Billy the Kid Bibliography — The Collector’s Authority Guide

Billy the Kid (born William Henry McCarty Jr., ca. 1859; died Fort Sumner, New Mexico, July 14, 1881) is the most written-about figure in New Mexico history and one of the most written-about individuals in all of American Western literature. The bibliography runs to hundreds of titles, but the collecting canon is much tighter: a handful of books from 1882 through the present constitute the authoritative record of the Kid, the Lincoln County War, and the world that produced him. Understanding which books matter, which editions matter, and which copies are actually rare is the practical work of this guide.

The Billy the Kid literature divides into three distinct periods. The first period (1882–1920) is dominated by a single book: Pat Garrett’s The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid (Santa Fe, 1882), ghost-written by Ash Upson, which is both the primary source closest in time to the events and one of the rarest New Mexico imprints. The second period (1926–1970) is the age of romantic mythology, inaugurated by Walter Noble Burns’ The Saga of Billy the Kid (Doubleday, 1926) and generating the cultural template for virtually every film, novel, and play about the Kid that followed. The third period (1970–present) is the scholarly reconstruction: Robert Utley, Frederick Nolan, Leon Metz, and others working from primary documents to strip away the legend and recover the historical record.

For New Mexico collectors, estate librarians, and anyone who has found a collection of Southwest and Western Americana in an Albuquerque or Santa Fe estate: Billy the Kid books are a frequent find, and the tier spread between a cloth-bound reading copy of the Utley biography and a genuine 1882 Garrett in original wrappers is enormous. This guide covers the complete collecting market.

Last verified May 2026 · Original research by Josh Eldred

The Lincoln County War — the historical context

Billy the Kid bibliography and historical books are sought-after collectibles, with early biographical accounts and historical studies commanding strong prices among Western Americana collectors. No Billy the Kid book is fully intelligible without understanding the Lincoln County War (1878), the range war that made him famous. Lincoln County in 1878 was the largest county in the United States by land area — encompassing what is now a dozen New Mexico counties, stretching from the Mescalero Apache reservation to the Texas state line. The county’s commercial and political life was dominated by L.G. Murphy and Company (known as “The House”), the general store and supply monopoly operated by Lawrence G. Murphy and later by James J. Dolan and John H. Riley. The House controlled the county’s economy through its contracts to supply beef to the Mescalero Apache agency and to Fort Stanton, and through its credit relationships with the area’s ranching population.

The challenge to this monopoly came from John Henry Tunstall (1853–1878), a young English rancher and merchant from a wealthy English family who arrived in Lincoln County in 1876 and established a rival store and bank in the town of Lincoln, backed financially by Alexander A. McSween (a Scottish-Canadian attorney who had been Tunstall’s legal adviser) and by the cattle baron John Chisum of the Jinglebob Ranch on the Pecos River. The Murphy-Dolan faction viewed the Tunstall-McSween-Chisum alliance as an existential threat; the alliance viewed the Murphy-Dolan monopoly as a corrupt obstacle to the county’s economic development.

The war began on February 18, 1878, when deputies employed by the Murphy-Dolan faction and acting under a disputed writ of attachment shot and killed John Henry Tunstall on the road between his ranch and Lincoln. Tunstall’s employees, including the young William H. Bonney (who called himself Billy Bonney and would later be known as Billy the Kid), formed a group called “the Regulators” with the explicit stated purpose of avenging Tunstall’s murder. The Regulators — operating under a disputed legal commission from Lincoln County Justice of the Peace John B. Wilson — killed at least four men associated with the Tunstall killing in February and March 1878, including Sheriff William Brady and his deputy George Hindman in the town of Lincoln on April 1, 1878.

The war culminated in the Five-Day Battle at Lincoln (July 15–19, 1878): a sustained firefight in which the Regulators and their allies, including McSween and his household, were besieged in the McSween house by the Murphy-Dolan faction reinforced by Fort Stanton soldiers in an extralegal deployment. On the night of July 19 the McSween house was set on fire; McSween and several of his men were killed attempting to escape. Billy the Kid and a handful of others escaped the burning building under fire, marking the effective end of the organized Regulator resistance and the end of McSween as a force in the county.

