A Photograph Of Billy The Kid Finds Its Way To A California Thrift Store
Kagin’sBilly the Kid (fourth from the left) is pictured playing croquet in this tintype from 1878.
While browsing through a cardboard box of tintypes at an antique shop in Fresno, California, in 2010, Randy Guijarro picked up a photo of a group of people playing croquet. He purchased it along with two other pictures for $2 simply because he liked how they looked, but he didn’t expect them to be more than trinkets.
However, after examining the tintype of the croquet players with a magnifying glass, Guijarro recognized one of the figures. As he told The Guardian in 2015, “You could put a Winchester rifle in his hands. It was the hat, the stance, him leaning on a croquet stick. I thought, my Lord, it’s Billy the Kid.”
Billy the Kid was an infamous American outlaw, but there was only one known photo of him in existence. Could Guijarro really have found a second one?
Kagin’sA closer view of the tintype. This is just the second photo of Billy the Kid in known existence.
Guijarro and his wife, Linda, realized that the other people in the photo were members of Billy the Kid’s gang, the Regulators. They reached out to Kagin’s Inc., a numismatics firm in California, and experts there began working to authenticate the thrift store artifact.
David McCarthy, the senior numismatist at Kagin’s, said in a statement: “When we first saw the photograph, we were understandably skeptical — an original Billy the Kid is the Holy Grail of Western Americana… Simple resemblance is not enough in a case like this — a team of experts had to be assembled to address each and every detail in the photo.”
McCarthy continued, “After more than a year of methodical study including my own inspection of the site, there is now overwhelming evidence of the image’s authenticity.” The firm determined that the photo had been taken in Chaves County, New Mexico, in 1878, perhaps at a wedding.
They also determined that it could be worth up to $5 million.
