Fort Sumner is a village in and the county seat of De Baca County, New Mexico, United States. The population was 1,031 at the 2010 U.S. Census, down from the figure of 1,249 recorded in 2000. Fort Sumner is the spring and fall home of the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, and is house to the burial site of famed outlaw of the American West, Billy the Kid, who was shot and killed there in 1881.

Named after former New Mexico Territory military supervisor Edwin Vose Sumner, U.S. Fort Sumner was a military fort charged subsequently the internment of welcoming Navajo and Mescalero Apache populations from 1863 to 1868. The federal doling out closed the fort in 1868 and sold its buildings to Lucien Maxwell, a prominent New Mexico landowner, in 1870. In the latter 1870s Maxwell’s son Pete befriended legendary outlaw Billy the Kid, and it was in his house that Billy was killed by Pat Garrett. Billy the Kid is buried in the obsolete military cemetery in Fort Sumner, as is Lucien Maxwell.

In 1866, the U.S. government was holding thousands of Native American Indians at Fort Sumner after they were subdued by Kit Carson. Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving proverb a concern opportunity and arranged to sell beef to the United States Government suitably that the captive, displaced, and imprisoned Native Americans could be fed. This enterprise led to the start of the Goodnight-Loving Trail, located far plenty west to avoid any gain access to with mobs wanting the superior Longhorn cattle.

In the 1920s the Transcontinental Air Transport airline built an airfield in Fort Sumner as part of its coast-to-coast let breathe passenger network, but the site was abandoned in the proclaim of the airline’s ambitious plans collapsed in the Great Depression. The landing field was reopened by the United States Army Air Forces as a training base during World War II. After the war, the base became the Fort Sumner Municipal Airport, and was agreed as a creation site for NASA’s high-altitude balloon program (see Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility).