The SHOCKING Truth Behind the Gun That Killed Billy the Kid (You’ve Been Lied To)

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Dark bedroom. Fort Snar, New Mexico, July 14th, 1881.

[00:00:06]A young man steps through the doorway holding a stake knife, asking in Spanish who is there. The sheriff sitting in the shadows does not answer him. He just raises a 7 and 1/2 in colt and fires one shot. The young man was Billy the kid.

[00:00:23]He was somewhere between 21 and 22 years old. The sheriff was Pat Garrett, 6 and 1/2 ft tall, a former buffalo hunter who had drifted into law enforcement the way Driftwood drifts into a riverbend. The two men had been friends once back when they both worked as ranch hands in the area. Now, one of them was going to walk out of that bedroom and the other one was not. Quick pause. If you are enjoying this dive into the rusty corners of American gun history, click the like button and subscribe. It helps us bring you more untold stories. The gun Garrett used to end Billy the Kid was a Colt singleaction army serial number 55093 built in 1880. It had a 7 and 1/2 in barrel, walnut grips, and the oneline Hartford address on top. Importantly, it was chambered in 4440.

[00:01:26]Yes, 4440.

[00:01:29]Not 45 Colt, not 38, not the caliber most people think of when they picture a cowboy 6 gun. This was a Winchester Center fire cartridge originally designed for the model 1873 rifle. And a lot of frontier lawmen loved it because it meant one kind of ammunition could feed both their rifle and their pistol.

[00:01:52]The 4440 throws a 200 grain lead bullet at about 725 ft pers out of a pistol length barrel. That is modest compared to a modern 44 Magnum. But at 3 ft in a dark bedroom with a target that has no idea you are there, modest is plenty.

[00:02:14]The bullet Billy took that night punched in just above his heart and flattened out inside his chest. Modern autopsies on similar 4440 pistol loads show expansion to nearly half an inch across.

[00:02:30]Billy dropped in the doorway without a word, already dead before Garrett fired his second shot, which missed and buried itself in the wall. Here is the kicker about the gun itself. It was stolen.

[00:02:45]Well, for loined is the polite word.

[00:02:49]Garrett had taken it seven months earlier from a gang member named Billy Wilson at a place called Stinking Spring, New Mexico. Wilson was part of the kid's crew. and the posi had pinned them down inside a small rock house.

[00:03:03]When the gang finally surrendered, Garrett walked off with Wilson's Winchester rifle and his cult pistol because that is what Frontier Lawman did. 7 months later, that same pistol killed the man whose gang it came from.

[00:03:19]That is a country mile past ironic. Let me rewind. Billy the Kid was born Henry McCarti, raised in New York and New Mexico and got his nickname because he was small and babyfaced even in his late teens. He fell into the Lincoln County War in 1878, a cattle range conflict that turned into a private blood feud with dozens of killings. Billy came out of that war with a reputation and a warrant. By 1880, he had killed men. Exactly how many gets debated, but the kid himself claimed four, and legend pushed it up to 21.

[00:04:03]The truth is probably somewhere between those numbers, and some of the men he shot were lawmen.

[00:04:11]Pat Garrett got elected sheriff of Lincoln County in November of 1880, specifically to bring Billy the Kid in.

[00:04:20]The cattle king, John Chisum, wanted the kid dead, and Chisum had the money to make that happen. Garrett put together a posi of tough Texas cowboys, and rode out. In December of 1880, they cornered the kid and his crew at Fort Sumner, killed Tom Ooliard in a brief firefight, and then tracked the survivors to Stinking Spring. That was where Garrett bagged Billy, Dave Rudabah, Tom Picket, and Billy Wilson. One gang member, Charlie Boder, got shot down coming out of the rock house. The rest were hauled off in chains. Billy the Kid went to trial in Msilia in April of 1881, got convicted of murdering Sheriff William Brady, and was sentenced to hang. Two weeks before the scheduled execution, he escaped the Lincoln County Jail by shooting both of his guards, James Bell and Bob Olinger. He rode out of town with the leg irons still on his ankles, and everybody figured he would run to Mexico. Instead, he drifted back toward Fort Sumner, which was stupid, but understandable. He had friends there. He had a girl there and he had this stubborn conviction that Pat Garrett would not look for him in the one place Billy was known to hang around. He was wrong about that. On July 14th, 1881, Garrett rode into Fort Sner with two deputies, John Poe and Thomas McKini.

[00:05:54]They had heard rumors the kid was nearby. Garrett wanted to talk to Pete Maxwell, a local rancher who had known Billy since he was a teenager.

[00:06:04]Around midnight, Garrett walked into Maxwell's darkened bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed asking questions in a low voice. And at that exact moment, Billy the Kid, barefoot and in his socks, walked up the porch looking to cut himself, a piece of beef from a freshly butchered carcass hanging outside. Billy saw the two deputies on the porch, and did not recognize them in the dark. He drew his own pistol, a cult thunderer in 41 Colt, and backed into Maxwell's bedroom, asking Pete in Spanish who these strangers were. He could not see Garrett sitting on the bed. Garrett could see him. Billy was silhouetted in the doorway against the moonlight outside. Garrett drew the 4440, fired once, and the bullet was already traveling before Billy knew anyone else was in the room.

