Billy the Kid’s Guns: The Thunderer, the Winchester and the $6 Million Colt

Billy the Kid carried a Colt revolver and a Winchester Model 1873, and the only authenticated photo of him shows both. Old West historians have long said his favorite handgun was the Colt Model 1877 “Thunderer,” a double-action .41. The most famous guns in his story, though, are two he didn’t own: the shotgun he took from a deputy and used to kill him during his 1881 jailbreak, which sold for $978,313, and Sheriff Pat Garrett’s Colt Single Action Army, the gun that killed the Kid. It sold for $6,030,313, still the auction record for any firearm.

Here’s every gun in the story, what each one sold for, the famous photo that fooled everyone into thinking he was left-handed, and what the same guns cost new today.

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Billy the Kid’s Guns at a Glance

Gun	Connection to the Kid	Sold for
Colt Single Action Army, .44-40	Pat Garrett’s revolver, the gun that killed him	$6,030,313 (Bonhams, 2021)
Whitney double-barrel 10-gauge, serial 903	Taken from Deputy Bob Olinger and used to kill him during the escape	$978,313 (Bonhams, 2021)
Winchester Model 1873, serial 20181	Said to be taken from the courthouse during the escape	$375,313 (Bonhams, 2021)
Winchester Model 1873	The rifle in his only authenticated photo	The photo sold for $2.3 million in 2011
Colt Model 1877 “Thunderer,” .41	Long described as his preferred revolver	No verified example has sold

Who Was Billy the Kid?

Billy the Kid was born Henry McCarty in New York City in 1859 and started calling himself William H. Bonney in 1877. He made his name in New Mexico’s Lincoln County War of 1878, riding with the Regulators after the rancher he worked for, John Tunstall, was murdered. He and two other Regulators were charged with killing Sheriff William Brady and a deputy. Governor Lew Wallace promised him clemency if he testified before a grand jury, and the Kid did his part, but the pardon never came. He was linked to nine killings before Pat Garrett shot him in 1881, at 21.

The Tintype: The Only Photo, and It’s Backwards

Almost everything people think they know about Billy the Kid’s guns comes from one small metal photograph, a 2-by-3-inch tintype taken at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, in late 1879 or early 1880. It shows him in a slouch hat, vest and sweater, holding a Winchester Model 1873 upright with the butt on the ground, and wearing a holstered Colt on his belt. A friend, Dan Dedrick, kept the plate after the Kid died, and his family handed it down for generations. In June 2011 it sold at auction for $2.3 million to businessman William Koch.

There’s a catch that fooled people for decades. A tintype is a direct positive made in the camera, which means the image comes out mirror-reversed. In the photo the Colt hangs on his left hip, and that is where the legend of a left-handed Billy the Kid came from. It even gave a 1958 Paul Newman movie its title, The Left Handed Gun. Flip the image and the gun is on his right hip where it belongs. Historians have written since the 1950s that he was right-handed, and some think he could shoot with either hand.

Our featured image at the top of this page is an AI-assisted restoration of that tintype, with the background cleaned, turned the right way around, with the damage cleaned up. We checked the guns against the original to make sure the restoration changed nothing about the Winchester or the Colt. For more photos that shaped how we see firearms history, see our collection of famous gun photos.

Billy the Kid’s Revolver: the Colt Thunderer Question

The gun most often named as Billy the Kid’s own is the Colt Model 1877, Colt’s first double-action revolver. It came in three calibers, and dealers gave each one a nickname: the .41 Long Colt was the “Thunderer,” the .38 was the “Lightning” and the .32 was the “Rainmaker.” The Thunderer is widely said to have been the Kid’s preferred weapon, according to the Colt M1877’s history, and some accounts say he had one on him the night he died. It’s a lovely looking gun with a bird’s-head grip, and a smaller frame than the Single Action Army.

It was also notoriously fragile. The early double-action mechanism was so intricate that gunsmiths called it “the watchmaker’s nightmare,” and Gun Digest once called it “the worst double-action trigger mechanism ever made.” When the trigger spring failed, the gun could still be fired single action. The honest summary is that the Thunderer link rests on tradition more than on a gun with provenance. No verified Billy the Kid Thunderer has ever come to market.

Nobody makes a true copy of the double-action 1877 today. Cimarron’s “Thunderer” borrows the name and the bird’s-head grip, but it’s a single-action revolver built on the Colt Single Action Army pattern:

Billy the Kid’s Winchester 1873

The Winchester in the tintype was the gun of the day. The Model 1873 fired the .44-40, the same cartridge as many Colt revolvers, so a cowboy could carry one kind of ammunition for both. The Kid clearly valued his. After Garrett captured him in December 1880, a mob tried to take one of his fellow prisoners off the train at Las Vegas, New Mexico. The Kid told a reporter afterward that he had not been afraid: “if I only had my Winchester I’d lick the whole crowd.”

