This is a photograph of Billy the Kid’s grave
Billy The Kid's Grave
Or is it?
Here he lies.
Frederick Nolan
Ever since Pat Garrett wrote finis to the Kid’s legendary
Billy The Kid
The most convincing (although not eyewitness) account of the Kid’s funeral was given in the 1930s by Jack “Lead Steer” Potter, who claimed he first heard it in Fort Sumner a few years after the event. There was a service at the graveside, Potter said, conducted by an old buffalo hunter named Hugh Leeper, who was known as the “Sanctified Texan” because “he was fairly well-educated and was an accomplished scholar of the Bible.”
In Potter’s account The Sheriff instructed several Mexican ranch hands to remove the dirt roof of an abandoned adobe building and pull out enough ceiling planks to make a coffin, as time was too short to have lumber shipped from Las Vegas. Late in the afternoon the corpse was loaded into old Vicente’s [Silva’s] wood-hauling wagon which proceeded to the government cemetery followed by every person in Fort Sumner, even the saloon keeper who rarely closed down his business. The Sanctified Texan, who believed in predestination, preached the funeral and said that Billy’s time had certainly come at last. They told me he made remarks about Billy “our beloved young citizen,” and read from the 14th chapter of Job – “A man that is born of woman is of few days and is full of trouble – he fleeth like a shadow and continueth not.” In closing he
said, “Billy cannot come back to us, but we can go to him and will see him again up yonder, Amen.”
The day after the funeral Pete Maxwell had his man pull a wooden picket from the parade-ground fence, saw off a foot or so, and nail it in a crossbar to the longer piece. Then he printed in crude letters “BILLY THE KID, JULY 14, 1881.” Later this marker was stolen by relic seekers and the second one, which replaced it, was also stolen … Back in 1930 when I began to write down my memories, I had a letter from John Roark, a stagecoach driver, who swore he saw the uprooted grave marker strapped to a feller’s luggage as he boarded a train back East.1
Strange though it seems, there are no other accounts of the event even though there must have been plenty of opportunities to get them – after all, Pete and Paula Maxwell, who would surely have been there, not to mention Deluvina Maxwell, Jesus Silva, Vicente Otero, Francisco Lovato and many other Fort Sumner residents could have described it in detail. And could there – just possibly – have been a photographer on the scene? One man certainly thought so, as older students of the Billy the Kid legend may recall.
In an article published in the December, 1960 issue of True West, artist Lea F. McCarty offered a photograph of four men which he claimed had been given to him by someone named “Tom Sullivan” an old man who ran the Billy the Kid Curio Shop at Fort Sumner. It had been taken, Sullivan told him, at the Kid’s funeral. McCarty took it to Ruidoso and asked Frank Coe’s grandson, a Mr. [Ralph?] Bonnell, if it was “the real thing.”
“Course it is. I’ve seen it many times,” Bonnell said. “Look at all of ’em holding their hats. Billy is in a cedar box out front of them and the picture was taken across the coffin. The man at the far right, for instance, is Miguel Otero, who was once Governor of New Mexico.” “And who is this fellow next to Otero on the right?” McCarty asked.
“That is Otero’s brother. You can see his hat is under his arm in respect for the Kid.” “And the fellow wearing overalls, second from the left – who is he?” Bonnell scratched his head. “That is Jesus Silva. The Kid was staying at Silva’s home the night he was cut down. He had come down from Frank Lobato’s sheep camp tired and hungry and wanted some beefsteak to eat. He was told by Silva to go over to Pete Maxwell’s house where they had just slaughtered a young heifer.”
And the man holding his hat up to his face? That, said Bonnell, was Hijinio Salazar, who was a great friend of the Kid’s and helped dig the grave as he wept shamelessly at the funeral.
2.
You’d think that perhaps McCarty might have taken a moment to wonder how Otero and his brother in Santa Fe, or Yginio Salazar, living even further away in Lincoln, could have got news of the Kid’s death at midnight on July 14 in time to get to the funeral by late afternoon of the following day, but clearly the thought never occurred to him.
