The rumor reached Pat Garrett by the spring of 1881, and it was the kind of gossip a sheriff could not ignore. Paulita Maxwell, the teenage sister of the man whose bedroom Billy the Kid would die in, was said to be carrying the outlaw’s child. If the talk was true, it might explain how Garrett knew exactly where to look for the Kid when he rode into Fort Sumner in July. One of Billy’s own friends, Vicente Otero, would later claim that Maxwell did not want his sister to marry Billy, and that was why he told Garrett where the Kid was hiding.

The idea that Pete Maxwell quietly worked with the sheriff to rid himself of an unwanted suitor was not far-fetched at all. People at Fort Sumner were actively feeding information to Garrett, including nearby ranchers. Maybe Pete simply disliked the notion of a known fugitive courting his sister, or perhaps he feared Billy meant to take her away entirely. Either way, Billy the Kid was dead within the hour of that night’s meeting, and the question of whether he left a child behind would outlive everyone involved.

Billy was only twenty-one when he died, possibly younger, and for the better part of three years he had been running with the young women of Fort Sumner. From that simple fact, a persistent legend was born. Every so often, someone turns up claiming to be his descendant. The short answer to the question is no: there are no birth records, no baptisms, nothing to indicate Billy the Kid ever fathered a child.

Yet at least two stories keep the question alive, and both are worth examining closely. To understand the first claim, one has to understand the Maxwell family. They were not merely residents of Fort Sumner; for all intents and purposes, they were Fort Sumner. Paulita’s father, Lucien Maxwell, had at one point owned the largest private land grant in the entire country, nearly two million acres.

In 1870, he sold most of it and purchased an abandoned army post known as Fort Sumner, then moved his family into the old officers’ quarters. They did not come alone. A couple of hundred people who had worked for Maxwell up on the Cimarron, mostly Hispanic families, joined them. When Lucien died in 1875, his son Pete, known to the locals as Pedro, got the run of the place.

A few years later, after the Lincoln County War, Billy the Kid showed up. Billy spent a great deal of time at Fort Sumner and came to know its people well, especially Pete’s sister Paulita. According to historian Frederick Nolan in his book The West of Billy the Kid, rumors circulated in 1881 that Paulita was carrying Billy’s child. That gossip eventually worked its way to Pat Garrett.

If true, it could explain a great deal about how Garrett knew to look for Billy at Fort Sumner in the first place. But the question of whether Paulita actually bore Billy’s child has never been settled. She married a man named Jose Jaramillo in January 1882, about six months after Billy’s death. Her first known child, Rita Adelina Jaramillo, was not born until 1884.

Could she have had another child a few years earlier that the records do not show? At least one historian thought so. The late Drew Gomber, writing in True West magazine in an article titled Did Paulita Maxwell bear Billy the Kid’s child? , 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 meant when he said she died at about sixteen is unclear. As far as the known records go, Paulita had two daughters, and both lived very long lives; one was still alive in the 1970s.

The 1885 territorial census for New Mexico shows only Paulita, her husband Jose, and one-year-old Adelina. If she had another daughter born in late 1881 or early 1882 who lived to be sixteen, that child should appear on the same census, but she is simply not there. Gomber’s belief that Pete Maxwell was a mighty unhappy feller carries weight, though. The notion that Pete was quietly working with Garrett to get rid of Billy is not far-fetched.

It is entirely possible that he did not like the idea of a known fugitive dating his sister, or that he was worried Billy would try to take her away. There is even a story, though its source cannot be pinned down, that someone who knew Billy claimed the only reason he returned to Fort Sumner after escaping from Lincoln was to get his girlfriend, and from there they planned to leave the territory together. That detail comes with a grain of salt; no primary source has been found to support it. But it is easy to see how Pete would not have been happy with his little sister dating a killer.

Years later, in the 1920s, when Paulita was interviewed by Walter Noble Burns, she denied that there had ever even been a romance. “Billy the Kid and I were good friends, and that is all,” she said. By then she was a grandmother and a devout Catholic, and perhaps she simply did not want her grandchildren hearing salacious stories, especially one that involved having a child out of wedlock. But she said something else during that same interview that is far more interesting.

Not only did she state that Billy was a bit of a ladies’ man with different girls spread all over the place, but she also claimed the following: “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.

