Band of Gypsys: I Walked on the Same Floorboards as Billy the Kid

(please click on photos to get a good view)

Above: On the way to Fort Sumner from Lincoln, New Mexico

Above: A House in Lincoln

Lincoln, New Mexico, is a little town in the middle of the state where Billy Bonney (alias The Kid) broke out of jail while waiting to be hanged for murder. I was not up on a lot of the history of this area, other than being a fan of "Young Guns," the movie that was loosely based on his life.

However, this town is pretty much the way it was when Kid was there in the late 1800s, and it is honestly like going back to that time. I walked on the same floorboards that he and his captors walked on in the old county courthouse where he was held, and where he shot two men and escaped. The two-story building has been made into a museum, but has been restored only to the point of preventing structural decay, so it's the same walls, floors, ceilings, windows, etc., that were there at the time. There's even a bullet hole in the wall at the bottom of the steep staircase inside.

Above: Looking into courtroom from doorway at top of stairwell. The Kid shot Olinger through that window with Bell's shotgun.

Above: The original clock hanging on the courtroom wall

The top floor was divided into four rooms at the time Kid was being held in custody, but the two inside walls that made his small prison room were removed later to make the larger courtroom before the building was made into a protected state building in the 1930s. That small room was on the far-left side of the courtroom in above photo. The window is the one he used to shoot and kill Olinger from.

Above: You can just see the white marker on the ground below the window through the bottom middle pane in photo above. This marks the spot where Olinger fell.

Above: Looking out the armory room window to the spot where Bell died, having made his way down the stairs and out the back door after being shot by Kid. There is a lot of heavy energy in this room, and surprisingly very little near the window where Olinger was shot...

There are a few different stories about what actually happened the day Kid escaped. This website has an interesting account of that day here: Jailbreak at Lincoln.

Above: view from the window where Olinger was shot

The original shackles that Kid later had removed in a small town south of Lincoln are in a glass case beside the window where he shot Olinger. We later went to a small store near the courthouse and they had some postcards made up of a photo taken when some people sprayed luminol over the floors in the upstairs courthouse to see where Bell was shot because there are at least three different stories about it. There was evidence of a huge amount of blood at the top of the stairsway.