If nothing else, the McCarty article shows us just how comprehensive a change there has been in researching such stories during the last half hundred years. We know now there was not, simply never could have been, a photograph of the Kid’s funeral, because if there had been one it would have surfaced long before Mr. McCarty embarked upon his quest. Quite apart from whether the mythical Mr. Sullivan (who was probably Ed Sweet) and Mr. Bonnell were simply pulling McCarty’s plonker, the “funeral” photograph was actually taken at the time the first marker was placed over the Kid’s grave in the early 1930s (see below).
So what is there by way of evidence to show the Kid was indeed buried where the marker says he was? Quite a lot, it transpires. The first “outsider” to examine the gravesite (that is to say, someone with no preconceptions and no ax to grind) seems to have been a “special correspondent” of the Las Vegas Daily Optic – all we know about him is his initials “I. N. P.” – who in January, 1882, visited what he called “The Bivouac of the Dead,” looking for the grave of Billy the Kid in the old military cemetery “to the southwest of the abandoned and decaying Fort Sumner.”
The cemetery itself, he reported, was surrounded by
“what was once a good adobe wall, but from decay and neglect is now merely an outline, surrounding an acre [sic] of ground.”
We enter on the north, walking over the remains of the once handsome gate. To the left, in the northeast corner, are the graves of four rustlers. Grant, killed by Billy the Kid; Ferris, who was killed by Barney Mason at the instance of the Kid, and O’Fallion and Bowdre … To the right of the entrance lies the grave of Billy the Kid, marked by a plain board, with the stenciled letters ‘Billy the Kid’ … The southwest part of the little burying ground is filled with graves of soldiers who were killed by Indians near the fort as the few legible headboards read ‘July 7, 1866.’
Over in the southwest [sic] corner lies the grave of Lucien B. Maxwell, once so famous in New Mexico.
3.
It all seems fairly straightforward: the Kid’s grave was to the right of the gate in the north wall, all the others in the northeastern corner. But visit the graveyard today and you find the graves of O’Folliard and Bowdre are adjacent to the Kid’s in the center of the plot and nowhere near “the northeast corner.” So who got it wrong: “I. N. P.” – who was there in 1882 – or Charlie Foor and the oldtimers in Fort Sumner who relocated the grave in the 1920s? You’d tend to think maybe the old timers. After all, as anyone who has read The Saga of Billy the Kid knows, by 1925 the site had reverted to wilderness and when Charlie Siringo mooted putting a marker over the grave a few years later, it was overgrown with mesquite. Even then, the actual location was ‘disputed’ as this item from the April 11, 1930 edition of The Fort Sumner Leader indicates:
MARKING GRAVE OF FAMOUS NEW MEXICO CHARACTER
An interesting step was taken by the DeBaca County Chamber of Commerce this week when that body gathered together here A. P. (Paco) Anaya, Vicente Ortega [Otero], and C. W. Charley Foor [and Jesus Silva] to make definite the disputed location [my italics] of the grave of New Mexico’s most romantic outlaw, Billy the Kid, in the little cemetery at Old Fort Sumner. These men located the grave in the old cemetery and a picture of them was taken, standing at the foot of the graves of the Kid, Charley Bowdry and Tom O’Phalion … a concrete curbing is in place around the three graves and a big concrete slab is to be placed over the grave of the Kid.
4.
So the first marker was not a marker at all but a concrete curbing with a flat slab on the actual grave. It wasn’t until a year or so later that the “Pals” marker which stands on the spot today was erected, as the same newspaper reported on October 31, 1931. .
MARKING BILLY’S GRAVE An order was made out this week for the grave stone marking the graves of Old Fort Sumner’s noted characters, Billy the Kid, Tom O’Phalion and Charley Bowdrie [doesn’t this kind of sloppiness make you sick?]. It is understood the stone is to have a suitable inscription, and covering all three graves, with pointers indicating each man’s resting place.
5.