After the Five-Day Battle, Billy the Kid continued operating in Lincoln County as a cattle thief and fugitive, developing the outlaw career that would eventually lead Governor Lew Wallace to put a price on his head, Pat Garrett to be elected sheriff with the specific mandate to capture or kill the Kid, and Garrett to finally kill him at Fort Sumner on July 14, 1881. The Lincoln County War and its aftermath generated the primary documentation for every major Billy the Kid book: the court records, military dispatches, newspaper accounts, and governor’s correspondence that are the raw material of the Nolan documentary history and the Utley biography.

The 1882 Garrett — the foundational text

No Billy the Kid book is rarer, more important, or more consequential than The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid, the Noted Desperado of the Southwest (New Mexican Printing and Publishing Company, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1882). It is the first book about Billy the Kid, published in the year following his death, by the sheriff who killed him. It is also, by nearly any measure, the rarest significant New Mexico book imprint outside of Spanish colonial publications and the pre-territorial period.

The ghost-writer: Ash Upson

Marshall Ashmun Upson (1828–1894) is one of the great unacknowledged figures in New Mexico literary history. Born in Connecticut, trained as a printer and journalist, he spent the last three decades of his life drifting through the Southwest as a postmaster, newspaper stringer, and occasional ranch hand. He was present in Roswell, New Mexico, in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and knew Pat Garrett well. The question of how much personal knowledge Upson had of Billy the Kid himself is unresolved: his preface to the Authentic Life claims direct acquaintance, but subsequent scholarship has been skeptical of the more colorful personal anecdotes, particularly those concerning the Kid’s early childhood in New York City (now known to be a fabrication: the Kid grew up in Indiana and Kansas before arriving in New Mexico via the Santa Fe Trail corridor). What Upson genuinely contributed to the book is a prose style — ornate, vernacular, self-consciously literary by frontier standards — that gives the Authentic Life its distinctive texture and that would influence the subsequent Billy the Kid narrative tradition.

The literary relationship between Garrett and Upson is formally acknowledged on the extended title page, which credits Upson as the compiler and writer. But the book is conventionally cited under Garrett’s name, and the commercial and political motive behind the book was Garrett’s: he was running for re-election as Lincoln County sheriff, had been criticized for the circumstances of the killing (shooting the Kid in the dark, without warning, in Pete Maxwell’s bedroom at Fort Sumner), and needed a public document establishing the justice and necessity of his action. The Authentic Life serves that political function while also genuinely documenting events, conversations, and circumstances that would otherwise be lost.

Original printed wrappers vs. cloth binding: the priority question

The bibliographic evidence on binding priority for the 1882 Garrett is incomplete, and the scholarly consensus is less settled than it would be for a major trade publication from a major press. The printed-wrapper state is treated as primary by most Western Americana authorities, on the grounds that the printed-wrapper format was standard for New Mexican Printing and Publishing Company productions, that the wrapper state is more consistent with the commercial expectations of a small-print-run territorial publication, and that the cloth-bound copies may represent either a simultaneous variant for a different commercial market (bookstore sale vs. subscription) or a later rebinding of originally wrapped copies. Buyers should be aware that the priority question is genuinely unresolved and that some authorities treat both states as simultaneous variants rather than first-issue / second-issue copies. The practical implication: both states are rare; neither should be valued as demonstrably primary without specialist consultation on the specific copy.

The University of Oklahoma Press facsimile reprints

The University of Oklahoma Press published a facsimile reprint of the Authentic Life in 1954 (the first paperback reprint with scholarly introduction by Jeff C. Dykes) and has issued subsequent reprint editions. These are easily identified by their copyright pages, which carry the OU Press imprint and the facsimile or reprint designation. A facsimile reprint is a legitimate reading and reference copy; it is not a collector object in the sense that the 1882 original is. Jeff C. Dykes (1900–1986) was a pioneering Western Americana bibliographer whose Billy the Kid: The Bibliography of a Legend (University of New Mexico Press, 1952) remains the most comprehensive bibliography of the Billy the Kid literature and is itself a collector target in first edition.

Found old books in an estate or attic? Text me a photo at 702-496-4214 and I'll tell you what I see.

