The reported death of legendary outlaw William H. Bonney, known to history as Billy the Kid, sent shockwaves through the American Southwest, yet the initial reaction was one of disbelief and confusion. Nearly 35 years after the fatal gunshot echoed through the dark bedroom of Pete Maxwell’s Fort Sumner home, the Kid’s story was still being pieced together by a curious public that had largely forgotten him, a strange fate for a man whose myth now rivals that of any historical figure.
The details surrounding his death, and the subsequent resurrection of his fame, are rooted not in the gunfight itself but in a series of coincidences that began with a beer, a barroom relic, and the very human failings of the lawman who killed him, Pat Garrett.
The end came, as it often does for outlaws, in the dead of night. On July 14, 1881, Pat Garrett, having recently been sworn in as sheriff, trailed the Kid to a remote ranch near Fort Sumner. Garrett knew Billy was staying at the home of his old friend, Pete Maxwell, a Cistercian compound of adobe buildings that served as the old fort’s heart.
As the story goes, the Kid, reportedly armed with a pistol and a butcher knife, stepped barefoot into the dark bedroom where Garrett was already speaking with Maxwell. Startled by the shadowy figure, Billy reportedly called out, “¿Quién es?” followed by “Who is it?”
within a matter of seconds, as Garrett shouted a warning. The subsequent exchange remains the stuff of legend: Garrett fired a single shot at the shadowy figure, striking the Kid in the heart, killing him on the spot, a feat that would have been impossible for most in the pitch black. The report, hastily assembled by a coroner’s jury, justifiably declared the killing justifiable homicide, and the man who killed the problematic kid was a hero.
Yet the story, as it was told to the world, was cloaked in a myth that has survived generations, but the truth of that night is still murky. The exact circumstances of the shooting have been debated for over a century. Some claim Billy wasn’t armed, that he was caught off guard and unarmed on that fateful night.
Others have spun theories that the Kid got a fair draw and was slain in a straight-up duel through the darkness, a story romanticized by early biographers. For many, the uncertainty is what fuels the mystique, but the death had a more profound consequence: it created a legend out of the corpse of an outlaw who, until that moment, was not a household name. The killing potentially cemented the Kid’s status, a fate that was determined less by his deeds and more by the actions of the very man who shot him.
The legacy of Billy the Kid, however, wasn’t born in the immediate aftermath of his death. In fact, the Kid’s notoriety was largely a regional 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇, a footnote in the history of New Mexico’s interminable fights. The general public back East, consumed with its own industrial woes and dark soot, paid little attention to the exploits of a young punk who rustled cattle and killed a few men during the brutal Lincoln County War.
The Kid’s legend was mostly silent for over three decades after Pat Garrett’s bullet ended his life, a fact that is all the stranger given that he was, by any measure, in every sense of the word, a product that the dime novels of the era should have eaten up. Yet, the reading public had moved on. It wasn’t until a chance encounter, a whimsical fateful event, that the spark of history was ignited and the Kid as we know him was truly born, which is where the true twist of his historical relevance begins.
That twist occurred in 1915, when a crime reporter from Chicago wandered unsuspectingly into a dive bar in El Paso, Texas, which would prove to be the moment where history changed forever. The reporter, a man named Walter Noble Burns, was in the region covering the exploits of the Mexican revolutionary, Pancho Villa, who was then conducting his raids across the American border. Needing a drink, Burns wandered into the Coney Island Saloon, where his eyes were caught by an old relic, a weathered revolver hanging prominently behind the bar.
Curious, Burns, the consummate journalist, asked the bartender about the weapon’s provenance. The bartender, with a sense of total bored nonchalance, informed him it was the famous pistol used to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 Billy the Kid. Burns, the crime writer, was struck.
“Billy the who?” he asked, drawing a complete blank.
The bartender, probably weary of trying to explain, simplified it: “The Kid used to be a famous outlaw around here. A notorious killer.” Burns finished his beer, paid his tab, and filed the trivial information in the far recesses of his mind, not thinking much about the wild claim, and went on about his business covering the war.
But the name gnawed at him. That reporter’s sense of an overlooked story never fully shut down, and that chance encounter at the bar turned out to be the seed of a legend. Years later, after the war had ended and his initial assignments in the Southwest had proved to be fruitful, Burns found himself back in the desert, visiting family, when the memory of that weathered revolver and the name, Billy the Kid, resurfaced with the force of an afterburner.
This time, he was prepared. He decided to look into this Billy the Kid character, and he launched a full-scale private investigation. He interviewed the souls who remained, the living connections to that era.
In particular, he interviewed Paulita Maxwell, a person of interest, the Kid’s “Old Flame,” who was still residing at Fort Sumner where the outlaw had met his maker. Burns got the story, not always the accurate one, but the story — the romantic, chaotic, deeply mythical, fast-draw tales of the Kid’s life. He collected the folklore of the region, and he poured them into his book, a sprawling fictionalized slice of history.
