Friend of the Kid honored at Fort Sumner

FORT SUMNER -- She's buried in an old Albuquerque cemetery where records were lost in a fire. Her grave is unmarked. On Wednesday, a group of Billy the Kid historians and enthusiasts brought back the memory of Deluvina Maxwell.

Kid chronicler Michael Anthony Giudicissi and others gathered at the old Fort Sumner Cemetery, where they placed a memorial to honor the woman known to be friends with the outlaw.

Giudicissi said Maxwell was present the night Pat Garrett shot Billy the Kid and that she might have been why Billy was at the family complex.

"She may have been even Billy's sweetheart at that time. Nobody's quite sure," Giudicissi said.

Born around 1848, Maxwell was Native American but captured by Apaches and bartered to Lucien Maxwell when she was about 10 years old. There are no confirmed records of when she was born, according to Giudicissi, but Deluvina spent most of her life in Fort Sumner. She was brought to Albuquerque a few months before she died in November of 1927 for breast cancer treatment.

"They buried her in the old Santa Barbara cemetery in Albuquerque," Giudicissi said. "She's lost history. And so we've been trying to find her grave site. We couldn't, and we want to do something to memorialize her because she was a significant character."

Giudicissi said he spent months at the cemetery, following clues to find where she might have been buried. He said the attempt was futile because there are hundreds of unmarked graves. A request to place a memorial at that cemetery was denied. One of Giudicissi's YouTube channel viewers suggested memorializing her in Fort Sumner because that is where she lived.

There is little doubt Deluvina Maxwell was close to The Kid. She was no fan of the lawman who killed him.

"He (Garrett) was afraid to go back to the room to make sure of whom he had shot!," Maxwell said, according to the website aboutbillythekid.com . "I went in and was the first to discover that they had killed my little boy. I hated those men and am glad that I have lived long enough to see them all dead and buried."

The website also reports the Kid was a "lady's man" known to have "fooled around." But it does not list Deluvina Maxwell as one of his girlfriends, though other historians have speculated she may have been.

In "The Saga of Billy the Kid," Walter Noble Burns writes that Deluvina referred to The Kid as "that poor child" after his death.

Deluvina Maxwell would have been in her early 30s when the Kid was killed in his early 20s.

Tim Sweet, owner of the Billy the Kid Museum in Fort Sumner, said the memorial is a welcome addition to their historic cemetery.

"Well, I think it's nice that they did that. It gives people a little more history about the family and everything," Sweet said.