Walter Noble Burns — The Saga of Billy the Kid (1926)

The distance from the 1882 Garrett to the 1926 Burns is not just forty-four years; it is the distance between the documentary record and the legend. Walter Noble Burns (1872–1932) was a Chicago newspaper reporter and popular historian who came to New Mexico in the early 1920s with the specific project of researching the Billy the Kid story for a popular book. He interviewed survivors — some genuine, some of doubtful memory — toured Lincoln and Fort Sumner, read the Garrett book, and assembled a narrative that was, in Burns’s own understanding, as much a work of creative reconstruction as a work of history. The result, The Saga of Billy the Kid (Doubleday, Page and Company, Garden City, New York, 1926), became the most influential popular Billy the Kid narrative ever written.

Burns’s significance is cultural rather than documentary. He did not do primary archival research in the modern sense; he relied heavily on Garrett’s 1882 narrative (which he treats as authoritative), on the oral tradition still circulating in the Lincoln County area in the 1920s, and on his journalist’s skill for vivid scene reconstruction. The book presents the Kid as a romantic hero — brave, loyal, fatalistic, unjustly persecuted by the forces of the Murphy-Dolan commercial empire. It popularized the episode of Billy the Kid’s escape from the Lincoln County Courthouse (April 28, 1881), in which the Kid killed deputies J.W. Bell and Bob Olinger and rode out of Lincoln while still in leg irons, as the central heroic event of the legend. It is still in print, still widely read, and still the first book that most general readers encounter on the subject.

The cultural afterlife of the 1926 Burns is considerable. King Vidor’s 1930 MGM film Billy the Kid was directly inspired by Burns’s book. Aaron Copland’s 1938 ballet Billy the Kid, with a libretto by Lincoln Kirstein, draws on the Burns characterization. Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (with Bob Dylan’s score) works within the Burns romantic tradition even as it adds revisionist layers. The Burns Billy the Kid — young, doomed, loyal to his friends, a casualty of frontier capitalism — is the template for virtually every subsequent creative treatment of the subject.

Miguel Antonio Otero — The Real Billy the Kid (1936)

The Otero volume is significant for a reason that goes beyond its direct content: it represents the son of the territorial governor making a formal case for the Kid’s humanity and the justice of the Tunstall-McSween cause. Governor Otero Sr. was a Republican political figure with close ties to the federal administration in Washington; his son’s 1936 book therefore has an implicit political dimension — a prominent New Mexico family endorsing the revisionist view of the Lincoln County War that Burns had popularized. The book also preserves interviews and oral testimony from Lincoln County participants that Nolan and Utley drew on in their later documentary work.

Maurice Garland Fulton and the documentary tradition

Maurice Garland Fulton (1877–1955) was an English professor at New Mexico Military Institute (NMMI) in Roswell who spent decades assembling the most comprehensive primary-source archive of Lincoln County War documentation then in private hands. His plan was a definitive documentary history of the war, but he died before completing the manuscript. The incomplete manuscript was edited by Robert N. Mullin and published posthumously as History of the Lincoln County War (University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1968). This is an important but under-recognized transitional document in the Billy the Kid bibliography: the first serious attempt at a documentary history, predating Nolan by 24 years. The University of Arizona Press first edition (1968) in hardcover is the collector target; subsequent paperback editions are reading copies.

Fulton’s archive — the documents he assembled over decades of research — eventually passed to the University of Arizona library and became part of the foundation of the scholarly literature. Frederick Nolan acknowledges Fulton’s work extensively in his own documentary history (1992). Collectors who encounter the 1968 University of Arizona Press Fulton in hardcover with the original dust jacket have a Tier Two piece that is often underpriced in estate contexts because it lacks the name recognition of the Burns or Utley volumes.

Robert Utley — Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life (1989)

Robert Marshall Utley (born 1929) is the most authoritative scholarly voice in the Billy the Kid literature, and his 1989 University of Nebraska Press biography is the book that displaced all previous narrative treatments as the default scholarly reference. The title’s concision is deliberate: “Short and Violent Life” is a corrective to the Burns tradition of romanticized heroism, insisting on the documentary reality of a young man who died at approximately 21 after less than three years of significant criminal activity.