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If that account is accurate, Paulita Maxwell was officially claiming that somebody else at Fort Sumner had been pregnant by Billy the Kid. And when she described the night he died, she told Burns that a woman named Celsa Gutierrez screamed as one demented, that Nasaria Yerby was wild with grief, and that Abrana Garcia stood shaking her clenched fists aloft, calling down curses on Pat Garrett’s head and threatening to kill him. Those were the women of Fort Sumner, along with Delvina Maxwell, who took Billy’s death the hardest. There is a caveat, however.

Burns’s book, The Saga of Billy the Kid, came out in 1926 and turned Billy from a dead rustler into an American legend. It is a great read and a great resource, but it is not always accurate. Some have called it a work of fiction outright. 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 a few creative liberties.

The possibility of embellishment cannot be dismissed entirely. The third woman Paulita named as Billy’s lover when he was killed was, according to Burns, Celsa Gutierrez, who was not only married but also Pat Garrett’s sister-in-law. Some sources claim it was Celsa who sent Billy over to Pete Maxwell’s house on the night of his death. That detail, if true, adds another layer to an already tangled story.

Nasaria Yerby is also alleged to have been one of Billy’s lady loves, and some believe her daughter, born in 1879, was fathered by Billy the Kid. There is no documentation to back that up. The 1880 census shows both of Nasaria’s children carrying the last name Yerby. That does not necessarily mean Yerby was their father, but it is all the evidence available.

There is another reason people believe Paulita carried Billy’s child, and it comes down to her son Telesfor. A photograph of Telesfor is often pointed to as resembling Billy the Kid. The resemblance is there, perhaps, but the theory collapses on a single fact: Telesfor was not born until 1893. Unless Billy found a way to freeze sperm decades before science figured it out, there is no way he was Telesfor’s father.

The second major claim comes with an entire book behind it. Albert Garcia wrote Billy the Kid’s Kid: The Hispanic Connection, and its central premise is that Billy fathered a son with Fort Sumner resident Abrana Garcia. Their 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 much in the way of proof beyond anecdotal stories: driving out to Fort Sumner to clean up Billy’s grave, the family never wanting to talk about the great-grandfather’s origins, things of that sort. It is easy to understand why people might want to keep something like that secret, but the historical record presents serious problems. 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.

His World War I draft registration agrees. According to the Garcia family, the records were forged to hide Jose’s father’s true identity, and he was in reality born in 1876. But if Jose Garcia was really born in 1876, then Billy would have been only fourteen or fifteen at the time of conception. That is possible, but the timeline has to be considered.

Billy was in Silver City with his mother in September 1874 and remained there until he got into trouble in September of the following year and skipped town. He then drifted to Arizona, where he killed Windy Cahill in August 1877. The known timeline leaves very little room for a Fort Sumner romance during that period. The book reportedly places Billy at Fort Sumner even earlier, as far back as 1872, but that does not fit either.

Billy was living in Kansas until 1871, and according to his brother Joseph, they 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 is also the question of why anyone would forge documents for a child born in 1876, when Billy was not even an established criminal yet and nobody outside Silver City had ever heard of him. Albert Garcia believed Billy the Kid was his great-grandfather, and his family believes it too.

That deserves respect. But from a historical standpoint, without corroboration beyond family stories, the claim does not hold up. Anecdotal stories do not constitute evidence. There is always the possibility that Billy the Kid’s remains could be exhumed someday and DNA extracted, but that is unlikely to happen for a variety of reasons.

As things stand, there is no evidence that Billy left behind children other than unsubstantiated rumors. That said, Billy did get around quite a bit, so it is very possible, maybe even probable, that he fathered a child somewhere. But proof is lacking, and in history, proof is everything. For all the rumors, the records, and the family stories passed down through generations, the answer remains the same.

Paulita Maxwell may have been romantically involved with Billy the Kid, and Pete Maxwell may well have had a hand in setting him up, but there is no hard evidence that she carried his child. The women of Fort Sumner mourned him in their own ways, screaming and cursing and shaking their fists at Pat Garrett as he rode away from Pete Maxwell’s bedroom that night. Some of them may have carried more than grief.

But without documentation, without baptismal records, without census entries, the question of whether Billy the Kid left behind a child remains exactly what it has always been: a question.