When I googled Fort Stanton and croquet I thought I might have stumbled across another record of Billy the Kid indulging in what seems like an unlikely pastime for gun-playing cowboys in New Mexico territory, 1878.
Fort Stanton after all was a military post in the Kid’s neck of the woods during his alleged croquet-playing days. You would think outlaws like the Kid might have been more likely to take their recreation in Las Vegas, New Mexico, or Tacosa, Texas, but I don’t know.
I did, however, remember the Kid’s penchant 
for odd hats. And in examining the photo above from the New Mexico Records Center and Archive, I wondered if the guy second from the right, observing a croquet match around the turn of the century in Santa Fe, wearing what appears to be a flower-topped lid, might be the infamous Mr. Bonney.
But, no, I won’t keep you in suspense. Peoplewise, the photo is mostly a reminder of a New Mexico celebrity almost as famous as the Kid — namely John Gaw Meem, the iconic Santa Fe architect, who had more sober taste in headgear. 
The croquet photo otherwise suggests the sport had an early popularity in New Mexico. It was taken at the Sunmount sanatorium in Santa Fe, which along with Fort Stanton was a tuberculosis treatment center.
I don’t know that Meem is in the Sunmount photo, but it is part of a Meem collection maintained at the New Mexico Records Center and Archives. I found it in an article titled, “The Lungers and Their Legacy — Chasing the Cure in New Mexico,” by Nancy Owen Lewis, scholar-in-residence at the School for Advanced Research. (See El Palacio magazine in 2008 for a more scholarly presentation of the photo than mine). Meem built a home nearby and some of his property later became part of the Santa Fe Preparatory School.
Croquet apparently was healthy recreation for lungers as New Mexico became a center for tuberculosis treatment. Meem himself arrived at Sunmount for recuperation in 1920. Lewis says in her 2016 book, Chasing the Cure in New Mexico, that Billy the Kid’s mother, Catherine Antrim, was an earlier tuberculosis victim who came to New Mexico but who sought treatment in less trendy Silver City.
I also don’t know if Meem played croquet, but my curiosity continues about the prevalence of the game in the wild southwest in the late 1800s, especially during the height of the New Mexico territory’s Lincoln County War. A recent, two-hour-long National Geographic “documentary” on a possible Kid photo, presented with all the perspicuity of Gabby Hayes, left me with a number of questions.
The National Geographic show focused on a photo supposedly taken in September 1878 on the Tunstall ranch in Lincoln County, two months after a famous 5-day gun battle in the town of Lincoln.
The people in the photo seem strangely relaxed after a nearly week-long shootout. Among my other questions is the bareness of the trees in September. And, in an earlier post, “Did Billy the Kid cheat at croquet?,” I questioned the strange bulges in the Kid’s sweater, the hand behind his back and the seemingly accusatory posture of his cohort to the right.
The Kid seems recognizable at least for his cockeyed hat and buck-toothed visage, but questions remain about the occasion, the time and the place.
The photograph’s proponents say the occasion was a wedding. And others have noted that Tunstall, the Kid’s former employer, who was shot dead in February 1878, was reputedly a croquet aficionado whose Lincoln County mercantile business might have been able to import the equipment. Or perhaps it was part of Tunstall’s baggage when he emigrated in in 1872.
As for the time of the photo, one internet trail I traveled suggested the Kid and his gang in September might have been several hundred miles east in Tacosa, Texas, selling stolen livestock, which, other than bushwhacking fellow humans, seems to have been the chief employment opportunity in Lincoln County in the late 1800s.
I may never get to the bottom of it. But the croquet-playing allegations probably aren’t doing the Kid’s reputation any good and they obviously are providing new fodder for Texans to sneer at neighboring New Mexico.
“Billy the Croquet Kid?” sniffed the headline on an editorial in the Fort Worth-Star Telegram on October 15. “Not much of an outlaw.”
dream ranch 