Oddly enough, the newspaper doesn’t seem to have covered the actual installation of the gravestone, so we can only conclude that it was placed on the spot sometime between November, 1930 and October 1932, when the paper ran a further story complaining the monument was already being vandalized. This lack of coverage has left us with questions which have persisted until the present day: first, did they really put the marker in the right place? And second, were the graves of Charley Bowdre and Tom O’Folliard near that of the Kid, or in the northeast corner of the cemetery as “I. N. P.” claimed in 1882?
To answer those questions it is first necessary to establish some facts about the cemetery, and how it was laid out in the Kid’s time. To do that we have to go back to the U.S. Army records. These show that in October 1862, acting entirely upon his own authority (but ratified post-facto almost a year later by his superior, Gen. H. W. Halleck) General James H. Carleton ordered the establishment of Fort Sumner at Bosque Redondo on the banks of the Pecos River. Designed as a five-company post and named for Mexican and Civil War veteran General Edwin Vose Sumner, it was sited at the center of a projected forty-mile square, 1,024,000 acre reservation (read concentration camp) for Navajo and Mescalero Apache Indians, of whom, at the end of 1864, there were over 8000 living in 1276 “lodges” – crude living quarters – at or near the fort.
The Navajos, by far the larger part of the population, owned nearly 7000 sheep, 2757 goats, 143 mules and over 3000 horses, the presence of the latter doubtless one of the reasons that the village of Puerto de Luna, on the northern edge of the reservation, became and remained a horse-thieves’ heaven. Crammed into an area that had been shrunk by bureaucratic or military sleight of hand to 13,644 acres, the Navajos hated every moment of every day they were confined at Guelte as they called it; the soldiers whose duty it was to confine them probably loathed the place with equal passion. 6.
During the construction of the post by Army engineers, a plot was set aside for a military cemetery, at first unenclosed, and situated exactly one quarter mile due east of the flagpole. Between January 2, 1863, and February 1, 1868, the following twenty-two military burials were recorded at Fort Sumner. 7.
Name and rank
Pvt. Samuel Strunk Pvt. Marcus Cruiz Pvt Albertin Crutchfield Captain Robert Lusby
Regiment
1st NM Cav 1st NM Cav 1st Cal Cav AAG US Vols
Date of death
January 2, 1863 October 5, 1864 December 8, 1864 February 20, 1865
Cause.
Killed by Indians (not found) Intermittent fever Unknown Took poison by mistake
Pvt. Juan Chavez Hosp. Stwd Philip Walsh Captain Joseph Berney Pvt. William H. Daugherty Pvt. Juan Marcus Pvt. Patrick Toury Pvt. Patrick Johnson Cpl. Hugh Friel Cpl. William C. Edwards 2Lt. William J. Eckley Pvt. John Devine Pvt. James Cook Pvt. Edward White Pvt. William Kerr Pvt. John Lee Edward Johnson Pvt. Thomas Hedgecock Pvt. William H. Epple
1st NM Cav 1st NM Cav 1st NM Cav 1st Cal Cav 1st NM Cav 5th US Inf. 5th US Inf. 3rd US Cav 3rd US Cav 5th US Inf 3rd US Cav 3rd US Cav 3rd US Cav 3rd US Cav 3rd US Cav Civilian 37th US Inf 3rd US Cav
March 30, 1865 April 25, 1865 October 7, 1865 December 7, 1865 December 21, 1865 July 7, 1866
July 15, 1867 May 3, 1867 June 12, 1867 June 20, 1867 July 9, 1867 July 9, 1867 July 9, 1867 July 9, 1867 July 9, 1867 October 12, 1867 November 17, 1867 July 1, 1868
Pneumonia (not found) Delirium tremens (not found)
Congestive fever Pneumonia Apoplexy Accidentally shot by comrade Acute rheum
Shot by comrade near Puerto de Luna Cerebral congestion Killed by Navajos near Fort Sumner
“ “ “ “
Killed by Guard while resisting arrest
On April 20, 1866, just a few months before his mustering out after two years of service with the US Volunteers, Assistant Quartermaster Capt. Gus Artsman filed a report with the Quartermaster General’s office on the general condition of the cemetery from which it is clear that even then it was already in a rundown condition. Artsman made a number of recommendations for its improvement. To begin with, he wrote, the plot was open to the elements and suggested that it be enclosed by an adobe wall. “Headboards are at most of the graves,” he added, “[and I] will have them at the remainder soon.” 8. The office of Quartermaster General and Brigadier General Montgomery C. Meigs concurred. “The graves should be sodded,” it stipulated, “mounds erected and also headboards where necessary, and otherwise put in a good presentable condition. At this point, as well as at all others in the remote territories of the west where there are no towns, villages, or organized municipality the graves of citizens should receive the same care from government as those of soldiers.” 9.
