[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by me

I'm still 'understandably skeptcal'; gun fighters never play croquet at wedding parties!

Just watched the National Geographic show on the picture. This puppy is real. Oddly the forensic facial guy wasn't entirely happy with Billy the Kid's face; he moved or is the most out of focus in the shot only 80.1% veracity. The woman in the center of the picture is Sally Chisum (86% veracity) whose uncle the Regulator gang members were herding at the occasion of the Lincoln County war. The building(still existing) was literally on The Kid's employer's ranch: John Tunstall, an Englishman, who literally introduced croquet to his employees, seen playing in the tintype. The forensic face guy was also a big croquet buff: All London croquet (invented there in 1851) mallets were 36"; a useful forensic tool in this case: as the figure holding the mallet may be readily determined to be 5' 8''-precisely the recorded height of Billy the Kid... also possibly the only gunfighter to wear sweaters in both of his tintypes!!!??? Sally Chisum's authenticated diary provides the provenance that the Regulators were all together on a given occasion in 1878 while employed on a cattle drive to Ft. Sumner. Additionally the tintype was absolutely verified to the late 1870's as to materials and method. Time, place, written witness account, with the witness in the shot...= $5,000,000. For me the history/hunt doesn't get better: the picture is good; the forensic foot-work is good; and there are no holes. The other key point (verisimilitude) is it's banality: literally a wedding-croquet-frolic of nobodies (at the time) in the middle of nowhere taking a shot, unrehearsed, that required everyone to remain still, including the horses, for 12 seconds. Who would fake that!