Optician thrown into Wild West Mystery

The following letter recently arrived in the Optician office from a US university researcher:

I am researching the history of Billy the Kid, and for some strange reason I found a source where Sheriff Pat Garrett said that there was an unfavorable article about him shooting Billy that was published in The Optician. This article, if it was ever published, would have been in an issue published between June 1881 and March 1882.

I am also fascinated on how a copy of this journal would have found its way to the New Mexico Territory so quickly after its publication, and how Garrett ever got a copy of it. It also could be a situation where Garrett's ghost writer made up the story about this journal or this article being published in that particular journal. I don't even know if there was a journal called The Optician published in 1881-1882.

I am desperately seeking to find this article or at least some citation of it.

Any information you can provide, including even as much as title of the article, publication date, etc. to a copy of the article will be deeply appreciated.

Thanks so very much for any assistance you can lend.Unfortunately Optician was not published until 1891 so things aren't as straight forward. We can't simply look through our archives for those dates.

Do you know more?

If you know anything about this contact chris.bennett@rbi.co.uk or call 0208 652 8250