Is This Billy the Kid?

A new photo of a famous outlaw may have been found.

He was a gunfighter and a thief who killed as many as nine people and broke out of jail twice. Billy the Kid was one of the most notorious outlaws of the Wild West.

Billy’s real name was probably Henry McCarty, though he also went by the name William H. Bonney. He was called “the Kid” because he was just a teenager when he became a criminal. He died in 1881, at the age of 21, after a sheriff shot him in New Mexico.

Despite the Kid’s fame, only one photo of him was known to exist. But now a company claims to have found a second photo of the famous outlaw—and it has been valued at $5 million!

DETECTIVE WORK

In 2010, a man named Randy Guijarro bought three photos for $2 at an antique shop in Fresno, California. When he took a closer look at one of the photos, he thought one of the men in it might be Billy the Kid. Last year, Guijarro took the photo to Kagin’s, a company that collects and sells historical objects from the Old West.

David McCarthy, an expert at Kagin’s, agreed that the man in the photo looks like the Kid.

“But just looking alike isn’t enough,” he says.

McCarthy and his team worked for more than a year to carefully authenticate, or prove, that the image was genuine. With help from historians and photography experts, they tried to match the other men in the photo with members of the Kid’s gang.

Last month, Kagin’s announced that it had enough evidence to prove that the man in the photo was Billy the Kid. Some experts believe the photo was taken during a wedding at a ranch in New Mexico.

Kagin’s has put the photo up for sale for $5 million. If it sells for that amount, it would be the most expensive photo ever sold.

NOT SO FAST

However, some people aren’t convinced that the new photo shows the Kid. Mark Lee Gardner, a historian who wrote a book about the outlaw, is one of them. He says there aren’t any historical documents to prove without a doubt that the Kid was ever at the place in New Mexico shown in the picture.

Gardner thinks the debate over the photo is sure to continue. But he says that’s part of the fun of studying history.

“When there’s controversy,” he says, “that means history is alive.”

Billy the Kid was an outlaw a long time ago. While he was famous for being a bad guy, can you make a connection to any people who are famous? Please tell why.