At the funeral, the women of Fort Sumner did not hold back their grief or their rage. One of them, a girl named Paulita Maxwell, would carry a secret with her for the rest of her life, a secret that historians, genealogists, and fortune hunters have chased ever since. Did she carry the child of Billy the Kid? Or was she just one of the many young women who loved him and lost him in the summer of 1881?

Billy the Kid was just twenty-one years old when Pat Garrett’s bullet ended his life in a darkened bedroom at Fort Sumner. Maybe younger. For the better part of three years, he had been running with the girls out there, and every so often, someone turns up claiming to be his descendant. But the claims never quite hold up to scrutiny.

There are no birth records, no baptisms, no documents of any kind to prove that Billy the Kid left behind a child. And yet, there are at least two stories that keep the question alive, and both of them deserve a closer look. To understand what happened at Fort Sumner, you first have to understand the Maxwell family. They weren’t just some family living at the fort; they were the fort.

Paulita’s father, Lucien Maxwell, once owned the largest private land grant in the entire country, nearly two million acres. He sold most of it in 1870 and used the money to purchase an abandoned army post along the Pecos River, a place that had once been a military installation called Fort Sumner. He moved his family into the old officers’ quarters. They did not come alone.

A couple hundred people came with them, mostly Hispanic families who had worked for Maxwell up on the Cimarron. When Lucien died in 1875, his son Pete, or Pedro as the locals called him, took over the place. A few years later, after the Lincoln County War, Billy the Kid showed up. He spent a great deal of time at Fort Sumner and got to know the people there well, especially Pete’s sister, Paulita.

The question is what kind of relationship they had. According to historian Frederick Nolan in his book The West of Billy the Kid, there were rumors circulating in 1881 that Paulita was carrying Billy’s child. Those rumors eventually made their way to Pat Garrett, and if they were true, they might explain how Garrett knew to look for Billy at Fort Sumner in the first place. One of Billy’s friends, a man named Vicente Otero, would later claim that Pete Maxwell did not want his sister to marry Billy the Kid.

That was why he told Garrett where Billy was hiding. The idea that Pete was quietly working with Pat Garrett to get rid of Billy is not far-fetched at all. There is solid evidence that people at Fort Sumner were actively feeding information to Garrett, including nearby ranchers. It is entirely possible that Pete didn’t like the idea of a known fugitive dating his sister.

Or maybe he was worried that Billy would try to take her away and leave the territory. There is even a vague, unconfirmed story that Billy only returned to Fort Sumner after escaping from Lincoln to get his girlfriend, and that the two of them planned to leave New Mexico together. No primary source can be tracked down to prove that one, but either way, it is easy to see why Pete Maxwell wouldn’t be happy with his little sister dating a killer. But the rumors about Paulita still don’t answer the question of whether Billy left behind any children.

The problem is the timeline. Paulita married a man named Jose Jaramillo in January of 1882, just six months after Billy’s death. Her first known child, a daughter named Rita Adelina Jaramillo, was not born until 1884. Could she have had another child a few years earlier that the records missed?

The late historian Drew Gomber thought so. In an article published in True West magazine titled “Did Paulita Maxwell Bear Billy the Kid’s Child? “, Gomber was quoted as saying: “Paulita had a daughter, but the date of her birth has always been in doubt, and she died at about 16. Whether or not Paulita had Billy’s kid, I don’t know, but I do believe she was pregnant at the time of the kid’s death.

Her brother Pete Maxwell was a mighty unhappy feller. ”

Which daughter Gomber was referring to is unclear. As far as the records show, Paulita only had two daughters, and both of them lived into old age. One was still alive in the 1970s.

The 1885 territorial census for New Mexico lists Paulita, her husband Jose, and one-year-old Adelina. If there had been another daughter, born in late 1881 or early 1882, who lived to be sixteen, she should appear on that same census. She does not. In a town that small, where everybody knew everybody’s business, a woman giving birth to a child shortly after Billy’s death would almost certainly have left some trace, some word, some record.

But there is nothing. Years later, in the 1920s, when Paulita was interviewed by Walter Noble Burns, she flatly denied that there had ever been a romance. “Billy the Kid and I were good friends, and that is all,” she said. Of course, she was a grandmother by that point and a devout Catholic.

Maybe she simply didn’t want her grandchildren hearing salacious stories, especially ones involving a child born out of wedlock. But she did say something else during that interview that raises questions. She described Billy as a bit of a ladies’ man, claiming he had different girls spread all over the place. Then she went further: “Three girls at least in Fort Sumner were mad about him.

One is now a respected matron of Las Vegas. Another, who died long ago, had a daughter who lived to be about 8 years old and whose striking resemblance to the famous outlaw filled her mother’s heart with pride. The third was his inamorata or lover when he was killed. ”

If that account is accurate, then Paulita Maxwell was officially claiming that someone else at Fort Sumner bore Billy’s child.