Published in 1926, Burns’ book, The Saga of Billy the Kid, was a phenomenon waiting to happen. It was a brilliant, sweeping, and incredibly well-written account that portrayed the Kid not just as a callous murderer but as a tragic hero, a wronged Robin Hood figure fighting against a corrupt and powerful cattle baron in the Lincoln County War, a man who fought for the underdog. The book wasn’t a dry historical account; it was a mythic story, and he wrote the way that sparked public imagination.
The book was a massive bestseller and was an immediate hit, breathing new life into an otherwise forgotten outlaw. The Saga of Billy the Kid was even selected by the prestigious Book of the Month Club, which hammered the legend into the hands of a national audience and was a foundational work of americana.
From there, Hollywood took over. Three years after the book’s publication, in 1930, the first major movie was released, a film titled Billy the Kid, starring heartthrob Johnny Mack Brown. The silver screen adapted the Kid’s story into a visual legend.
All of a sudden, the little bandit from New Mexico who had no recognizability in history became a household name, a titan of the American Western. Since then, the Kid has been reinvented in countless films, from low-budget B-pictures to the stylish Young Guns of the 1980s, which featured Emilio Estevez in the role. Authors, historians, and screenwriters have all had their shot at the Kid, crafting the narrative of the myth and this phenomenon, we can trace all of it back to Walter Noble Burns stopping in for a cold brew, and, of course, a bartender who kept an old gun on display.
But this entire narrative is only half the mystery. On the surface, the Bartender’s story seems a peculiar one, but the question that looms in the shadows is not why the Kid was killed, but how that particular gun that garroded the Kid ended up in that particular bar in the first place? The answer to that is a tale of vice, debt, and a lawman’s fall, and it tells another story about the nature of the Old West.
The lawman who fired, Pat Garrett, wasn’t a good man as the records show, he was a man with a torturous weakness for alcohol. That enthusiasm, which one might call a “drinking problem,” was notorious, and it needed funding, which he was perpetually short on. He often and famously borrowed money from a man named Tom Powers, the proprietor of that same Coney Island Saloon, and the creditor who would hold the gun as collateral.
Powers, who held a stake in the legend, didn’t just buy the weapon, he secured it in the most literal sense of the word. When Garrett, who was slightly destitute, borrowed money, he gave over the deadliest firearm he owned as a means of security, or collateral, to guarantee the loan would be repaid. That weapon, in a sense, went on to represent the corpse of a legend.
It was a formidable guarantee for Powers as long as Garrett never squared up to the debt. Fate, having a dark sense of humor, allowed this arrangement to fester. Garrett was assassinated not long after, shot in the back in 1908, the result of a personal dispute that had surged after a saloon session.
With the sheriff dead, no one came to reclaim the pistol, and old Tom Powers was able to tuck the artifact away as his own permanent possession, hanging it behind the bar. The very instrument of the Kid’s doom, then, was just a piece of contract law in El Paso.
That perfectly fateful combination, Powers’s debt, Garrett’s bad financial management, and the sheer luck of a journalist looking for a drink, directly links to the reason why we talk about Billy the Kid today. The boot-leg legend is that had not that perfect storm, of Garrett’s revocation, the daily events, Pancho Villa’s incursion into the United States, and the coincidental journalistic curiosity, the Kid would have, as the record suggests, faded into a footnote, not a household name. He would have been a historical quick note, a low-level grammarian written about in a few academic papers.
This chain of circumstances is why Kid remains a celebrated outlaw while many of his peers from the Old West, like Charley Bowdre, remain completely lost to the foam. He was such a name.
Walter Noble Burns, for his part, certainly understood the power of this myth making. With his book now a bestseller and the Kid’s story a household name, he realized the new formula for historical success isn’t about facts, but about the 𝒹𝓇𝒶𝓂𝒶. Four years later, Burns turned his attention from the Kid to another West relic, a man by the name of Wyatt Earp.
The gunfight at the O. K. Corral, like Billy’s story, had been in its own relative obscurity since 1881, possessing only a local significance.
Burns took the story, gave it due treatment, and did became the first, major source that made Earp into the immortal that he is today, a legend that persists. This is why you don’t call him the “Mythmaker” for nothing. He had a gift of finding golden narrative out of the dusty furrows of the Old West, and a use of best-selling legends.
The tale of the hapless relic is done. The Gun itself, however, the one piece of physical evidence that had its own journey, has one last chapter in it. After Tom Powers died, having been filled with cancer and further destroyed by guilt, he did not die with his famous “haunted” gun.
He actually took his own life, but notably, not with the pistol of the famous Kid. It was a curious choice. Powers’s suicide, however, was not the end of it.
