Billy the Kid Owned a Ranch in Seven Rivers in 1884

Not really, but that's what Dan Quinn said, in 1895.

Conspiracy theories surrounding Billy the Kid surviving the night of July 14, 1881 have always been an alluring part of the greater legend of William H. Bonney. The one found below, written by Quinn in "Bad Billy, the Kid, and the Wicked Things He Did," published in The San Francisco Examiner in 1895, is one of the earliest examples I've come across.

Now, here's the story which the cowboys of the Vegas and Northeastern New Mexico and the Panhandle country tell each other about their fires of nights and which my recent 'meet' with the Kid tends to verify. I heard it from a veracious gentleman by the name of Riley Brooks. At the time we speak of Riley had just been released from vile confinement in the Trinidad Jail.

Brooks agrees with Garrett so far as going to Maxwell's ranch is concerned, but he says that while Garrett was lying talking to Maxwell on the blankets and waiting in nervous apprehension for the coming of the Kid, this happened:

A step was heard outside and Maxwell, just as Garrett himself relates, suggested, "There's the Kid now." A dim figure appeared in the door made made the Mexican inquiry described, and was shot down by Garrett.

But it turned out when investigated that instead of having killed Billy the Kid, he shot a half-witted Mexican sheep-herder who belonged in the vicinity. A pow-wow followed, when it was determined by all hands - including Billy the Kid, who to this end was treated with by Maxwell's daughter and who didn't appear in person to mingle in the debate - to act on the theory that the Mexican was the Kid and that the Kid was therefore killed. The MExican was to be buried, Garrett and his people were to return, and the Kid was to disappear so far as those parts of New Mexico were concerned and was to be heard of no more.

"This programme," said the veracious Brooks, "was faithfully carried out," and at the time he told it to me in 1884 he asserted that the Kid was living quietly and amiably for him in the region known as Seven Rivers, far down the Pecos valley, and where Clay Allison and other worthies of the range, saddle and six-shooter, also had their habitats. Riley said that the Kid had quite a bunch of cattle and was getting along first-rate. He had carried to his new home the person and the loving affections of the Maxwell girl."