midnight on July 14th, 1881.
Garrett said that he left his two deputies in the gate outside the porch where Pete Maxwell’s bedroom was, and he went inside to talk to Pete. Now, the two lawmen, Poe and McKinney, they claimed that shortly after, they saw a lone person walking across the playground, and then on the inside of the picket fence, and he was buttoning his trousers.
When he got close, he sensed them in the gate. He jumped up on the porch, pulled a pistol and a knife and said, can us. And McKinney stood up and tried to calm him down, said, hey, you know, fine. And the kid quickly backed into Pete Maxwell’s bedroom and then said, can I speak? Who are those men? Who is it? Who is out there? And then he sensed that there was somebody in the room.
Garrett claims that he was sitting on his pistol on the bed, you know, talking to Pete and that the kid came close. He had a pistol right in front of his face. And then he sensed that somebody was there and he backed up and he said one more time, can I speak? Garrett pulled out his pistol and shot twice. First one hit the kid in the heart. And the kid was with his many enemies, as as Garrett put it in his version of events.
Now, what’s a little hard to believe about that for me is that he was also in his stocking feet walking across the parade ground. Now, if you’ve ever been walked in the Southwest, in New Mexico or Arizona, and your stocking feet in the dark at midnight, there is something there called bullheads, we call them in our section of the country.
And these are stickers and they are not cute. And I have a hard time believing that the kid was walking across the playground. Here’s why. I believe that the kid was in the house and they came across. He was probably in Polita’s bedroom, who is which was across from Pete’s bedroom. And that he came he saw somebody outside by the gate.
He came across the bedroom and said, Canis Pete. And this is backed up by McKinney later had a mining partner, and he confessed to that person. Now, this is the second person. You can dismiss it if you want, but I think it has a ring of truth. He said that Garrett found out when the kid was going to visit his girl and he hid behind the couch and shot him down like a dog.
Now, this is ironic because the kid said during his capture in Santa Fe that I do not mind dying like a man, but I do not want to be shot down like a dog. In my opinion, he probably was shot down like a dog. And also, Garrett wanted to protect Pete Maxwell and Polita, and he needed to get the kid out of the house because it was a scandal. He was killed in their house, you can imagine.
And yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ll change the story so he’s outside of the house and coming from some somewhere else with his pants but in his pants uh but regardless of either version the kid is now dead and um the local hispanic women first we got to tell you about um um we got to tell you about the fact that uh he he attacked by the Navajo woman who was the maid in the house, and she called him a pisspot son of a bitch, and we’re going to have to beep this, but I love that because she hated him, and that was pretty much the sentiment of the people in the village.
Now, there’s about 190 people living there. They’re mostly Hispanics. And Pat Garrett and his men were very nervous that they were going to be attacked, that there was going to be a counterattack. But there wasn’t. They did come and they said, may we remove the body? And they did. And Jesus Silva and several others carried his slender body across the playground to the old carpenter shop area there and put him on a bench.
And they had to plug the wound. It ironically did not bleed out until two hours after he was shot in the heart. And they put a rag in it. And then they got a shirt from Pete Maxwell. It was too big.And then they had a wake there that night, and they put candles up, and the men and women of Old Fort Sumner guarded his body until the next day, and he was buried later in the day.
Some say that the body was taken to a Beaver Smith saloon and was put on display in the saloon so people could come and pay their last respects. He was taken to the cemetery and they allegedly, they just took one of these stays off of the picket fence, the one he walked by, buttoning his pants. And they wrote Billy the Kid, no other real name, not the dates, anything.
And they put that up and that was the end of the story. So now fast forward to the near present and my good friend, Buckeye Blake, the artist, he came up with the idea about 20 years ago, actually, to have a fitting wake for Billy the Kid.
And he wanted to do a life-size sculpture of the kid in repose on the bench and put that over the grave. Well, he went to the powers that be in Fort Sumner, and that would be the town council. And this was back in the early 2000s when there was all this fever to dig up Billy the Kid. And Fort Sumner was nervous about it. It was a million-dollar attraction as they looked at it.
And they were afraid. Someone told them, well, what if we dig him up and he’s not there? Then you’ve lost all your money. So they were very not in the mood to have somebody messing with the Billy the Kid grave. And keep in mind, this is a gravestone that had been stolen twice, not once, twice, and had to be replaced.
In fact, they ended up having to put bars around the grave. Okay, so this is a contentious gravestone in American history. And so Buckeye meets this firestorm of negativity and saying, we want nothing to do with this. negativity and saying we want nothing to do with this he goes home to texas and destroys the um uh clay sculpture and forgets about it well fast forward and about two years ago um someone in fort sumner contacted him and and said we’re interested in what you had to offer and so marianne cortes who was the head of the chamber, she championed the project
and she brought in several other people to help on this. And in fact, I was contacted to help with the layout in the museum on to show how Billy the Kid actually died. So the good news is that Billy the Kid’s sculpture, The Last wake of Billy the Kid, is going to be permanently installed at the museum in the spring of 2026.
And so whether you believe in the story I just told you or you are a brushy bill advocate and don’t think that all of this is hooey, I think two quotes kind of sum up where we are in all of this. The first one is by the late great historian Leon Metz, and he said something that I just love, and that is, what people choose to believe is a fact in itself, end of quote.
Now, Joseph Campbell, in his famous book on the hero with a thousand faces, he put it a little differently. He said, wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. End of quote. Now, between those two quotes, you have, I believe, the actual truth, and it’s your job to choose which one it is.
I’m Bob Lois Bell, and this has been a wonderful story on Billy the Kid.