Accordingly in 1867 the plot was enclosed by an adobe wall; readers of Walter Noble Burns’ Saga of Billy the Kid will recall that according to Charlie Foor there was also an arched gateway with a cross on top. 10. The entire cemetery at that time measured 156 feet [52 yards] east-to-west and 146 feet [48. 66 yards] north-to-south, which probably explains, although it was in fact slightly larger than that, why it later became known as ‘Hell’s Half-acre.’ On March 21 of that year Lt. Robert McDonald, 5th Infantry (whose display of “most distinguished gallantry at the battle of Wolf Mountain in Montana” the following year would earn him a Medal of Honor) reported that although because of the nature of the local grass it had not been possible for the graves to be sodded, the cemetery was “now enclosed by a wall built of Adobes five feet high and twenty-seven inches wide at the bottom, sloping to a point at the top. Trees have been planted throughout, the graves are in good condition, Head Boards placed at each and every grave.” 11.
The Lieutenant may have been telling headquarters what it wanted to hear rather than the truth; following the annual inspection of the cemetery a year later, Swiss-born Regimental Quartermaster Lt. Alexander Sutorius, Third Cavalry, reported on June 23, 1868 that he had had difficulty locating graves due to the absence of headboards and added “There are a few graves which I find impossible to have identified from the long period of interment.” 12. Among these appears to have been that of Capt. Joseph Berney, 1st NM Vol. Cavalry, who died October 7, 1865.
The Navajos were about to be delivered from their bondage. In 1867 Congress passed an Act creating the Indian Peace Commission. On May 28, 1868 General William Tecumseh Sherman and Samuel F. Tappan arrived at Fort Sumner with authority to negotiate a treaty with the Navajos. Sherman’s orders were to remove the Navajos to Fort Sill, but the Navajo leaders argued successfully to be allowed to return to their homes in the Four Corners region. The government acceded, promising $150,000 to provide the Navajos with transportation to their new reservation in northwestern New Mexico and northeastern Arizona, and to furnish them with 15,000 sheep and goats and 500 cattle to rebuild their livestock industry. On June 15, some seven thousand Navajos began the long trek to their new homes under the protection of two companies of US Cavalry commanded by Maj. Charles Jarvis Whiting, Third Cavalry; shortly thereafter the military decommissioned the post and in 1869 the decision was taken to abandon it. 13.
In 1870, following the sale of his ‘Maxwell Land Grant’, and after some dickering with the Army, Lucien B. Maxwell purchased the old fort buildings and irrigation ditches (called “improvements” in the documentation) from the government for $5000 (after they had been offered at a public sale on June 13, 1870 where, to the dismay of the Secretary for War, the best bid was $900) and when
the deal was closed in October, moved his center of operations from Cimarron to Fort Sumner. 14. According to a survey made two years later “the buildings had deteriorated in value greatly during the time they were unoccupied.” The surveyor also reported that since the purchase Maxwell had spent about $10,000 on improvements, which included enlarging one of the former officers quarters buildings into a spacious twenty-room private home, a hundred feet long and nearly fifty wide, for himself and his family. For a further $5000 he purchased two buildings situated on the west side of the Avenue which had belonged to J. A. LaRue, former post trader. By 1872, the population of Fort Sumner was estimated at 250 souls, almost all of them working for, or dependent upon, Maxwell. 15.
