Randy Guijarro of Fremont, California, paid $2 for an old photograph at an antique shop in 2010. The seemingly ordinary pictures turned out to include one of the most valuable images of the Old West, with an insurance value of $5 million.In 2010, Guijarro purchased the photograph for $2. He kept the 4-by-5-inch photograph, and at some point, he began to suspect it showed someone famous. So, he approached Kagin’s Inc., a company that deals in Western history and rare coins. Guijarro believed the picture was genuine, and he spent the next year working with experts to test that belief.Kagin’s said the photo shows Billy the Kid and members of the Lincoln County Regulators playing croquet. Friends, family and lovers were there, too. It shows the gang “playing a leisurely game of croquet alongside friends, family and lovers in the late summer of 1878”, the company said.Billy the Kid is one of the most notorious outlaws in American history. He was part of the Regulators and took part in the Lincoln County War in New Mexico. Legend has it that he killed between eight and 22 people. The company says the photo has been appraised and insured for $5 million and, if confirmed as authentic, would be only the second known image of him. The other is a tintype taken in New Mexico in 1880. A collector named William Koch bought it for $2.3 million in 2010.“When we first saw the photograph, we were understandably sceptical. An original Billy the Kid photo is the Holy Grail of Western Americana. We had to be certain that we could answer and verify where, when, how and why this photograph was taken,” Kagin’s senior numismatist David McCarthy told the LA Times.But Kagin’s still had one question: where was the photo taken? McCarthy flew to New Mexico to find the exact location. He called the moment an ‘incredible thrill’. “We have these moments of discovery every once in a while. You get goosebumps,” he told ABC News.For McCarthy, it was the posture and face that stood out. “The way he held his body in the photo, [a] sort of confident slouch. [He’s] facing the camera, dead on, with a grin on his face,” McCarthy told the outlet. His team found that the building was about a 15-minute walk from the home of John Tunstall, the Englishman who mentored Billy the Kid. Tunstall, McCarthy said, wrote in his diary about playing croquet with friends. Research also suggested that a wedding or a cattle drive after the war was the likely reason for the gathering, he said.“Billy the Kid is incredibly famous. [But] he wasn’t shooting people all the time. He had friends he cared about. He had women he chased. It (the photograph) opens up the idea of the humanity of a character like Billy the Kid,” McCarthy said.Kagin noted that this picture was more special than the first, as it revealed ‘a slice of life’.A documentary on the National Geographic Channel also tells the story of how the photo was found and authenticated. “This is such a great story. He’s one of the great outlaws and personalities,” Kagin added.
