Billy the Kid Photo Sells for $2 million in Denver

The NY Daily News reports on the sale of an 1879 or 1880 tintype photo of Billy the Kid.  According to the article the photo is believed to have been taken outside a saloon at For Sumner, NM.  The photo was estiamted to sell for $400,000.00, and was purchased by a Florida collector.

The NY Daily News reports on the sale 

The photograph, believed to have been taken outside a saloon at Fort Sumner, New Mexico in either 1879 or 1880, was expected to fetch only as much as $400,000.

In the photo, Billy the Kid is seen with his 1873 Winchester carbine in one hand and a Colt revolver at his hip.

"It shows the Kid as he might have looked if we ran into him out on the trail between Lincoln and Fort Sumner," Bob McCubbin, a collector of rare photographs, told the Denver Post.

Billy the Kid gave the image to a friend, Dan Dedrick, and the tintype has been owned by his descendants, the Upham family, ever since. It has only been publicly displayed during the 1980s at a museum in Lincoln County, N.M.

Tintypes were an early form of photography that used metal plates. They are reverse images, and the Billy the Kid tintype led to the mistaken belief that the gunman was a lefty.

To read the complete article, click HERE.

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