There is a caveat, though. Burns wrote The Saga of Billy the Kid, a book that came out in 1926 and turned Billy from a dead rustler into an American legend. It is a great read and a valuable resource, but it is not always accurate. Burns did travel to Fort Sumner and interview people who knew Billy, but there is no way to know whether he wrote down their words verbatim or took some creative liberties.

The woman Paulita described as Billy’s lover when he was killed was, according to Burns, a married woman named Celsa Gutierrez. She also happened to be Pat Garrett’s sister-in-law. According to some sources, it was Celsa who sent Billy over to Pete’s house on the night of his death. There is another reason people think Paulita carried Billy’s child, and it has to do with her son, Telesfor.

A photograph of Telesfor has fooled a great many people over the years. The resemblance to Billy the Kid is striking. But the math doesn’t work. Telesfor wasn’t born until 1893, twelve years after Billy died.

Unless Billy found a way to freeze sperm decades before science made it possible, he could not possibly be Telesfor’s father. So when it comes to Paulita Maxwell, all we have are rumors. It is entirely likely that she and Billy were romantically involved, and it wouldn’t be surprising if Pete Maxwell had something to do with setting Billy up. But there is no hard evidence that Paulita ever carried Billy’s child.

Paulita’s interview with Burns revealed more than just the rumors about herself. She described the night Billy died in vivid detail. She said Celsa Gutierrez screamed as one demented. A woman named Nasaria Yerby was wild with grief.

Another woman, Abrana Garcia, stood there shaking her clenched fists aloft, calling down curses on Pat Garrett’s head and threatening to kill him. These were the women of Fort Sumner, along with Delvina Maxwell, who took Billy’s death the hardest. Nasaria Yerby is also alleged to have been one of Billy’s lovers. Some believe her daughter, born in 1879, was fathered by Billy the Kid.

But there is no documentation to support that, and the documents that do exist, namely the 1880 census, show that both of Nasaria’s children carried the last name Yerby. That doesn’t necessarily mean Yerby was their father, but it is all the evidence we have. Then there is Abrana Garcia. Her claim is the one that actually has a book behind it.

Albert Garcia wrote Billy the Kid’s Kid: The Hispanic Connection. The central premise is that Billy fathered a son with Abrana Garcia, and that son, Jose Patrocinio Garcia, was the author’s grandfather. In other words, Albert Garcia was claiming to be Billy the Kid’s great-grandson. The book does not offer hard proof, only anecdotal stories.

Albert Garcia wrote about driving out to Fort Sumner to clean up Billy’s grave, and he noted that his family never wanted to talk about his great-grandfather’s origins. It is understandable why a family might want to keep something like that secret. But the biggest problem is the record. Jose’s baptismal record shows he was born in 1886, five years after Billy’s death.

Census records from 1900 all the way up to 1930 consistently show his birth year as 1885 or 1886. So does his World War I draft registration. The Garcia family claims those records were forged to hide Jose’s father’s true identity, and that Jose was actually born in 1876. But if that’s true, Billy would have been only fourteen or fifteen at the time of conception.

That’s possible, but the timeline doesn’t make it easy. Billy was in Silver City with his mother in September of 1874. He stayed there until he got into trouble in September of 1875 and skipped town. He then drifted into Arizona, where he killed Windy Cahill in August of 1877.

There isn’t much room in that timeline for a Fort Sumner romance. The book supposedly places Billy at Fort Sumner as early as 1872, but that doesn’t work either. Billy was living in Kansas until 1871, and according to his brother Joseph, the family spent time in Colorado before moving south to New Mexico. The earliest he can be placed in New Mexico is when his mother married Antrim in early 1873.

There’s another problem with the forgery theory. Why would anyone go to the trouble of forging documents for a child born in 1876, when Billy wasn’t even an established criminal? Nobody outside of Silver City had ever heard of him at that point. The Garcia family genuinely believes that Billy the Kid was their ancestor.

Albert Garcia believed it, and his family believes it to this day. That deserves respect. But from a historical standpoint, if all you have are family stories and no corroboration, you don’t have much of a claim. Anecdotal stories aren’t evidence.

There’s always a chance that Billy will be exhumed one day and DNA extracted, but that’s not likely for a variety of reasons. As things currently stand, there is really no evidence that Billy the Kid left behind any children, only unsubstantiated rumors. That said, Billy did get around quite a bit. It is very possible, maybe even probable, that he fathered a child somewhere along the way.

We just don’t have proof. At the end of the day, when you’re talking about history, you have to have proof. So the question remains open. Billy the Kid was young, charming, and loved by women across the territory.

On the night he died, several of those women mourned him openly and violently. Whatever secrets they carried with them, they took to their graves. And the descendants who claim Billy the Kid as their ancestor will keep making their case.

But history demands evidence, and so far, the proof just isn’t there.