His widow, along with Pat Garrett’s widow, had engaged in a legal month over its ownership. Powers’s family, had the loan never paid the Pistol was rightfully theirs, and Pat Garrett’s family argued that the gun was a piece of their family’s heirloom, technically on loan. In the end, after the law suit, “Apolinaria” Garrett ultimately did sue and got the gun back, a victory, though this was stained with tragedy.
Two weeks after gaining the weapon, and after decades of being part of the in a debt, Apolinaria Garrett died.
And here, a story is with a tint of the morbid. After that, possession of the famous gun was tied to massive, strange death or a receipt of bad luck. It was held in the Garrett family for several decades, but by the 1980s, the relic was sold off to a succession of private collectors, real for the tourism circuit.
The gun was passed around, eventually disappeared out of temporal obscurity and then had a high-profile, high-dollar sale at auction in August of 2021, fetching a massive $6 million dollars. That number, that monetary value, reflects exactly how much how Bill has evolved from a footnote to a central piece of the American culture is. The old relic lives on in a vault as a far cry from the rusting, hanging behind the bar in a dive, and if it still shoots, well, that’s not something we can know from a simple speculation.
As the history of the legend grew, the actual story of the Kid itself was distorted, egregiously over a hundred years of yards. For instance, many people believed the Kid was a veritable giant, the classic leader of a criminal army. But his legend is a fabrication and an amplification.
The Kid’s origin was that of a notable juvenile criminal. He engaged in petty theft, but his turn to a serial killer was bred by the conflict where he was a Regulator in the Lincoln County War, which was a horrible anti-cattle vendetta. That turned a young thief in his late teens into a avenger of a friend’s murder.
Billy was a famous killer, they claimed he took out 21 men, but historical record supports a far lower body count, maybe four to six men he definitely killed, perhaps a few more, but the truth on the bounty was a tall tale. His notoriety was not a given.
During this final alcove of his life, after his escape from Lincoln, the Kid’s real life story was more pathetic than a mythic. The final chapter occurred after he murdered two deputies, Bob Olinger and James Bell during his gutsy escape. He was then on the run, hounded, and by the summer of 1881, the Kid was hiding out at Fort Sumner, living rent-free in the province, staying with girlfriends and making a nuisance of himself with drinking.
Each woman in the Mexican households in the area were worried, because his presence meant a visit from Pat Garrett was inevitable. In a sense, Billy would have done well to leave, following his initial intention to hit the trail for old Mexico, but he refused. Others stayed in the comfort of his family and friends.
The state of mind that and bravery can only linger for a certain time through the old folks. The man was careless and in the same way he was the first Gustav. He walked himself into the trap at Maxwell’s that fateful night.
The mystery he leaves behind has a great, historical catharsis that predicted that he’ll be an old man, in New Mexico’s legal records, though there was one key detail of his death. The newspaper reporters in Las Vegas New Mexico in 1881.
The gangly, child features of the Kid, and the timing of his death, ensure he never had to live with the consequences of Pat Garrett being a sheriff. Old Age doesn’t catch him, but he left us with the idea that.
In the 140 years since, people have argued about the events with that, with every book, his story, this becomes a love story and a tragedy, a shootout in snow. The myths have evolved to make him as a local hero. The story is immortalized because it’s a great story that happened to be true.
The final chapter of the possession and of the gun, not just because of that one at the Bar, but due to the fact that a mess of fate was the creator, like the respect for Garrett’s memory, the son who spearheaded that they had the story in the hole.
This was the truly strange odyssey. The gun was stolen, and was that the revolver in the bar, the actual, honest-to-God murder weapon? We don’t have a 100% guarantee.
Although the path to authenticity is shaky. But the story is the one that matters. It is the spoken thing.
Later, actually, a 2005 sale of the gun when it came with its own “Crazy Brick of cursed” stories, but had a certificate of authenticity took $2 million. Then, in 2011, it went to the auction for over six million, a testament to market value not just of the iron, but the myth, the legacy.
The same is more of an evidence of the modern fame that it’s a high priced collectible. The wild west thriller of Machine. But the ambiguity doesn’t matter.
The myth now is more impactful than the truth. Walter Noble Burns found a character who had an unknown presence, that could rise after death. It gives a new meaning to the word “outlaw”.
It is all because of an old gun in a bar and a reporter that needed a beer.
As they say in the legacy community, “Here’s to Billy, who was perhaps the master of his own narrative”, and for Garrett’s absolutely-miscalculated very curse. If he had not borrowed from a barman, Barrett may have likely never have heard of him beyond a name. The Kid went from oblivion to a secular idol.
The story of his death, of the missed and mythmakers, the eerie grip that he drew, is a colder piece of American history. It is that the image of the man who doesn’t age, and whose cap that writes the story for a final time. And the one who, by accident, from, a curious journalist’s.
As I write this, many, have been the new heart. Weird as it.
No less a scholar, no matter what, we wouldn’t be describing it that’s not for Mr. Burns’s beer. In that sense, the Kid is a case of an historical revivals.
It’s all part of its story, making a name in every detail.