Between 1870 and 1880 the cemetery was regularly used for civilian burials. Nearly all of these were in ground east of the central path where there were already a few graves, believed to have been those of workers and artisans who had died during the building of the original fort in 1863-65. An October 31, 1907 War Department memorandum to the Secretary of the Interior confirms “that the post cemetery was used as a private burying ground subsequent to the abandonment of the post and that from 60 to 80 civilian remains were buried there …” 16. As if perhaps to distance himself royally from his employees and neighbors, the grave of Lucien B. Maxwell, who died June 25, 1875, is not among them but in the southwest quadrant of the cemetery, as is that of his son Peter, who died July 21, 1898.
Among the graves on the eastern side, as “I. N. P.” told us (although Charlie Foor claimed otherwise) was “Texas Red” Joe Grant, who thought he could sucker Billy the Kid and instead got suckered himself. The killing took place at Fort Sumner on January 10, 1880. Here’s how eyewitness Frank Lloyd described it to J. Evetts Haley in 1935. 17.
Texas Red said when he come there that that was his business, to kill the Kid and they talked and went out and had shooting matches at a mark for the whiskey all day and come into the saloon to take a drink. Tex was pretty drunk and Billy was full. Tex throwed his hand on his gun and says ‘Billy, I can draw the first blood for the whiskey.’ Billy says ‘I’ll go you’ and broke his neck in three places. He shot him in the mouth, under the chin and in the neck before he hit the ground. He had his hand on his gun and never got it out of the scabbard. I saw it. I was standing right at the bar. That was Teet’s [Beaver Smith’s] saloon.
Another unmarked grave holds the body of John Farris (sometimes given as Faris or Faires) who was certainly killed by Barney Mason as “I. N. P.” reported, but that it was at the behest of Billy the Kid is highly unlikely. Born in Mississippi in 1845, Farris was the oldest son of Solomon and Laurinda Farris, and had served with the rank of lieutenant in Co. H. of Baylor’s Regiment of Texas Cavalry until the unit surrendered at Galveston in June, 1865. He and his five brothers were peripherally involved in the Mason County troubles, although so far as has been ascertained to the present time, they were not directly implicated in any killings. In his book “Riata and Spurs” Charles Siringo mentions starting out up the Bascom Trail for Kansas with a cowboy named John Ferris, who borrowed $25 from him and $50 from the livery man and hit the road “… direct for Fort Sumner, where he was shot and killed by Barney Mason.” The Santa Fe Daily New Mexican gave such details as were available on January 19, 1880.
In a shooting affray at Fort Sumner on the 29th ultimo [December 29, 1879] John Farris was shot and killed by Barney Mason. Farris shot three times at Mason without any provocation, when the latter went off, got a pistol and returning to the store where Farris was, shot him twice in the breast.”
Another version suggests Farris got into a card game with Mason and Pat Garrett and a quarrel ensued during which Mason shot Farris in the back. 18. Whichever story is true, Farris was just as dead, and it’s highly unlikely he got even so much as a picket-fence marker over his grave. As for Mason, it was said that following the capture and death of the Kid, he badmouthed Pat Garrett for failing to share the reward for killing the Kid and other bounties collected by Garrett to which Mason’s spying had contributed, whereupon Garrett evolved a plan to get rid of Mason. “Barney knows too much,” he told Skelton Glenn. Shortly thereafter Mason came across a fine yearling, apparently unbranded; unfortunately for him he overlooked a small H brand between the forelegs which was used by Garrett; as a result, Mason was indicted on two counts, stealing an ox and altering brands, and on May 1, 1887 was sent to the penitentiary. On November 16 of the same year after he was pardoned by Governor Ross, Barney left New Mexico and never came back. 19.
In 1906, it was decided to remove the remains of the “approximately” 22 enlisted men and officers buried in the Fort Sumner cemetery to the National Cemetery in Santa Fe as part of an ongoing process of reburial of bodies from former military posts (Forts Stanton, Marcy, Grant, Wingate, and Craig as well as Fort Sumner) that had begun a decade earlier and would continue until 1920. On December 2, 1905, the specifications for this operation were issued and bids to conduct it invited. The successful contractor was required to “put the remains of each [person] in a dressed pine box 26 in. x 10 in. x 10 in., and where any disagreeable odor can be noticed, to place in the box a sufficient quantity of sawdust saturated with carbolic acid to destroy such odor. The graves in the old cemetery are to be refilled by the contractor and the ground left smooth and all the rubbish carted away by him.” 20.