Utley’s research base is the New Mexico territorial archive (now held by the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives in Santa Fe), Lincoln County court records, military records from Fort Stanton and the Department of the Missouri at the National Archives, the Lew Wallace Papers (Indiana Historical Society), the New Mexico governor’s correspondence, and the surviving newspaper record — primarily the Mesilla Valley Independent, the Las Vegas Gazette, and the Santa Fe New Mexican. He supplemented the documentary record with a comprehensive survey of the secondary literature, including material available at the UNM Center for Southwest Research and the research done by Frederick Nolan (whom he credits generously as a collaborator and consultant). The result is 302 pages that give the reader the fullest picture of the historical Kid the documentary record currently supports.

Utley’s companion volume, High Noon in Lincoln: Violence on the Western Frontier (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1987, ISBN 0-8263-1001-5), focuses specifically on the Lincoln County War context rather than on the Kid as an individual. Published two years before the biography, it is the more analytically focused of the two books: its argument is that the Lincoln County War was not primarily a conflict between good and evil (the Burns interpretation) but rather a contest between competing commercial interests in which both sides committed violence and both sides operated outside the law. The University of New Mexico Press first edition in hardcover is the collector target; subsequent paperback editions are common. The two Utley volumes are best held together as a set.

Not sure whether to sell, donate, or keep? Call or text me at 702-496-4214 — I'll walk you through it.

Frederick Nolan — the documentary historian

Frederick Nolan (born 1931, British) is the Billy the Kid scholar who did the most comprehensive primary-source archival work of any researcher in the field. He spent decades in archives in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, England (for Tunstall family correspondence), and Washington D.C. (National Archives military records), assembling a documentary record that dwarfs in scope anything Utley, Fulton, or any previous researcher had produced. His two major contributions to the collecting canon are complementary in method and reach.

Nolan also produced The Billy the Kid Reader (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), an anthology of primary and secondary sources on the Kid, and edited and annotated Maurice Garland Fulton’s incomplete manuscript as History of the Lincoln County War (University of Arizona Press, 1968) — the first in a series of editorial and archival contributions that established his place in the field. The complete Nolan library (the two Oklahoma Press titles, the Arizona Press Fulton edition, and the Reader) constitutes the most important documentary component of any serious Billy the Kid collecting library.

Leon Metz and the companion scholarly literature

The tintype photograph — the seven-figure auction record image

The only authenticated photograph of William H. Bonney is a tintype, approximately 2.5 by 3.5 inches in format, showing a young man standing with a Winchester Model 1873 carbine in his right hand and a Colt Single Action Army revolver in a holster on his left side. He wears a gray hat, a vest, and a kerchief; the background is a plain studio backdrop. The image was taken at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, approximately 1879–1880.

The tintype sold at Brian Lebel’s Old West Show and Auction in Denver, Colorado, on June 25, 2011, for a seven-figure auction record — a price that made it the most expensive photograph at auction in the world at that date. The buyer was William Koch, a Florida collector. The provenance runs from the Fort Sumner period through several private New Mexico and western ownerships before entering the collector market in the 20th century.

The authentication rests on: the photographic technology (wet-plate collodion tintype, consistent with the 1878–1882 period and inconsistent with a later forgery); the documentary record placing Bonney at Fort Sumner during the period; contemporaneous physical descriptions of the Kid (notably his prominent front teeth, slightly crossed, visible in the image); and the oral provenance tradition. Mainstream scholarship accepts the tintype as authentic; a small minority of researchers has argued for additional forensic authentication. No second authenticated photograph of the Kid has been identified, despite periodic claims.

For book collectors, the tintype’s significance is that its reproduction in Billy the Kid books is itself a bibliographic datapoint. The Burns 1926 first edition reproduces the tintype as a frontispiece; so does the Utley 1989 first edition. The quality of the reproduction, the accuracy of the caption, and whether the caption has been updated to note the 2011 auction result can all help date a specific printing. Nolan’s The West of Billy the Kid (1998) contains the highest-quality book reproduction of the tintype available in print form and is the reference standard for the image.

