Investing in history: Amy Gauthier is renovating the Ellis Store, a place where Billy the Kid rattled his spurs

In 2020, Amy Gauthier was driving from Louisiana to Utah when she found herself in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Unexpectedly.

“It was May, it was raining and my GPS kept rerouting me,” Gauthier said. “I thought if I just kept driving west, I’d get to Utah sooner or later.”

Then she started seeing signs for Billy the Kid’s gravesite and pulled off the highway.

“It was nighttime,” she said. “I spent about 30 minutes at Billy’s grave. I was trying to take it all in. Where was the fort? I didn’t get it that this big legend was in this little part of the world.”

Flash forward four years and Gauthier has moved to Lincoln and purchased the Ellis Store, a building that played a significant role in the 1878 Lincoln County War, which made the Kid a legend and eventually put him in that Fort Sumner grave.

Gauthier, 45, is refurbishing the Ellis Store, which has not been in use for a few years. She hopes to have rooms ready for vacation rental by the fall and to eventually make the historic building an event center.

“I’m just a Billy the Kid enthusiast,” Gauthier said, while explaining why she has settled in Lincoln, a small-town flashback to the Old West located on U.S. 380, 33 miles southeast of Carrizozo. “I’m passionately obsessed with the whole story.”

From 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. July 13, Gauthier is hosting an open house at the Ellis Store. Visitors will be able to see Western art by Bob Boze Bell of Cave Creek, Arizona and Buckeye Blake of Weatherford, Texas; talk about the Kid and other colorful characters from the town’s gunsmoke-hazed history; and explore the building’s rooms and grounds.

“I just want people to experience the house again,” Gauthier said. “It has been locked up. The history here is so rich, I want people to reconnect with it. A lot of important people were here. A lot of important things happened here.”

A nasty affair

The Ellis Store building was constructed as a residence in the mid-1850s. Isaac Ellis and his family opened a store there in 1876. It also served the family as a ranch headquarters and a boarding house.

In 1905, Dr. J.W. Laws acquired the building and turned it into a tuberculosis sanatorium. In more recent times, it has been a bed and breakfast.

But the Ellis Store earned the prominence it is known for today during the Lincoln County War, which pitted two commercial factions — one headed by Lawrence Murphy and Jimmy Dolan, the other by John Tunstall and Alexander McSween — against each other in a vicious conflict for control of the area’s cattle and dry goods business.

Billy the Kid and his cohorts, known as the Regulators, sided with Tunstall and McSween, while Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady and his top guns backed Murphy and Dolan.

It was a nasty affair. Men deputized by Brady killed Tunstall, shooting him out of his saddle a few miles outside Lincoln on Feb. 18, 1878.

On April 1 of that year, gunmen, including the Kid, ambushed Brady and four of his deputies on Lincoln’s main street, slaying the sheriff by pumping at least a dozen bullets into him.

The war reached its climax during a five-day showdown — July 15-19, 1878 — between the two factions in Lincoln.

“During the five-day battle, the Ellis Store was a stronghold for many of the Regulators,” said Bob Boze Bell, executive editor of True West magazine and one of the artists whose work will be on display during the July 13 open house.

Billy the Kid and other Regulators were holed up in McSween’s house in Lincoln.

The fight was a standoff until Col. Nathan Dudley, commander of nearby Fort Stanton, decided to enter the fray on the Murphy-Dolan side.

“On (July 18), Col. Dudley had had enough of everyone’s shenanigans and had a howitzer brought to the scene from Fort Stanton,” Bell said.

“He had the howitzer pointed right at the (Ellis Store), threatening to blow it to hell and back. That’s when the Regulators who were in there bailed out.”

Later that night, the McSween house was set ablaze and McSween shot dead in his yard as he fled the flames. The Kid and several others shot their way out and dissolved into the night, an episode Bell depicts in his painting “Billy’s Backyard Bullet.”

A midnight character

“Thanks to my grandparents, Bob and Lue Guess, I was raised on the daring stories of Billy the Kid,” Bell, 77, said. “My grandfather was born in Weed, New Mexico, in 1888, and together (my grandparents) lived in Steins Pass (west of Lordsburg) and up on the Gila near Duncan, Arizona.

“So, all of that history was instilled in me at an early age.”

When he was 9, Bell bought what he believed was an original picture of Billy the Kid and New Mexico lawman Pat Garrett from a private museum near Moriarty.

“When I discovered it was fake, my fate was sealed because I made a vow to find out the truth about the Kid once and for all,” he said. “I have written three books on the subject, so you might say I’m a little obsessed with the boy.”

Those books are illustrated with Bell’s artwork. He paints in gouache, like watercolor but laced with white pigment to make it opaque. The dozen or so pieces he is taking to the Ellis Store open house cover various aspects of the Kid’s life.