There were only three bidders for the job, all from Santa Fe: Jose D. Sena and Pedro A. Sandoval were highest at $800, C. F. Dudrow put in the low bid, $300, and was awarded the contract. The bodies, which according to the military records were “on the western side of the cemetery” were accordingly exhumed by his workers, placed in boxes as stipulated, and reburied at Santa Fe on March 8 in military graves 674-695. A citation from his April 20, 1906 report to the Assistant QMG, US Army, Denver, indicates how meticulously Dudrow worked. 21.
As stated … it was impossible to identify the remains of any particular person. I spent five or six days traveling through the country in search of old residents who might be able to identify some one or more of these soldiers, but after a lapse of forty years it could hardly be considered possible to get reliable information … I had an interview with a Dr. John Gayheart [Gerhardt] whom I traveled fifty miles to see [at Los Ojitos] who was a caterer for the officers mess during the time of the post but he could remember nothing regarding names or anything of that nature. He was, however, able to tell me the part of the cemetery used by the military. He also told me about the wooden monument over the remains of one of the Captains but could not recall the name [Lusby]. I also found other parties who gave me practically the same information. At one time, I was informed, all the graves of the soldiers were marked with wooden head boards and when I did this work some of them were still standing in the first and second rows but all lettering entirely obliterated and not even legible under a magnifying glass. [The body in grave] No. 8 … was a Corporal of Cavalry which was apparent when the grave was opened as the re-enlistment stripes on the sleeve were visible for probably a minute before the color and material crumbled away from exposure to the air.
The identification of the officers was made from the shoulder straps and clothing. The list furnished me giving the names of these twenty two officers and men contained but one Lieutenant consequently I am thoroughly convinced that there can be no mistake as to these remains being those of Wm. J. Eckley as the Second Lieutenant Shoulder straps would indicate, and the other two officers being Captains.
As shown by the drawing the graves of the three officers were close together. No. 18 was the one burried in a metallic casket and over whose grave was the large wooden monument. From the position of the grave, date of death, and black trowsers without stripe found in this grave, I am inclined to believe that this was the grave of Capt. Lusby … From information received from several parties I am satisfied that the interments were made from right to left, and in my opinion it would be quite likely that the first officer to be burried should be in the center of the rows in the part of the cemetery used for military burials.
The identification of the remains removed was as certain as could be expected after the long lapse of time as signified by the remaining head boards which were all of the same pattern … and the finding of something of a military nature in nearly all of the graves. In nearly every grave with the exception of the three officers I found parts of the old government woolen sock. The boxes in which the remains were shipped were numbered to correspond with the numbers as shown on the drawing enclosed.
Dudrow’s statement that some headboards were still standing also suggests that the famous September, 1904 flood, even though it is supposed to have inundated the cemetery to a depth of four feet, did not do as much damage as might have been expected and therefore probably did not, as some writers have suggested, wash graves and bones away down the Pecos. So, given that they were all still there in 1906, the big question is, could Dudrow have accidentally exhumed any of the nearby civilian remains – and most especially the Kid’s – and mixed them up with the military ones? Some people think so. According to a newspaper article by one Kelly Rae Hearn in the Taos, NM El Crepusculo of June 2, 1955,
“a Catholic priest, Father Burke … was present at Fort Sumner when the bodies were taken from the burial ground there to be transferred to the Santa Fe National Cemetery. After completion of the operations, the grave formerly occupied by the body of the Kid was empty …”
22.
