What happened to Billy the Kid’s guns? After all, if Billy the Kid was the most famous outlaw of all time, there ought to be a record of what happened to his firearms. And if there isn’t, well, maybe Pat Garrett didn’t really kill him.
Believe it or not, we actually do have records.
On the night of July 14, 1881, Billy stepped into Pete Maxwell’s darkened bedroom at Fort Sumner with a butcher knife in one hand and a pistol in the other, and seconds later Sheriff Pat Garrett put a bullet in his chest.
And we’re not going on Garrett’s word alone. Deputy John Poe said that when they finally got a candle and looked in, Billy was stretched out on his back “with a six-shooter lying at his right hand and a butcher knife at his left.” Pete Maxwell told the coroner’s jury that Billy came in “with a gun in his hand.” Celsa Gutierrez, who lent Billy the knife, said “he didn’t have anything but his gun and the knife” when he left her house. And Billy’s friend Paco Anaya wrote that after the shooting, Deluvina Maxwell took the pistol from Billy’s hand and put it on the bureau.
It was a Colt Model 1877 in .41 caliber, what collectors oftentimes call the Thunderer. It was a self-cocker, another term for double-action. Most revolvers of the day were single-action, meaning you had to thumb back the hammer before every shot. With a self-cocker, the trigger does all the work. It was also the second self-cocker Billy was known to carry (we’ll get to the first one in a moment).
Billy was buried at Fort Sumner the following day, and Garrett left town with his guns. Most people assume that’s the last anybody ever heard of them, but thankfully that’s not the case.
On October 3, 1881, Garrett wrote a letter on his official letterhead to the Lincoln County Commissioners: “I have in my possession two horses and one saddle captured from Frank Wheeler also one gun and six shooter captured of William Bonney, which await your orders.”
The reply came back the same day from commission chairman W. W. Paul: “Report of P. F. Garrett of captured property. Approved and sale ordered.” County clerk Ben Ellis filed it, and the original is still at the county courthouse in Carrizozo. Shout-out to the always helpful Ben Doss, who pointed me there. I reached out, and the courthouse kindly sent me a copy.
So not even three months after Billy’s death, his pistol and long gun were sitting in Lincoln as captured property, listed on the same page as a horse thief’s horses.
Fun fact: That horse thief, Frank Wheeler, rode with Jesse Evans and Jimmy Dolan during the Lincoln County War. In 1879, Billy named him in a letter to Governor Lew Wallace as one of the men driving stolen cattle to the Mescalero reservation.
Now, Garrett wasn’t always the most reliable narrator. So how do we know he really had Billy’s pistol? Because Charlie Siringo, of all people, says he bid on it.
Siringo met Billy in Tascosa in the fall of 1878, while he was punching cattle for the LX. They shot at targets together and swapped gifts, a cigar holder for a book. According to Siringo’s biographer, Howard Lamar, that was probably the only time they ever met.
But Siringo later rode with a posse after the Kid, and he made several more trips to New Mexico, including to Lincoln. In his 1920 History of Billy the Kid, he wrote, “During the following spring in the town of Lincoln, the sheriff auctioned off the Kid’s saddle, and the blue-barrel, rubber-handled, double action Colt’s 41 calibre pistol, which the Kid held in his hand when killed.
There were only two bidders for the pistol, the writer and the deputy county clerk, Billy Burt, who got it for $13.50. Its actual value was about $12.00.”
Thirteen dollars and fifty cents. Somewhere around four hundred bucks in today’s money, for the gun Billy the Kid was holding when he died. And only two people bothered to bid on it.
Is there a catch? Mostly with the date. Siringo puts the sale in the spring of 1882, months after the commissioners approved it.
It’s worth noting that Siringo’s book on Billy the Kid is error-ridden, and most historians don’t fully trust it. But according to his biographer, Howard Lamar, Siringo was called to Lincoln in October 1881 to serve as a witness against Pat Coghlan, the Tularosa rancher who’d been buying the cattle Billy stole.
That’s the same month Garrett wrote his letter. Coghlan got his trial moved to Mesilla, and Siringo ended up spending the whole winter in Lincoln County. So whether the sale took place that fall or the following spring, Siringo would have been in Lincoln County when it happened.
As for Billy Burt, he was definitely a real person. In fact, the Kid borrowed Burt’s horse when he escaped from Lincoln, promising to send it back. And true to his word, the pony wandered into town a few days later dragging a rope.
I found Burt on the 1880 census in White Oaks, a 24-year-old miner from New York living with his father, right next door to James W. Bell, the deputy Billy killed during his escape. By 1881, Burt was working in Lincoln as deputy county clerk under Ben Ellis, the same Ben Ellis who filed Garrett’s letter.
After that, unfortunately, the trail peters out. I did find a William Burt of roughly the same age, with a father of the same name, who died in Massachusetts in 1888. He never married and never had children. If that’s our man, did he still have the pistol when he passed? Or did he get rid of it before he left New Mexico? Your guess is as good as mine.