[00:07:03]Quick pause. If this is your kind of stuff, smash the like button and hit subscribe. It helps the channel a ton and lets us keep digging into these Old West deep dives. The ballistics of that shot are worth thinking about. Garrett fired from a seated position roughly 8 to 10 ft from Billy across a pitch dark room. He was aiming at a shape, not a target. The 4440 at that range would have hit with somewhere around 230 foot-lb of energy, which is not a massive number by modern standards, but plenty to drop a man in his tracks if the bullet hits the right place. And it did. The bullet entered just above Billy's heart, tore through lung tissue and a major vessel, and killed him before he hit the floor. Pete Maxwell nearly got killed, too.

[00:07:59]Garrett's second shot, fired in the panic of the moment, missed Billy entirely and was stopped by the wall an inch or two from Pete's bed. A little more on the 4440 because it matters. The cartridge was introduced by Winchester in 1873 as a rifle round, and within a few years, Colt started chambering the singleaction army in the same caliber.

[00:08:24]Cowboys loved the combo. You could carry one box of ammunition and feed both your saddle gun and your belt gun. The bullet design was a flatnse lead slug, 200 grains, sitting on a compressed charge of 40 grains of black powder. When that round hits flesh at short range, the flat nose acts almost like a soft point, smashing and expanding rather than punching a clean hole. That is a big part of why the cartridge earned a reputation as a serious manstoppper despite its modest velocity numbers.

[00:09:03]There has been a 140 plus years of debate about whether Garrett gave Billy a fair chance and whether Billy was actually armed with his thunderer or just the stake knife. Garrett wrote in his own book that Billy had both. Other witnesses said the pistol was found on the floor next to Billy's body. A few conspiracy-minded folks still argue that Garrett shot the wrong guy and the real Billy the Kid lived out his days in Texas under a different name. The autopsy, such as it was in 1881 rural New Mexico, was done by a frontier doctor who basically confirmed one chest wound and a dead outlaw. That was that.

[00:09:48]The 4440 stayed with Garrett. He carried it for years after. Then his life went sideways. He got appointed collector of customs in El Paso by Theodore Roosevelt in 1901.

[00:10:01]Then got fired in 1906 after he brought a salooning friend named Tom Powers to lunch with the president and pretended the guy was a cattleman.

[00:10:13]Garrett was drinking hard by then, gambling hard and broke. The pistol ended up with Tom Powers, probably as collateral for a loan. Powers hung it behind the bar at his Coney Island saloon for years, telling anyone who asked that this was the gun that killed Billy the Kid. Pat Garrett got murdered himself in 1908, shot in the back of the head in a roadside argument over a grazing lease in the New Mexico desert. He never got back the gun. His widow, Apollina, sued the P estate in the 1930s and eventually recovered it. In 2021, that same 4440 Colt sold at a Bonham's auction in Los Angeles for $6 million and change, which is almost certainly the highest price ever paid for a single handgun. The hammer came down, the buyer paid, and the gun that killed the most famous outlaw in American history passed into private hands once again.

[00:11:20]Billy the Kid never made it to his 22nd birthday. Garrett got paid a bounty of $500 for killing him, which caused a minor scandal because some folks thought the reward money should only go to capture, not killing. Garrett had to hire a lawyer to get the money. and the territorial legislature had to cut him a special check months after the deed. He eventually did get paid. $500 was good money in 1881, about a full year's wages for a working cowboy, but it was not much pay for the rest of Garrett's days. He was forever the man who killed the kid. And that label followed him into every saloon, every political fight, and every business deal until the day he was shot dead on a New Mexico road. The 4440 cartridge itself tells you something about that era. It was a compromise round, not quite a rifle cartridge, not quite a pure handgun cartridge, sitting right in the middle. Law men and outlaws alike carried it because it was practical, available, and did the job.

[00:12:33]It would put down a man, a horse, or a deer with equal efficiency.

[00:12:38]The Peacemaker in 4440 was probably the single most common serious sidearm west of the Mississippi from 1878 through the 1890s.

[00:12:51]Billy the Kid himself owned one at various points. That is maybe the final irony of that dark bedroom. If Billy had walked in a second earlier, or Garrett had sat facing the other way, the two of them might have been shooting at each other with the same kind of gun. Fort Sumner itself is mostly gone now. A small museum, a graveyard with three wooden markers, and a state highway.

[00:13:18]Billy's grave gets visited by thousands every year. Some of them spit on it.

[00:13:25]Some of them leave flowers. The bedroom where it happened was torn down decades ago. All that is really left is the gun itself. The story that surrounds it and the historical fact. One 4440 bullet fired in the dark by a man who had once been friends with the target ended the most famous outlaw career in the Old West. Not bad for a tired sheriff who could barely see. If you made it this far, hit subscribe. Frontier out.