A Belle of Old Fort Sumner

An unpublished manuscript by Walter Noble Burns offers revelations to the biographer’s groundbreaking account of outlaw Billy the Kid’s life.

Mark Lee Gardner

Walter Noble Burns was onto something. A 56-year-old Chicago journalist, Burns had become intrigued by a long-dead and largely forgotten outlaw named Billy the Kid. He suspected the Kid’s bloody career might make a good story. So, in the summer of 1923, Burns traveled to far-off New Mexico, hoping to find and interview old-timers who had known the gunslinger. The three-month trip could not have gone better. Burns located several of the Kid’s associates and thrilled at their vivid and stirring reminiscences. Perhaps his biggest catch was Paulita Maxwell Jaramillo, a woman whom several informants singled out as the Kid’s lover and the sole reason for the outlaw’s fateful return to Fort Sumner after his notorious Lincoln County jail escape in the spring of 1881. Soon after Burns returned to Chicago, he completed two articles based on his New Mexico interviews. One told the story of the Lincoln County War, primarily through the words of Susan McSween Barber, whose first husband, attorney Alexander McSween, was one of that deadly feud’s protagonists. The second article focused on the Kid’s final exploits. It was also the story of Jaramillo, who narrates the Kid’s tale. Burns titled the article, “A Belle of Old Fort Sumner.” Curiously, Burns’s two articles never appeared in print. A likely explanation is that Burns realized he had the makings of a book; he submitted a book proposal on the Kid to Doubleday, Page & Co. in October 1923. Three years later, his seminal The Saga of Billy the Kid appeared, becoming an immediate bestseller and making the Kid a household name for all time. What of those two articles? Burns recycled much of the information for his book, but he wrapped the article typescripts in brown paper, tied the package with a string and stored them away. There they remained until a cache of Burns manuscripts surfaced in an online auction in 2017. Because Burns’s New Mexico interview notes do not seem to have survived, these articles, with their long quotations and written while these tales were still swirling in his mind, may be the closest we will get to the actual words said by Barber and Jaramillo—and perhaps even the words said by the Kid. In the article published here, Burns gives us Jaramillo’s version of the Kid’s Lincoln jail escape, which she claimed as the “true one.” Yet she wasn’t even in Lincoln at the time, so where did she get her account? Only the Kid would have known some of the details she relates. On the other hand, Burns may have created a fiction, using Jaramillo to tell the story as a literary device. Scholars have long questioned Burns’s quoted material in his Kid biography, surmising it contains a good deal of embellishment. (The only changes made are fixing typos, adding paragraph breaks, clarifying punctuation and correcting names to conform to accepted spellings.) A keen-eyed reader of both The Saga of Billy the Kid and the following article will find thought-provoking discrepancies, raising more questions that cannot be easily answered. Even so, Burns was a masterful storyteller, and his first crack at writing the Kid’s story provides us with a fascinating look at the beginnings of a true epic...MORE