The rifle’s a different story. Garrett’s letter lists “one gun” separately from the “six shooter.” We know Garrett ended up with the Kid’s Winchester 1873 carbine, serial number 20181, the one Billy grabbed from the courthouse armory the day he killed Bell and Olinger. We can’t say for sure it’s the same “gun” named in the letter, but if it is, it never made it to the auction.
Garrett gave it to Captain Joseph Lea, the former Confederate guerrilla now known as the Father of Roswell. Lea and the other Pecos cattlemen had talked Garrett into running for sheriff in 1880 to stop the rustling coming out of Fort Sumner. So when Garrett gave Lea the Kid’s rifle, along with the shotgun Billy used to kill Bob Olinger, he was handing them to the man who’d put him in office to bring in the Kid in the first place.
We know this because Lea swore to it. In January 1897, with Garrett still very much alive, Lea signed a statement before a notary in El Paso: “The Winchester saddle gun, number 20181, was the gun of the Kid, the noted New Mexico outlaw. The cal. 10 shotgun, number 903, was the gun the Kid used to kill Robert Olinger with at Lincoln in 1881. Both guns were given to me by Mr. Garrett, noted sheriff of Lincoln.”
Both guns were displayed at the New Mexico Military Institute, which Lea founded, from 1898 until 1925. After Lea died in 1904, they passed through his family to his son-in-law, Hiram Dow, then to the collectors John Bunting and Robert McNellis, and eventually to a Texas A&M professor named Jim Earle.
In 2021, Bonhams sold both of them at auction. The shotgun went for $978,313 and the rifle for more than $300,000. Credit where it’s due, the aforementioned Ben Doss ran down every name on that chain of ownership. As for why Garrett gave the rifle away instead of selling it as the commissioners ordered, that I don’t know.
Two more of Billy’s guns can be traced at least part of the way. When Garrett’s posse caught Billy at Stinking Springs in December 1880, he was carrying a different Winchester. According to Siringo, posse member Jim East later told him, “The Kid made me a present of his Winchester rifle, but old Beaver Smith made such a roar about an account he said Billy owed him, that at the request of Billy, I gave old Beaver the gun. I wish now I had kept it.” So in other words, Billy the Kid’s Winchester got traded for a bar tab.
He also had his first self-cocker on him that day, a Colt Lightning, the .38 caliber version of the 1877 model. Garrett took it off him, and according to historian Robert Stahl, Billy asked that it be given to Mike Cosgrove, the Las Vegas mail contractor who’d shown him some kindness after his capture, to hold until he got out of jail. Whether Billy ever got it back is uncertain.
And then there’s the butcher knife. Nobody turned it in to the county, because it wasn’t a weapon. It belonged to Celsa Gutierrez, Garrett’s sister-in-law, and Billy borrowed it that night to cut some meat at Pete Maxwell’s. Her son, Candido, swore in a 1951 affidavit that he saw Billy pick it up. According to Paco Anaya, after the shooting,
Deluvina Maxwell took Billy’s knife and put it away in Pete Maxwell’s bureau. The Maxwell family says Pete’s sister Paulita kept it afterward, and it stayed with her descendants for more than a century.
In 1926, Deluvina signed a statement with her mark saying that the knife in the possession of Paulita’s daughter, Adelina Welborn, “is the original that Billy the Kid held in his hand at the time of his death.” Ursula Pacheco Baca, who had known Billy, swore to the same thing in 1951.
The knife eventually passed through Adelina’s daughter and granddaughter. It was sold to historian Frederick Nolan in 1997 and went to the collector Robert McCubbin two years later. In January 2019, it went up for auction in Mesa, Arizona, with an estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million. It sold for $118,000.
So, what happened to Billy the Kid’s guns? Pat Garrett reported the pistol and a “gun” to the county, and the county ordered them sold.
According to Siringo, Billy Burt bought the pistol in the spring of 1882 for thirteen dollars and fifty cents. The courthouse Winchester went to Captain Joseph Lea, and today it’s the only one of Billy’s guns people can still put their hands on.
His other Winchester settled a bar tab with Beaver Smith. His first self-cocker went to Mike Cosgrove for safekeeping and was never heard of again. And the butcher knife stayed in Fort Sumner with the Maxwell family, or so they say.
As for that pistol, Billy Burt is unfortunately the last lead we have. If he’s the same William Burt who died in Massachusetts in 1888, and if he still had the gun when he went back east, then who knows. Maybe Billy the Kid’s pistol is still out there somewhere. Maybe it’s sitting in a dusty box in somebody’s Boston basement, wrapped in an old rag, and nobody in the house has the slightest idea it’s even there.
If you’re still looking to scratch that Billy the Kid history itch, I recently discussed the question of whether Billy the Kid left any children behind. For more than a century, rumors have tied him to a child with Paulita Maxwell, and others point to Abrana Garcia and her daughter. I dug into the family records, census entries and the stories passed down in Fort Sumner to see whether any of it holds up. You can find the episode on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.