A remote New Mexico village holds the ghosts of outlaws and the future of science.

History · Published 20 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Fort Sumner began as a military site for the forced internment of Navajo and Mescalero Apache people. Today, this quiet village is better known as the final resting place of Billy the Kid and a critical launch site for NASA’s high-altitude research balloons that probe the stratosphere.

Established in 1862 and named for military governor Edwin Vose Sumner, the fort served a dark purpose in the American West. From 1863 to 1868, the federal government used the site to imprison thousands of Native American people who had been subdued by Kit Carson. The human cost of this internment created an unexpected economic ripple: in 1866, entrepreneurs Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving recognized a desperate need to feed the captives, launching a cattle-driving enterprise that would become the famous Goodnight-Loving Trail.

The military abandoned the site in 1868, selling the infrastructure to landowner Lucien Maxwell in 1870. The location soon shifted from a place of state-sanctioned confinement to a backdrop for frontier folklore. It was here, in the home of Maxwell’s son Pete, that the lawman Pat Garrett killed the notorious outlaw Billy the Kid. Both the outlaw and the landowner are buried in the old military cemetery, cementing the village's place in the mythology of the American frontier.

In the twentieth century, the village reinvented itself through infrastructure and aviation. The arrival of the Eastern Railway in 1908 connected the area to broader trade networks, while the 1920s saw the construction of an airfield for transcontinental passenger travel. Though that initial project failed during the Great Depression, the site found new life as a military training facility during the Second World War. Following the conflict, the airfield transitioned into a municipal airport, eventually becoming the home of the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, where NASA conducts high-altitude research today.

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