Billy the Kid

Billy the Kid—born Henry McCarty and later known as William H. Bonney—was a teenaged ranch hand turned combatant in the Lincoln County War (1878) whose brief, turbulent life became inseparable from the town of Lincoln. Arriving in the county in 1877, he sided with the “Regulators,” a faction aligned with merchant John Tunstall and attorney Alexander McSween against the entrenched Murphy–Dolan monopoly. 

In Lincoln’s single-street settlement, he took part in the April 1, 1878 street ambush that killed Sheriff William Brady, endured the siege known as the Five-Day Battle in July 1878, and, three years later, staged his most famous exploit: the audacious 1881 jailbreak from the Lincoln County Courthouse (then the Murphy–Dolan store), during which Deputies James Bell and Robert Olinger were killed.

His legend outgrew the facts almost immediately—stoked by dime novels, frontier journalism, and Sheriff Pat Garrett’s 1882 account—casting the Kid as everything from folk hero to ruthless outlaw. Lincoln is where myth and history collide. In Lincoln, Billy the Kid is not just a story, here you can walk in his footsteps.