Old Fort Days

On the Saturday evening of Old Fort Days, Fox Field at Fort Sumner High School holds a chimichanga-eating contest at a quarter to six and, at six, a footrace run with gravestones. In 2019 about 50 people, from Fort Sumner and across the region, raced before a packed stadium. The race honors an outlaw’s headstone that was stolen and brought home, and it has anchored the celebration for more than forty years.

Old Fort Days falls on the second weekend of June in Fort Sumner, De Baca County. The Fort Sumner Chamber of Commerce puts it on in a community that promotes itself, in the words of a 2019 newspaper account, as a “sleepy little village with a shady little past.”

Four days from Avenue C to the fairgrounds

The celebration takes up most of a week. The 2025 schedule opened on Wednesday evening, June 11, with a Cowboy Camp Meeting in the Fort Sumner Community House. According to the columnist Betty Williamson, the 2026 edition opened the same way. Thursday’s events in 2025 gathered on E. Avenue C in front of the courthouse: a cornhole tournament and a salsa challenge at six, a dunking booth at seven, and a street dance from eight to eleven.

Friday began at Dallas Park with the cow plop at 8 a.m. Alan Sparks, chamber president in 2015, explained it this way. A piece of ground is marked off in a grid and people bet on squares. “And then they turn a cow lose and let it walk around until it has a bowel movement,” Sparks said. The holder of that square won $500. Chicken bingo followed at nine. After that came a kids’ play zone with a pet show, games, and water activities. At four the Little Britches Tombstone Race, the children’s version, ran on the football practice field. A tug of war started at six across from the senior center. The Working Ranch Cowboys of America ranch rodeo began at seven at the De Baca County Fairgrounds, followed by a dance there at nine with the Stateline Band.

Saturday in 2025 started with a cowboy breakfast from six to nine at the Masonic Lodge north of the post office. A 5K color run began at seven at Bosque Redondo Lake, which the schedule also calls the Slough. In 2026 the chamber invited visitors to bring a fishing pole out to the Slough as part of the weekend. Team roping opened at the fairgrounds at nine. The parade stepped off at ten along Sumner Avenue under the 2025 theme, The Wild West. The Cattlewomen’s barbecue ran from eleven to one in the high school cafeteria. Horseshoe pitching followed at the Slough at one, and the rodeo returned to the fairgrounds at seven. Williamson described that Saturday-night rodeo as the close of the 2026 celebration. The 2025 schedule added one more event on Sunday morning, the Scott Marshall, Christian Pettigrew, Joe Tom White Memorial Team Roping.

A crafts show runs through Friday and Saturday. In 2024 it was set up outdoors at Dallas Park, and in 2025 it was held in the high school gym. The public pays no admission. Townspeople also walk a business crawl from shop to shop with punch cards. The 2026 crawl ran June 12 and 13 and ended in a prize drawing.

The program shifts from year to year. The 2015 edition had a chili cook-off, a hog-calling contest, concerts by local bands, and a teepee with fresh baked goods for sale inside. Children could enter goat roping and a pet show. Dachshunds ran a wiener dog dash for $250. In 2019 the dash filled the intermission of the tombstone race, and owners had varying success persuading their dogs to cross the field and stay in their lanes. That night ended with a street dance north of the village hall and an open ranch rodeo.

A museum shaped like a hogan, and a grave in a cage

From noon to four on Saturday the 2025 schedule set aside time for tours of three sites. The first was the Bosque Redondo Museum, admission $7. Navajo architect David Sloan designed it in the shape of a hogan and a tepee. The museum and its interpretive trail tell the history of Fort Sumner and the Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation, which New Mexico Historic Sites calls tragic. At one o’clock the museum held a Treaty Commemoration Day presentation with dancers.

The second was the Billy the Kid Museum, admission $8. According to its website it has gathered 60,000 relics, “western and otherwise,” since it opened in 1953. They include “a rifle that belonged to Billy the Kid, along with the documentation,” as well as “the door Billy backed through the night he was slain and two curtains that came out of Pete Maxwell’s bedroom where Billy was shot.”

The third stop is a few miles off, in the old Fort Sumner Cemetery on Billy the Kid Drive. Williamson describes it as “what most people believe is Billy’s real grave.” The grave sits inside a steel cage and can be viewed at any hour. The chamber notes that it is always open and free. A business-crawl punch card was entered twice in the drawing if its holder had visited any of the three sites. Photographs served as proof and were checked at the chamber booth.

Forty yards and back

Sparks laid out the course in 2015. It runs 40 yards and has two obstacles, one three feet high and one four feet. When the gun sounds, racers climb both obstacles and run to the far end, where their tombstones wait. Then, as Sparks told it, “the thieves snatch their tombstones,” carry them back to the start, and set them down. The stones have been stolen. The runners then pick them up again, carry them back over the obstacles, and set them at their original resting places. A racer who drops the stone or steps outside the lane is out of the race.

In 2015 the open division carried an 80-pound stone. Sparks said the women’s, couples, and men-over-35 divisions carried 20 pounds. By the 2019 account, four groups raced with stones weighing 40 to 80 pounds. The top prize started at $1,000 and had reached $2,500 by 2015. The 2025 purses were $2,500 and $1,000 for the top two in the open division, $750 each for the couples and women’s divisions, and $350 for racers 35 and over. The race has been billed as the “World’s Richest Billy the Kid Tombstone Race.” In 2026 the chamber called it the American AgCredit World Famous Tombstone Race.

In 2015 the chamber added a Billy the Kid look-alike contest. Contestants walked the parade with numbers on their backs, and parade-goers voted. “We will announce the winners at the Tombstone Race,” said Jeni White of the chamber. Anyone could enter, she said, including women and children.

Two thefts and a husband’s idea

The 2019 newspaper account dates the first theft of the headstone to 1951 and the second to 1981. Sparks told it more briefly, and the 2015 newspaper account framed the two thefts as legend. “Well, Billy the Kid’s tombstone had been stolen … but we always got it back,” Sparks said. “The last time it was stolen, it was in California. The sheriff drove out there and got it back. But when (the thieves) stole the gravestone, they had to go over two fences to get to its location.”

According to Sparks, the chamber wanted an event that would make Fort Sumner famous and bring in visitors. Mary Ann Cortese was chamber president at the time. “So Mary Ann’s husband got to thinking and said, ‘Let’s do a tombstone race to commemorate the stealing and bringing it back,’” Sparks said. In his account, the first race was run in 1979, during Old Fort Days festivities held June 11 through 13.

The sources count the years differently. In 2019 the newspaper called the event the 44th annual Old Fort Days and the race its 43rd running. That year the organizer was Sarah Cortese Fitzgerald, Mary Ann Cortese’s daughter. Fitzgerald said her mother had helped start the Old Fort Days programming 44 years earlier.

Other townspeople have also served on the work over the decades. Ann Fincke, a lifelong resident, taught school, painted, and sat on the Old Fort Days Committee. She died in 2010 at 92. Jimmie Dee Fox was president of the County Fair Board and chairman of the Old Fort Days Rodeo. She died in 2013 at 44.

“It’s fun to see people that come year after year,” Fitzgerald said in 2019. “Since the very start of Old Fort Days, this has been a sort of cornerstone.”