Fort Sumner: Home to Billy the Kid

The Billy the Kid Museum is the result of one man’s love of history and collecting. When Ed Sweet was a young man, he made his living selling fruit and vegetables to his neighbors in the area around Fort Sumner, N.M. As he traveled the area, Sweet kept an eye out for anything old that his customers might want to trade for his wares.

After many years of collecting antiques and historic artifacts -- many of them associated with the area’s most famous outlaw -- Ed and his wife Jewel opened a small museum in Fort Sumner in 1953. Because of the artifacts and the town’s close association with the infamous outlaw, the Sweets named their museum The Billy the Kid Museum.

That small collection of artifacts has grown to a museum housing more than 60,000 relics associated with Billy the Kid.

The museum remains in the family with current owners Don Sweet, his wife Lula and their son Tim. Among the artifacts are a rifle once owned by Billy, along with the door and the curtains from the room where he was killed by Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett in 1881. Also on display are the chaps and spurs he liked to wear to dances. It was said the outlaw was a good dancer and was popular with young ladies in the area.

The Old Fort Sumner Museum is just a few miles away and has artifacts about the history of the area and items relating to Billy the Kid. Among the museum’s artifacts are Billy’s letters to Gov. Lew Wallace asking for help while he was in jail and copies of the coroner’s report on the his death in both English and Spanish plus modern artifacts like press photos from the movies Young Guns I and II. Also on display are 14 paintings by artist Howard Suttle detailing the life of Billy the Kid.

But the real draw for this museum is the cemetery out back where Billy along with two of his pals are buried. Although there is a headstone for Billy, the exact location of the bandit’s body is unknown. Shortly after Billy’s burial, a flood washed away all the wooden markers in the cemetery so the current headstone is an educated guess. An iron cage around the burial site is to detour vandals who have stolen the headstone three times since 1950.

Fort Sumner is the perfect location for museums dedicated to the outlaw since Billy the Kid was a frequent visitor to the area. Although Billy’s early history is clouded in mystery, it’s generally believed he was born William Henry McCarty around 1860 in a poor Irish neighborhood in New York City. To confuse matters even more he occasionally went by other names including William H. Bonney or Henry Antrium.

What is known is the family moved around a lot and lived in Indiana and Kansas before his mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis and Billy, his brother, mother and stepfather moved to Colorado and later New Mexico for her health. His mother died on Sept. 16, 1874. To make matters worse, his stepfather had all but abandoned the family but returned long enough to take the two boys to live with a foster family. Their stepfather would show up occasionally but eventually the boys were separated and bounced from one foster family to another.

Billy was on his own at a young age and worked as a ranch hand in Lincoln County, N.M., for John Tunstall. Tunstall was murdered in 1878 by a sheriff’s posse during the “Lincoln County War” and Billy set out to revenge his death. Billy ambushed the sheriff and his deputy and was eventually caught, tried and convicted to hang. On April 28, 1881, Billy broke out of jail.

Newly elected sheriff Pat Garrett vowed to capture the fugitive outlaw. And on July 14 Garrett made good his vow when he shot and killed the outlaw in one of the buildings on Old Fort Sumner. Billy the Kid was 21 years old.