Fort Sumner — where the story ends

Fort Sumner (De Baca County, southeastern New Mexico) has two distinct historical identities that overlap in the Billy the Kid story. The first: it was the site of the Bosque Redondo reservation (1863–1868), where approximately 9,000 Navajo and 400 Mescalero Apache were held by the U.S. Army under General James H. Carleton following the forced march known as the Long Walk. The fort was closed as a military installation in 1869 after the failure of the Bosque Redondo experiment, and its buildings were converted to a private ranch by Lucien Maxwell (of the Maxwell Land Grant).

The second identity: by the late 1870s, Fort Sumner was a small civilian community on the Pecos River, and Billy the Kid used the area as his primary base of operations between 1878 and 1881. The Kid was at Fort Sumner when Pat Garrett killed him on July 14, 1881, in Pete Maxwell’s bedroom — an event described in detail in both the Garrett 1882 narrative and the Utley 1989 biography. The Kid is buried in the Fort Sumner cemetery alongside Tom O’Folliard and Charlie Bowdre, two companions who had been killed earlier by Garrett’s posse.

The Billy the Kid Museum in Fort Sumner (open seasonally) holds artifacts, photographs, and documents related to the Kid and the Lincoln County War period, including reproduction and original material from the Fort Sumner era. The Old Fort Sumner Museum at the Maxwell ranch site is a separate operation. The grave site in the Fort Sumner cemetery, marked by a carved stone headstone (a replacement of earlier markers damaged by souvenir hunters), is maintained as a public site.

Have books you're ready to part with? I offer free pickup across Albuquerque — call 702-496-4214.

The Brushy Bill Roberts controversy

The most persistent alternative history in the Billy the Kid literature is the claim that Garrett did not kill the Kid at Fort Sumner in 1881 and that the Kid lived on under the alias Ollie P. (“Brushy Bill”) Roberts. Roberts, a Texas cattle hand living in Hico, Texas, made this claim publicly in 1948 to a Hico attorney named William V. Morrison, who had been researching the “Billy the Kid survived” oral tradition in the Southwest. Morrison arranged a November 1950 meeting between Roberts and New Mexico Governor Thomas Mabry in Santa Fe, at which Roberts petitioned for a pardon for Billy the Kid’s crimes. Roberts died in December 1950, a few weeks after the meeting, without receiving the pardon or seeing the question resolved.

The Billy the Kid survivalist claim generated a specific literary sub-genre. The key titles for collectors:

The Roberts claim has been periodically revived by journalists, documentary filmmakers, and local Texas boosters. A 2003 legal effort by Lincoln County Sheriff Tom Sullivan and Capitan, NM mayor Steve Sederwall to authorize DNA testing of the Fort Sumner grave site and Catherine Antrim’s Silver City grave (the Kid’s mother) failed in court when a New Mexico judge ruled the exhumation effort legally insufficient. Billy the Kid scholars — Utley, Nolan, Metz, and others — uniformly reject the Roberts claim on evidentiary grounds: the contemporaneous newspaper accounts of the killing, the Fort Sumner community’s testimony, and the documentary record supporting Garrett’s account are considered more than sufficient. The survivalist literature is a component of the collecting canon as cultural history rather than as documentation of what actually happened.

The three-tier collector market

The Billy the Kid collecting market divides cleanly into three tiers by rarity, scholarly importance, and current secondary-market value. Understanding the tier structure is the first requirement for any estate librarian, appraiser, or collector working with a New Mexico or Western Americana book collection that includes Billy the Kid material.

Tier One — the genuinely rare

Tier One contains a single title: Pat Garrett’s The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid (New Mexican Printing and Publishing Company, Santa Fe, 1882). An original copy in original printed wrappers with all leaves present and in clean condition is an exceptional Western Americana object and should not be transacted without specialist handling. The appropriate venues are major auction houses specializing in Western Americana and rare books — Heritage Auctions (Dallas), Swann Galleries (New York), and Christie’s or Sotheby’s Books and Manuscripts department for copies of exceptional provenance or condition. Established rare-book dealers in Western Americana (Arizona Book Fairs, the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America member dealers) are appropriate secondary-market channels. Estate attorneys and family members handling New Mexico estates who encounter what appears to be a small, battered pamphlet-bound volume from 1882 with the New Mexican Printing and Publishing Company imprint should treat it as a significant find and seek specialist evaluation before any disposition decision. The book collection insurance guide covers how to document and protect high-value finds while awaiting specialist appraisal.

