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Old Fort Sumner Cemetery
The graves of Tom O'Folliard and Charlie Bowdre lie beside that of Billy the Kid in the former post cemetery at Old Fort Sumner, less than seven miles southeast of the village of Fort Sumner, the De Baca County seat. Visitors can't miss the graves anymore, since they're enclosed in a locked steel cage made of rebar that the village constructed shortly after the Kid's footstone was stolen and quickly recovered a second time in early 1981.
Billy buffs will recognize the common headstone, the thousand-pound block of granite inscribed "Pals". Charles W. Foor, who'd arrived at Old Fort Sumner a couple of months after Pat Garrett had shot and killed the Kid, spearheaded the drive to have it cut, inscribed, and installed circa 1931. Uncle Charlie, as Foor was nicknamed, had become a willing tour guide there as Billy's popularity grew after Walter Noble Burns's 1926 book was published.
When Hollywood director King Vidor and college-football-star-turned-actor Johnny Mack Brown were scouting locations for Vidor's 1930 MGM film Billy The Kid, they drove out to Old Fort Sumner. There they met Foor, who took them to the Kid's grave. Afterward, Brown contributed $150 to the fundraising effort.
As tourists to Billy's gravesite swelled to several hundred visitors a year, the nearby village of Fort Sumner formed a chamber of commerce (in 1929), and posted highway signs, welcoming folks and directing them to the Kid's grave.
Everything at the one-acre cemetery had begun simply and quietly.
After the Kid's burial on Thursday afternoon, July 14, 1881, somebody took a plain board, stenciled letters on it, and jammed it into the soft earth at the head of his grave to mark it. A Las Vegas Daily Optic reporter described it in a mid-January, 1882, article after visiting Billy's gravesite.
After that first marker was stolen (or shot to pieces), Pete Maxwell had a four-foot-long, wooden slat removed from the parade-ground picket fence near his home. A one-foot length was cut off and hammered onto the longer piece to form a "t", and the words "Billy The Kid (Bonney)" and "July 14, 1881" were put on the crosspiece.
In 1884, Maxwell sold the old fort to the New England Livestock Company. In the late 1880s, after that company's Board of Directors had visited Old Fort Sumner, Col. Jack Potter, a company employee, remembered that one of the men -- a fellow named Chauncey from Boston -- yanked out the Kid's marker, which was tilted and rotting at the base. He claimed he was taking it back east to a museum. He climbed aboard the company's Concord coach with it, and the coach clattered northward. In 1934, the elderly Potter tried to track down the marker. But he only managed to trace it as far as Las Vegas, New Mexico, where the driver of that stagecoach remembered that one of his passengers had it strapped to the outside of his suitcase.
In 1889, the Pecos River flooded and took out Beaver Smith's Saloon at the southwest corner of Old Fort Sumner's parade ground. By 1994, the company had sold off its assets in Old Fort Sumner and one of its owners, Lon Horn, tore out the useable lumber in the Maxwell House for the construction of his ranch house 30 miles east. Local folks cannibalized much from the homes and structures that remained. Continued flooding (the vaunted September, 1904, flood inundated the cemetery under four feet of muddy water) began to melt and erase adobe walls. By 1900, only foundations, adobe wall remnants, and corral post stumps remained. The cemetery had no grave markers of any kind. Only the old timers who had once lived there (or who were living nearby) could still pick out the walls, corners, and north entrance of the old cemetery. By keying on these faint, fixed points, they were usually able to approximate Billy's grave.
In 1906, the U. S. government had the remains of 22 soldiers who were buried there (in two rows inside its west wall) dug up and reburied in Santa Fe National Cemetery.
The more famous of the Kid's grave markers isn't the big one. It's the smaller one, the pointed footstone. James N. Warner of Salida, Colo., donated it and installed it in April, 1940. The elaborately inscribed granite marker has been stolen twice. The first time was in August, 1950. It was found in a field on a ranch near Granbury, Texas, in May, 1976. Local resident Joe Bowlin brought it back, and it was ceremoniously reinstalled that June. It was stolen again in February, 1981, but recovered days later in Huntington Beach, California. It was reinstalled in May, 1981. A short time later, the village -- which owned the one-acre cemetery -- erected the steel cage to protect the gravesites, preserve the chipped-away headstone and Warner's footstone, and discourage further vandalism and theft.
The stolen tombstone became the inspiration for the World's Richest Tombstone Race, held during Fort Sumner's Old Fort Days Celebration every June.
Somewhere in the cemetery's northeast corner (near the new entrance) lying in an unmarked grave is Joe Grant. Billy shot and killed Grant in Bob Hargrove's Saloon in January, 1880. In the cemetery's southeast corner are the marked graves of Lucien Maxwell; his wife, Luz; their son, Pete; Pete's wife, Sadie; and Lucien and Luz's daughter, Paulita. Uncle Charlie's marked grave is near the southwest corner.
The village still owns the cemetery. Admission is free, year-round.
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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