The mysterious Father Burke, if he ever existed at all, was never interviewed anywhere else, so the claim that he saw the Kid’s grave empty remains unsupported, and since elsewhere in the same article it is stated that 43 bodies from Fort Sumner were reburied in Santa Fe rather than the documented 22, we can hardly call it reliable. On the other hand, the War Department memorandum cited above is very specific: “There being no funds to cover the cost of disinterment of these [other 60 or 80 civilian] remains and there being no authority to re-inter them in a national cemetery … no steps have been taken by the Department looking to their removal.” 23. In other words, since Dudrow had no reason to move them and would not have been paid a red cent had he done so, it’s more than probable he did not, and that every non-military body that was buried there is still there.
Further support for the proposition that this is so exists in the form of a carefully and accurately scaled map that Dudrow drew up at the time of the exhumation, showing not only the locations of the graves from which the bodies of the soldiers had been taken, but also other graves in the cemetery, most notably those of two “outlaws, friends of Billy the Kid” and that of the Kid himself. In the northwest corner of the cemetery are shown the graves of five children, three ‘unknown,’ one the ‘child of Maj. Keyes’ and the fifth a ‘child of Bobien family,’ probably Felipe (the name often mistakenly given as Henry) Beaubien, believed to have been between ten and twelve years old, who was killed by one of the Henry Hawkins “Mesa Hawks” gang during the 1902 robbery of a Fort Sumner store owned by Philip Holdman and Charlie Foor. 24.
Others believed to have been buried in the cemetery but not shown on the Dudrow map – and therefore probably on the eastern side with those he simply identifies as “civilian dead” – include Francisco Gallego, killed by cowboy Tom Moran; George Peacock, killed by C.W. White in 1884; and John B. Legg, another forgotten character from the early days of New Mexico history, a saloon-keeper, gambler and hardcase who had served as a deputy U. S. Marshal, participated in the pursuit of the Black Jack Ketchum gang, and in August, 1894, killed a small time badman named William McElhany, a.k.a. “Portales Bill”. On March 22, 1899 he was himself killed by James Blanton in quarrel over a poker game at Fort Sumner. Also in there somewhere is Charles Wesley Foor (1850-1940), the man who most of all was responsible for identifying the location of the Kid’s grave and for ensuring that a marker was placed on the spot. 25.
Which brings us to the other big question: was the Kid’s grave where the present marker says it is? Charlie Foor said it was “three feet west of [the] path and thirty-one steps from the gate.” (Question: did he mean the original gate in the middle of the north wall, or the present day gate in the northeast corner?). 26. On the Dudrow map, the Kid’s grave is about 35 feet in from the gate and maybe 10-12 feet west of the central path. So did he misidentify it, too? In August, 1999, using the Dudrow map as a guide, Gregory Scott Smith, Monument Manager at the Fort Sumner State Monument, made some careful comparative measurements. He immediately discovered that today, the cemetery is some 187 feet across; which means the north wall (where the old entrance was) is some feet further north than it was in 1882; his conclusion was that “each time they’ve rebuilt the wall (or fence) they’ve moved it back from the existing wall or fence a little.” As a result, the total growth in north-south dimension has been around thirty feet, maybe half of that on the south side.
“It seems reasonable to assume,” Scott Smith wrote, “that the modern wall was built to replace the fence marked — – — on Dudrow’s diagram in order to include all of the graves [that had in the intervening years been buried between the barbed wire fence and the original wall].”
He then made some measurements from the cage which surrounds the Kid’s marker to other locations. 27.
At that point the cemetery is 166 feet wide (east/west). It’s a little less than 60 feet from the northwest corner of the cage to the west wall. The cage is 11 feet long and it’s a little more than 95 feet from the northeast corner of the cage to the east wall … Dudrow’s diagram indicates that the grave would be 45 feet from the 1906 fence line and I measured the current placement as 49 feet from the existing north wall. Dudrow’s diagram predicts a distance of 99 feet from the foot of Billy’s grave to the east wall, and I measure a little more than 95 feet. To summarize, I think the modern placement (based on information provided by Billy’s pallbearers in 1931) agrees almost exactly with the placement indicated by Dudrow’s diagram.