“Coffee With Billy” shows the Kid having coffee with an Hispanic family in front of an adobe house on a sunny day. The painting is inspired by the young outlaw’s reputed good relations with the Hispanic community.

But “Billy at Midnight on the Most Dangerous Street in America” depicts a hair-trigger Billy in a darkened Lincoln, a rifle over his shoulder, a pistol on his hip.

“This captures him as he was, sort of a midnight character,” said Bell. “He’s got two cartridge belts, his hips are thrust out, a cocky little Irish guy.”

Two paintings, “Billy at the Rear Door of the Ellis Store” numbers 1 and 2, are especially important to the Ellis Store open house exhibition because they establish the Kid’s connection to the building.

Bell said the Kid supposedly stayed at the store during a meeting with New Mexico Territorial Gov. Lew Wallace to discuss giving amnesty to Billy for his role in the Lincoln County War. The amnesty was never granted.

An even more direct connection between the two paintings and the Ellis Store is the fact that the pictures are framed by floorboards taken from the building.

“While Amy and her crew were rehabbing the room that the previous owner said was the room where the Kid stayed, they found termites and had to rip up part of the floor,” Bell said. “I asked Amy to ship me some of the better pieces of wood.”

Bell said he’s excited about what Gauthier is trying to do with the Ellis Store.

“She is a tireless worker who wants to save the place.”

Good bones

Gauthier grew up in Louisiana, Shreveport and Alexandria. But she had made a career as a corporate spa manager at the biggest spa in Utah when the pandemic struck in 2020 and she was furloughed from her job.

She was driving back to Utah from a visit with family in Louisiana when a mixed-up GPS led her to Billy’s grave.

Or maybe it was just fate.

“My maternal grandfather was a nut for Wild West history,” she said. “He used to tell the greatest stories. He told stories about Billy the Kid.”

So, when she happened onto the Kid’s grave, she was primed to find out more.

“I wanted to familiarize myself with Fort Stanton, White Oaks and Puerto de Luna,” she said. And the next thing she knew, she had bought a piece of the history that enchants her.

She moved to Lincoln in late February and closed on the Ellis Store property in early May. She has never before tried to restore a historic property.

“This is my first rodeo,” she said. “In the four months I’ve been here, I’ve learned a lot of things. This is an old house that endured many years of neglect. The first two months I was here, I was just cleaning up.”

She concedes that the work is challenging.

“There are some trees growing close to the house that need to be taken down,” she said. “There may be some tree roots growing through the plumbing. There’s stucco damage, some serious termite damage. The house has shifted and settled over the years. But basically she has good bones. I’m just trying to get back to where everything is strong and sturdy and go from there.”

Blaze of glory

In April 1881, the Kid was tried in Mesilla for the murder of Sheriff Brady, convicted and sentenced to be hanged.

On April 28, 1881, while awaiting execution, he escaped from jail in the Lincoln County Courthouse in Lincoln, killing two deputies while he was at it.

Two and a half months later, Lincoln County Sheriff Garrett heard that Billy might be in the Fort Sumner area and made tracks for those parts. On the night of July 14, 1881, Garrett shot and killed the Kid at Pete Maxwell’s house at Fort Sumner.

The July 13 Ellis Store open house is just shy of the 143rd anniversary of the Kid’s death and the 146th anniversary of the five-day fight in Lincoln.

Paul Andrew Hutton, distinguished professor of history at the University of New Mexico, plans to be at the open house.

“I have been called to this place by (Bob Boze) Bell,” Hutton, 74, said. “He’s getting nostalgic and wants to gather all the troops one more time at the site of Billy’s great escape.”

By troops, Hutton means what counts today as the old guard of Billy the Kid aficionados, of which he is one.

Others expected to attend the Ellis Store open house include Bell; Blake, 78; Western artist Thom Ross, 71; Billy the Kid cold-case investigator and author Steven Sederwall, 71; and Western nonfiction writer and musician Mark Lee Gardner, 63.

Hutton was guest curator of the 2007 Albuquerque Museum exhibit “Dreamscape Desperado: Billy the Kid and the Outlaw in America.”

“People just get caught up by Billy,” Hutton said. “There is a mystique about him. He’s America’s favorite bad boy, famous internationally. He is Peter Pan morphing into Robin Hood.”

Hutton believes the Kid and the other Regulators were on the right side in the Lincoln County War, challenging a corrupt system in which Murphy and Dolan were cogs.

“He really was on the side of the angels,” he said. “The whole system was stacked up against him, but he made his stand and goes out in a blaze of glory. What’s better?”

Hutton is pleased that private money is being put into preserving the Ellis Store.

“It is one of the most historic buildings we have from back in the Lincoln County War,” he said. “And Lincoln, I think, is the best preserved Western town we have in the country.”