Billy the Kid Territory
Charlie Bowdre

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Old Fort Sumner Cemetery

Read the story about the old Fort Sumner cemetery.

The Gravestone

Old West outlaw William Bonney, aka “Billy the Kid,” was famously shot by Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett in Fort Sumner, New Mexico on July 14, 1881. He was buried in the Old Fort Sumner Cemetery alongside Tom O’Folliard and Charlie Bowdre, two members of the Kid’s gang, who had both been killed by Garrett’s posse in 1880. The Kid’s individual grave marker, which wasn’t placed until 1940, has been stolen and recovered twice. It is presently in shackles inside an iron cage.

Charlie Bowdre

After the Regulators disbanded in Aug., 1878, Charlie Bowdre, one of the original Regulators, packed up his wife and belongings in Lincoln County and headed northeast to Old Fort Sumner. He soon found work as a ranch hand.

Charlie was older than Billy the Kid. Born circa 1848 on a Mississippi plantation and (recalled Frank Coe in 1927) "..a bookkeeper and well educated", he rode into Lincoln in 1875. Although Bowdre was broke, Lawrence Murphy and partner James Dolan loaned him enough money to buy a ranch on the Rio Ruidoso. Unlike Billy, Charlie was married (to Manuela Herrera), who seemed to be a settling influence.

While the Kid was stealing animals from late 1878 to late 1879, Bowdre found work at Tom Yerby's ranch on the upper Arroyo de las Canaditas. There, 27 miles northeast of Old Fort Sumner, he became Yerby's foreman. Pete Maxwell soon leased Charlie and Manuela a place to live in Old Fort Sumner's old post hospital.

But there was still the matter of that murder indictment against him for the April, 1878, shooting death of Buckshot Roberts at Blazer's Mill.

On December 3, 1880, Bowdre met secretly with Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett three miles northeast of Old Fort Sumner. Charlie insisted to Garrett that he wanted to give himself up, stand trial, and win an acquittal. Bowdre wanted to go straight. Garrett warned him to make up his mind quickly or he might end up dead. On December 15, Bowdre sent a letter pleading his case to Joseph C. Lea, a prominent Roswell businessman who'd once ridden with Quantrill's Raiders.

But Charlie couldn't shake the old ways. More to the point, he didn't have the backbone to refuse Billy. At dawn on December 23, Garrett's posse shot and killed Bowdre at Stinking Springs. They brought his body back to Old Fort Sumner in a buckboard. There Garrett and his men withstood repeated assaults from an enraged Manuela. Garrett paid for some of Charlie's funeral expenses; he admitted later that he'd had no grudge against the man. Bowdre was buried next to Tom O'Folliard. Garrett's posse had shot and killed the Kid's pals just four days -- and 19 miles -- apart.

Sources:

Nolan, Frederick, The Lincoln County War: A Documentary History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992).
Nolan, Frederick, The West of Billy the Kid (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).
Rasch, Philip J., Trailing Billy the Kid (Stillwater: Western Publications, 1995).
Simmons, Marc, Stalking Billy the Kid (Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 2006).
Utley, Robert M., Billy the Kid: A Short Violent Life (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).

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