All of which, when taken together with the details at the “bivouac of the dead” recorded by the Optic reporter in 1882, strongly suggests the stone marking the location of the Kid’s grave is as near the right place, give or take a couple of feet, as anyone could decently have hoped for. And despite a century of legends of exhumation by skelologists, of his bones being hung in a doctor’s waiting room or washed down the Pecos or taken up with the military bodies and reburied in Santa Fe, the odds are the Kid is still in it. Which is more than enough for the sentimentalist in all of us: for just a few yards away from his grave is the stone which marks the last resting place of pretty little Paula Maxwell Jaramillo, the girl he loved enough to die for.
Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie, Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: ‘Here he lies where he longed to be Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.’
—————————————————————————————————————————-
The author would like to thank Gregory Scott Smith, Monument Manager, Fort Sumner State Monument, for his invaluable assistance in the preparation of this article.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————
NOTES
1. Burroughs, Jean M. On The Trail: The Life and Tales of “Lead Steer” Potter. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1980. 105-107, 137-139.
2. True West, (8) 2. December, 1960. 6-9, 62-64. 3. “The Bivouac of the Dead” A Visit to an Old Burying Ground at Fort Sumner by a Special
Correspondent of The Optic. Las Vegas Optic. January 16, 1882. 4. The Fort Sumner Leader, April 11, 1930. 5. The Fort Sumner Leader, October 31, 1931. 6. Keleher, William A. Turmoil in New Mexico. Santa Fe: The Rydal Press, 1952. 502. 7. Record of Interments, Cemeterial Files, Fort Sumner 1863-68. Office of the Quartermaster General.
RG92, NARA. 8. General Correspondence and Reports Relating to National and Post Cemeteries, 1865-1890. Box
64: Steilacoom to Vicksburg. Office of the Quartermaster General. RG 92, NARA. 9. Ibid.
10. Burns, Walter Noble. The Saga of Billy the Kid. New York and Garden City: Doubleday Page & Co., 1926. 294.
11. Consolidated Correspondence, Fort Sumner File, Box 1093. Office of the Quartermaster General. RG92, NARA.
12. General Correspondence and Reports, op cit. 13. Keleher, op cit. 466-467. He says there were four companies of US Cavalry. 14. General Correspondence and Reports, op cit. 15. Survey of Fort Sumner Military Reservation by Robert B. Willison, 1872. Courtesy Gregory Scott
Smith, Fort Sumner State Monument, NM. 16. R. S. Oliver to Hon. Sec. of the Interior, October 31, 1907. US Dept. of the Interior. Courtesy
Gregory Scott Smith. 17. Haley, J. Evetts. “Interview with Frank Lloyd.” Tularosa, NM. August 18, 1927. Haley History
Center, Midland, Texas. 18. McAlavy, Don. “The Mysterious Death of John Farris.” The Outlaw Gazette (11) 1. November, 1998.
22-23; Siringo, Charles. Riata and Spurs. Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Co. 1927. 119ff ; Santa Fe Daily New Mexican January 19, 1880; “Farris, John.” Biographical Files, Robert N. Mullin Collection, Haley History Center, Midland, Texas.
19. “Mason, Barney.” Biographical Files, Robert N. Mullin Collection op cit. 20. “Specifications for Disinterring and Removing Remains of Officers and Enlisted Men and Civilians
at Old Fort Sumner, New Mexico.” December 2, 1905. B. K. West, Lt. Col. Deputy Commissary
General, US Army. Denver, Colorado. Office of the Quartermaster General. RG 92, NARA. 21. C. F. Dudrow to Col. C. A. H. McCauley, AQM General, Denver April 20, 1906. Consolidated
Correspondence, Fort Sumner File. op cit.
22. Hearn, Kelly Rae. “Here Sleep the Dead Heroes.” El Crepusculo, Taos, NM. June 2, 1955. 4. 23. R. S. Oliver to Hon. Secretary of the Interior, October 31, 1907 op cit. 24. C. F. Dudrow to Col. C. A. H. McCauley op cit. 25. Research by Donald K. McAlavy, Clovis, NM.
26. Burns, Saga op cit. 297. 27. Gregory Scott Smith, personal communications August 5, 1999 and August 2, 2002.
Recent Comments