The calls and e-mails have been streaming in from Singapore, Ireland, Tokyo and Australia.
The world’s deep-pocket collectors have taken a fancy to Old West outlaw memorabilia, and they’re eager to get themselves something like a tintype photograph of an armed-and-cocky Billy the Kid, circa 1879.
But Brian Lebel is having to tell them it won’t be easy. The reason the Kid’s raggedy portrait went for $2.3 million at his Old West auction in Denver last week was because of its uniqueness. Palm Beach, Fla., billionaire William I. Koch snatched up what is likely the only surviving one.
The international publicity about the rare bidding duel that Koch won Saturday — with a demoralizing lack of hesitation — has gotten a lot of people digging through their attics for old photos they think might show an outlaw in his prime.
Until Koch paid more for a historical photograph than anyone had done before, only a small circle of mostly Westerners traded outlaw artifacts. A few mega-millionaires at New York auction houses have bid higher for artistic photographs.
The number of bidders at Lebel’s 23rd annual auction next year is certain to swell, but novice collectors will have to vie over a dwindling supply of outlaw artifacts.
“An opportunity like this comes once in a lifetime,” said Bob McCubbin, a Santa Fe collector who has one of the most extensive outlaw photography collections along with the knife Billy the Kid held when Sheriff Pat Garrett gunned him down.
When found and authenticated, photographs of the likes of Jesse and Frank James can bring hefty prices because outlaws typically didn’t stand around on dusty frontier main streets posing for photographers.
The provenance of a photograph can turn an interesting picture into historic gold, McCubbin said. The Billy the Kid tintype was confirmed by Garrett, who used a copy in his book, and was passed down by generation from the outlaw’s buddy Dan Dedrick for 130 years to his descendents, he said.
Koch said Christie’s auction house verified its authenticity.
But photographs can be forged, so collectors should consult independent historical photography experts. Lebel said a woman recently claimed to have a negative of the Kid tintype, but he knew there was no such thing.
An old picture of a famous person doesn’t guarantee it’s worth much. It’s easier to find pictures of publicity magnet Buffalo Bill Cody, whose face was more recognizable in England than the queen’s in the 1880s, Lebel said. A Cody photograph, like an Abraham Lincoln original, is just too common to be valuable.
The picture of Billy the Kid (real name William Henry McCarty), which was taken at Fort Sumner, N.M., was a fluke. The fugitive, credited for as many as 21 murders, but more likely guilty of around nine, had only four copies, and only one still exists.
Collectors such as McCubbin, who once paid $45,000 for a rare picture of Doc Holliday, have hunted down the descendants of outlaws like Pinkerton detectives. McCubbin found Holliday’s descendants after they reverse-migrated East.
He caught the collector bug in the early 1970s when Jarvis Garrett gave him a picture of his father, former Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett, who killed the Kid. As word got out that McCubbin would pay cash for fading old pictures of bad guys, people started calling.
About eight years ago, a Pinkerton security company employee was cleaning out a California office when he came across some old boxes filled with photographs. The company was going to toss them.
He found a vintage picture of Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch. It wasn’t the individual cropped pictures that Pinkerton agents plastered on wanted posters while searching for gang members, but the full-length snapshot of all five wearing Sunday duds and sitting or standing formally in a Fort Worth, Texas, studio.
Nervous he would be beaten to the punch, McCubbin caught a plane to Los Angeles to buy the photograph. He wouldn’t reveal what he paid.
On another occasion, an elderly widow gave an estate attorney an old photograph with something that looked like dried blood on the back. It was signed “From Ben Thompson to King Fisher.”
It was a portrait of Thompson, an infamous Texas gunslinger who killed more than a dozen men, often in drunken duels, given to an outlaw with an equally infamous reputation.
An 1884 newspaper article gave some of the history. Thompson gave the photograph to Fisher in Austin, Texas, and the two caught a train to San Antonio, where they went to a bar called the Vaudeville Theater. It’s unclear why Thompson went to a place where he had killed the owner a few years earlier.
On that day, friends of the dead man riddled both Thompson and Fisher with bullets. The blood-dampened photograph was still in Fisher’s coat pocket.
“It’s in excellent condition, bloodstains and all,” said McCubbin, who bought the photograph from a descendant of the Fisher family.
It’s getting much tougher to find such memorabilia, though. Descendants of outlaws have sold pistols and photographs to people like Koch, who has a set of Frank and Jesse James guns.
McCubbin said he isn’t about to part with his collection, worth millions of dollars. Lebel said most of the other big collectors like Koch feel the same way.
However, Koch said he plans on displaying the Billy the Kid tintype in a few museums. McCubbin has already done so with some of his collection. Lebel said several collectors are planning on donating their artifacts to museums after they die.
It doesn’t mean people won’t try to make new discoveries or at least claim they have.
“There’s people all over the world going through boxes of photographs,” Lebel said.
In the days since the Billy the Kid tintype sold in Denver, many have already e-mailed him images of more than 200 photographs they found in attics and basements, he said. They include 1800s photographs of brothers that people suggest must be Jesse and Frank James.
“Some aren’t even close,” Lebel said. “Of the 200, maybe one is authentic. Just because a picture is old and the guy has a mustache doesn’t make him an outlaw.”
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com