Tier Two — significant and collectible

Tier Two includes titles that are genuinely collectible and that require first-edition identification before their value can be assessed:

• Walter Noble Burns, The Saga of Billy the Kid (Doubleday, Page and Company, 1926): first-edition first-printing (Doubleday, Page imprint, not Doubleday Doran) with original dust jacket is a significant piece. Jacketless firsts are collectable at a discount. Later Doubleday Doran or Grosset and Dunlap printings are reading copies.
• Miguel Antonio Otero, The Real Billy the Kid (Rufus Rockwell Wilson, 1936): the only Rufus Rockwell Wilson edition; scarce and undervalued. The collector target is a clean copy with the original binding intact.
• Maurice Garland Fulton, History of the Lincoln County War, edited by Robert Mullin (University of Arizona Press, 1968): the first-edition hardcover with dust jacket. The book is less well known than it should be and is frequently underpriced in estate contexts.
• Jeff C. Dykes, Billy the Kid: The Bibliography of a Legend (University of New Mexico Press, 1952): the foundational bibliography of the Kid literature, limited print run, significant for bibliographic collectors.
• C.L. Sonnichsen and William V. Morrison, Alias Billy the Kid (University of New Mexico Press, 1955): primary document of the Brushy Bill Roberts tradition; first edition with both authors’ signatures (both pools now closed) is exceptional.

Tier Three — scholarly reference copies

Tier Three titles have collector value in clean first-edition hardcover but operate in a different market range than Tier One and Two pieces. They are the bread-and-butter of the Billy the Kid collecting library — the books that document, rather than constitute, the legend:

• Robert Utley, Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life (University of Nebraska Press, 1989): hardcover first edition with original dust jacket. Bison Books paperback editions are reading copies.
• Robert Utley, High Noon in Lincoln (University of New Mexico Press, 1987): hardcover first edition with dust jacket. Companion to the biography.
• Frederick Nolan, The Lincoln County War: A Documentary History (University of Oklahoma Press, 1992): hardcover first edition with dust jacket.
• Frederick Nolan, The West of Billy the Kid (University of Oklahoma Press, 1998): hardcover first edition with dust jacket. The visual reference standard.
• Leon Metz, Pat Garrett: The Story of a Western Lawman (University of Oklahoma Press, 1974): hardcover first edition with dust jacket. Metz pool closed 2015.
• Donald Cline, Alias Billy the Kid (University of New Mexico Press, 1998): hardcover first edition. Not to be confused with the Sonnichsen / Morrison title of the same name (1955).

The Lincoln Historic Site and New Mexico institutional holdings

The town of Lincoln, New Mexico (Lincoln County, southeast New Mexico, on US-380 approximately 12 miles east of Carrizozo) is the most intact physical survival of the Lincoln County War landscape. Unlike most frontier-period southwestern towns, Lincoln was never significantly rebuilt or expanded after the 1880s; the street it preserves — the single main road that was the town of Lincoln in 1878 — retains most of its original buildings. The Lincoln Historic Site, administered by the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division (part of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs), encompasses the old Lincoln County Courthouse (from which Billy the Kid made his famous April 1881 escape), the Tunstall Store and Museum, the Wortley Hotel, and several other period buildings.

The Lincoln County Heritage Trust manages additional properties and the research archives associated with the Lincoln Historic Site. The archives hold primary documents related to the Lincoln County War, photographs, and a significant reference library of Billy the Kid and Lincoln County War secondary literature. Researchers with serious primary-source needs should contact the site directly for archival access.

