The only confirmed photograph of Billy the Kid is a small, scratched tintype barely two by three inches. For more than a century, that piece of metal has been used to build one of the most persistent myths in American frontier history: that Billy the Kid was a left-handed, half-mad killer. The problem is that the photograph itself tells a different story, and the way it was read for generations turned a technical detail into a false legend. The tintype is known today as the Dedrick tintype.
Billy himself gave it to his friend Dan Dedrick, a man reportedly involved in cattle rustling and possibly counterfeiting alongside him. Dedrick kept the photograph for his entire life. When he died in 1938, he passed it to his nephew Frank Upham, and the Upham family held onto it for decades, occasionally loaning it for display. In the 1980s it was exhibited briefly by the Lincoln County Heritage Trust in New Mexico, but it did not reach the wider world until 2011.
That year the family sold the tintype at auction in Denver. The winning bid was $2. 3 million, paid by billionaire William Koch, an Old West enthusiast. It became the most expensive 19th-century photograph ever sold, a record that still stands.
Whether the photograph actually shows Billy the Kid has been argued for years, but the case in its favor is strong. The face matches contemporary descriptions from people who knew him: the slightly prominent front teeth that witnesses compared to a squirrel’s, the narrow jaw, the boyish features, the slight build. This is not the chiseled movie gunslinger. It is a young man of twenty or twenty-one who looks as though he had not slept much.
The clothing also fits. He wears a slouch hat, a shirt, a vest, what appears to be a cardigan sweater, a bandana loosely tied at his throat, and a cartridge belt. It is the practical, inexpensive outfit of someone living an armed and unsettled life on the New Mexico frontier in 1880. If the photograph were a fake, whoever staged it would have had to get all of those details right, along with the face, the weapons, and the period of the clothing.
The photograph is a ferrotype, or tintype, made by exposing the image directly onto a thin sheet of iron coated with dark lacquer. In the 1870s and 1880s this was the cheapest and fastest form of photography available. A traveling photographer could produce one for a quarter, or fifty cents for multiple copies. The Dedrick tintype shows its rough history: scratches, spots where the emulsion wore away, areas where the metal oxidized.
This was not a carefully preserved family heirloom. It was something that got tossed in a drawer, passed around, maybe carried in a pocket. The source of the left-handed myth lies in how tintypes were made. The chemistry of the process meant that whatever the camera captured was flipped horizontally when it was developed onto the metal plate.
In the photograph, the revolver appears on Billy’s left hip and his right hand rests on the rifle, with the left side of his body turned toward the camera. For decades, this was treated as proof that he was left-handed. But when the image is reversed, the gun appears where a right-handed man would naturally wear it, and the rifle is held in the left hand the way a right-handed person would hold it. Even the vest buttons and belt buckle line up correctly once the mirror image is accounted for.
There is another clue inside the photograph itself. Billy holds a Winchester Model 1873, and in the image its loading gate appears on the left side. Winchester only manufactured Model 1873s with the loading gate on the right. The photograph has to be reversed.
Witness accounts agree. People who rode with Billy, fought against him, and jailed him described him as right-handed. Pat Garrett, the sheriff who killed him, said Billy drew his gun with his right hand. Contemporary newspaper accounts never mentioned left-handedness.
In 1954 historians James Horan and Paul Sann stated publicly that Billy was right-handed and carried his pistol on his right hip. Film historians later confirmed this by examining the vest buttons and buckle. But by then the myth was already too deep. Pat Garrett, or someone working with him, used an engraving based on the tintype as the frontispiece of his 1882 book, The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid.
Dime novels, magazine articles, and early histories of the Lincoln County War reprinted the image without mentioning that tintypes are reversed. Repetition turned an error into fact. By the time Hollywood got hold of the story in the 1930s and 1940s, the left-handed outlaw was carved in stone, and Paul Newman played him that way in The Left-Handed Gun in 1958. The tintype also reveals something about Billy’s circumstances when it was taken.
According to his girlfriend Paulita Maxwell, who was interviewed in the mid-1920s, a traveling photographer came through Fort Sumner in 1880 and Billy posed standing in the street near Old Beaver Smith’s Saloon. Maxwell said she never liked the picture because it made him look rough and uncouth, and that was not how she remembered him. Billy was not ragged in the photograph, but he was not well off either. He was armed, equipped, and dressed in layers.
The gear cost real money. A Winchester cost about $25 in 1880, a Colt revolver another $15 or $20, and the hat, vest, cardigan, and boots brought the total to close to $70 or $80. A cowboy in that era made roughly $30 a month. Billy either had money saved, was being paid well for what he did, or was funding himself through other means.
The photograph catches him in the middle of that life: a working gunman, not a cattle baron, not a drifting vagrant. One detail nearly everyone overlooks is Billy’s expression. He does not look directly into the camera but slightly upward, tired, wary, uncomfortable. In the 1870s and 1880s, a portrait was a major event.
Subjects stood perfectly still for several seconds while the exposure was made, and most stared straight at the lens because the photographer told them to. Billy did not. By the time the photograph was taken, probably in early 1880, he had already been through the Lincoln County War, had killed at least a couple of men, and had people actively trying to kill him. Just months later, in December 1880, Pat Garrett captured him.
Getting photographed while wanted was a genuine risk; the image could be circulated to lawmen and used as evidence. Why he did it is not known for certain. He may have wanted a keepsake to send to someone close to him, or he may simply have been young and vain enough to want a picture of himself regardless of the danger. He was only twenty or twenty-one, and at that age long-term consequences are easy to ignore.
According to one account, Billy posed for four identical tintypes that day. The camera had multiple lenses that produced four images on a single metal plate, which was then cut apart. Of those four copies, three are accounted for. Billy gave one to Dan Dedrick, and that copy survived.
Another went to Pat Garrett, either taken from Billy at his capture or acquired after his death, and Garrett used it for the engraving in his book. A third reportedly went to Deluvina Maxwell, a Navajo woman who worked for the Maxwell family and was a devoted friend of Billy’s. Author Emerson Hough saw that copy in Fort Sumner in 1904, but its whereabouts after that are unknown. The fourth tintype is lost, probably discarded, destroyed in a fire, or forgotten in an attic.
The survival of the Dedrick tintype is itself unlikely. It was a cheap photograph made for pocket change and should have been lost many times over. Instead it survived fires, floods, moves, estate sales, and more than a century of neglect. It is now the only confirmed image of one of the most famous outlaws in American history.
What it proves is that the left-handed Billy the Kid was never anything more than a photographic illusion, believed because it made the story better and because no one bothered to understand how tintypes work. It also shows a real young man at a specific moment: not the devil of the dime novels, not the Robin Hood some tried to make him, but a twenty-year-old who had already killed men and would be dead himself within eighteen months. He does not look evil in the photograph, and he does not look heroic. He looks like someone caught in circumstances he may not fully control, aware that his life is dangerous and uncertain.
That scratched, oxidized piece of metal may be the most honest thing that survives about Billy the Kid, a young man who had no idea he would still be famous more than 140 years later.