One Winchester sold as his is a Model 1873 with serial number 20181, made in 1876, with a 20-inch round barrel. Bonhams described it as the rifle the Kid took from the Lincoln County courthouse during his escape and that Garrett recovered at Pete Maxwell’s ranch after killing him, and it sold for $375,312.50 in 2021. Its paper trail starts with a notarized statement from 1897, sixteen years after the escape, which is typical for Old West guns and a reason to treat any single attribution with care.

Winchester still builds the 1873, in .357 Magnum, .45 Colt and the original .44-40, and it’s one of the smoothest lever actions you can buy. Our best lever-action rifles guide shows how it compares with modern designs, and if you want to shoot one in competition, start with our guide to cowboy action shooting:

Uberti’s Italian-made 1873 carbine is the budget way to get the same look, with the short barrel and saddle-ring styling of a cowboy’s saddle gun:

The Jailbreak: Olinger’s Shotgun

In April 1881 the Kid was convicted of murdering Sheriff William Brady and sentenced to hang. He was held on the top floor of the Lincoln County courthouse. On the evening of April 28, with Garrett out of town, Deputy Bob Olinger took the other prisoners across the street for supper and left Deputy James Bell alone with the Kid. On the way back from the outhouse, the Kid slipped his handcuffs, hit Bell with them, grabbed Bell’s revolver and shot him as he ran.

Still in leg irons, he broke into Garrett’s office, where Olinger had left his loaded shotgun, and waited at the upstairs window. When Olinger came running at the sound of the shot, the Kid called down, “Look up, old boy, and see what you get,” and fired. It took him about an hour to hack off the leg irons with an axe, and then he rode out of town. Some stories say he was singing.

That shotgun was a Whitney double-barrel hammer gun in 10 gauge, serial number 903, with 25 1/4-inch Damascus barrels. Bonhams cataloged it as the gun taken from Olinger and used to kill him, and according to the auction house it appears by serial number in Olinger’s probate records. It sold for $978,313 in August 2021. For five years it was the most expensive shotgun ever sold at auction, until Clyde Barrow’s sawed-off Browning Auto-5 brought $1 million in 2026, a story we tell in the guns of Bonnie and Clyde.

Olinger’s Whitney was a full-length 10-gauge, not a cut-down coach gun, but short double-barrels were everywhere in the Old West, and the “coach gun” is still a favorite with cowboy action shooters and for home defense. Stoeger’s Coach Gun is the classic modern example, and our best double-barrel shotguns guide compares the rest:

The Gun That Killed Billy the Kid: Pat Garrett’s Colt

Almost three months after the escape, Garrett heard the Kid was around Fort Sumner. Near midnight on July 14, 1881, he was sitting in Pete Maxwell’s darkened bedroom when the Kid walked in, pistol drawn, and asked in Spanish, “¿Quién es? ¿Quién es?” (Who is it?). Garrett recognized his voice and fired twice. The first shot hit the Kid in the chest, just above the heart. The second missed. Billy the Kid was 21.

Garrett’s gun was a Colt Single Action Army in .44-40, serial number 55093, made in 1880. According to Bonhams, it had belonged to outlaw Billy Wilson, and Garrett took it when he captured Wilson and the Kid at Stinking Springs in December 1880. It passed through collectors to the Jim and Theresa Earle collection, and on August 27, 2021, Bonhams sold it for $6,030,313 against an estimate of $2 million to $3 million. It’s still the world auction record for any firearm. We rank it against the others in our list of the most expensive guns ever sold.

Colt still makes the Single Action Army, and a new one costs a fraction of one percent of Garrett’s. Italian-made copies from Uberti cost less again, and our Uberti 1873 Cattleman review explains why they’re the favorite of cowboy action shooters. Ruger’s Vaquero is the tough, modern-steel alternative. Compare the full field in our best revolvers guide:

The Croquet Photo and Other Doubtful Claims

Because only one photo of the Kid is accepted, every “new” one makes headlines. The best known is a larger tintype bought at a Fresno, California, memorabilia shop in 2010 that some claim shows him playing croquet with the Regulators in 1878. Collector Robert G. McCubbin and historian John Boessenecker concluded in 2013 that it doesn’t show Billy the Kid, though a forensic image expert has argued it does. The same caution applies to guns. Plenty of old Colts and Winchesters have been sold as “Billy the Kid’s,” and very few come with anything like the paperwork behind Garrett’s revolver.

More Guns of the Old West

The Kid is one story in a much bigger one. Wild Bill Hickok’s guns sold at the same 2021 auction as Garrett’s Colt, and our Wild West outlaw guns guide covers Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and more, the guns of Tombstone breaks down the O.K. Corral era on film, and the real guns of Red Dead Redemption 2 shows how accurate the video game’s Colts and Winchesters are. For the most famous shootouts, see our most famous gunfights in history. And if you’re buying in the Kid’s home territory, our New Mexico gun laws guide explains the rules. Our used gun listings often turn up older single actions and lever guns.

Frequently Asked Questions

Featured image: AI-assisted restoration of the c. 1880 Fort Sumner tintype of Billy the Kid, which is in the public domain, mirror-corrected, background cleaned, with added text. The guns were checked against the original photo and are unchanged.