New Mexico’s university collections add significant depth:

• University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research (Albuquerque): holds the Maurice Garland Fulton Papers (the archival collection that formed the basis of Fulton’s incomplete documentary history), the Robert N. Mullin Papers, and significant Billy the Kid and Lincoln County War secondary literature. The Center for Southwest Research is the primary research library for New Mexico history and the correct institutional resource for collectors and researchers needing primary-source comparison material.
• New Mexico State University Library Special Collections (Las Cruces): holds the Rio Grande Historical Collections, which include materials relating to the Lincoln County area, Pat Garrett’s later career in Dona Ana County, and the territorial-period Mesilla Valley context. The Billy the Kid and Garrett connection to southern New Mexico (the Mesilla trial of 1881, where the Kid was convicted and sentenced to hang before his escape from Lincoln) makes the NMSU collections relevant to the broader research record.
• New Mexico State Records Center and Archives (Santa Fe): holds the New Mexico Territorial Archives, including the governor’s correspondence from the Lew Wallace period (1878–1881) that documents the Lincoln County War from the territorial executive’s perspective. The Lew Wallace Papers are split between New Mexico and Indiana (Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis); the New Mexico component covers his service as territorial governor.
• Fray Angélico Chávez History Library (Santa Fe): holds the New Mexico Historical Review back files and significant secondary literature on New Mexico history including Billy the Kid material. The library is the research arm of the Palace of the Governors and the New Mexico History Museum.

Closed and open signing pools

All of the major Billy the Kid authors except Robert Utley and Frederick Nolan have closed signing pools:

• Pat Garrett: died February 29, 1908. Pool closed 1908. A signed Pat Garrett item — a letter, a document, a copy of the Authentic Life with a Garrett signature — is an extraordinary collector’s object. Authentication for Garrett signatures requires specialist expertise; the signed books authentication guide covers the general framework, though a Garrett signature demands ABAA-member dealer or major-auction-house specialist review.
• Ash Upson: died October 6, 1894. Pool closed 1894. Signed Upson material is essentially unknown in the market.
• Walter Noble Burns: died April 15, 1932. Pool closed 1932. Signed Burns first editions (1926 Doubleday) are rare.
• Miguel Antonio Otero Jr.: died 1944. Pool closed 1944. Signed copies of the 1936 Rufus Rockwell Wilson edition are rare.
• Maurice Garland Fulton: died 1955. Pool closed 1955.
• Jeff C. Dykes: died 1986. Pool closed 1986.
• C.L. Sonnichsen: died 1991. Pool closed 1991.
• Leon Metz: died 2015. Pool closed 2015.
• Robert Utley: alive as of 2026. Pool open.
• Frederick Nolan: alive as of 2026 (verify status). Pool nominally open.

I pick up books for free anywhere in the metro area. Call 702-496-4214 to schedule.

Encountering Billy the Kid books in New Mexico estates

Billy the Kid books are a frequent find in New Mexico estate libraries, particularly in collections from southeastern New Mexico (Roswell, Lincoln, Carrizozo, Alamogordo, Artesia, Lovington), the Santa Fe area, and Albuquerque. The books that appear most commonly are: the Utley paperback (Bison Books edition), the Nolan Oklahoma Press titles in paperback, regional press booklets and pamphlets published for tourist audiences at Lincoln and Fort Sumner, and — less frequently — earlier hardcover editions from the Burns and Otero era.

The practical estate-encounter protocol for each tier:

If you find a small, battered pamphlet-format book printed in Santa Fe in 1882: Stop. Do not put it in a box. Do not price it with other books. Photograph the title page, the copyright page or publication line, and the binding state (wrappers vs. cloth). Text or email those photographs to a Western Americana specialist before any other action. A genuine 1882 Garrett in original wrappers changes the trajectory of an estate disposition significantly.

If you find a 1926 Doubleday first edition of Burns: Check the copyright page for the publisher name (Doubleday, Page vs. Doubleday, Doran) and for any dust jacket. If the publisher line reads “Doubleday, Page and Company,” you have a first-edition issue copy; if there is a dust jacket, you have a potentially significant piece. Text a photo of the copyright page and the jacket (if present) to 702-496-4214 for an honest read.

If you find Utley, Nolan, Metz in hardcover with dust jackets: Straightforward Tier Three collector pieces, correctly priced and processed in the standard estate book workflow. Clean copies with unclipped jackets are the cleanest sell; paperback editions are reading copies for donation routing.

Related: Billy the Kid, the Lincoln County War & New Mexico Outlaw Literature: A Collector's Authority Guide

Related: Kit Carson Bibliography