Billy the Kid

Anyone who has dipped into pictorial American history will have come across a reproduction of this tintype of Billy the Kid taken in 1879 or 1880 in Fort Sumner. It's one of the iconic images of the Wild West. Billy gave the tintype to a friend, Dan Dedrick, and it has been owned by his descendants, the Upham family, ever since. Last Saturday it came up for sale at the Old West Show and Auction in Denver and fetched $2.6 million. Interesting note: tintypes - an early form of photography that used metal plates - reversed the image. This mistakenly led to the movie The Left Handed Gun (1958) which starred a glamorous Paul Newman as the scruffy psychopath above!