Impatient with the lethargy of the federal authorities in Santa Fe, Wild decided to mount his own offensive against the outlaws. He found two men he thought he could trust, John Hurley and Robert Olinger, both members of the Dolan faction in the Lincoln County War and veterans of Peppin’s posse in the Five-Day Battle. After much delay, Wild got Marshal Sherman to issue commissions naming them deputy U.S. marshals. On the basis of their arresting authority, Wild then succeeded in lining up as many as thirty or forty of the county’s substantial citizens in a “posse comitatus” committed to wiping out the infestation that plagued them. As federal possemen, their ostensible mission was running down counterfeiters, but their true interest lay in attacking the larger affliction of stock theft.
Two pillars of the Roswell establishment who thought Wild offered a rare opportunity to clean up Lincoln County were John Chisum and Joseph C. Lea. Even before throwing in with Wild, they had taken steps that would complement his plan. Casting about for someone to replace George Kimball as sheriff of Lincoln County, they had fixed on Patrick F. Garrett.
Pat Garrett had come to Fort Sumner in the autumn of 1878, fresh from the buffalo plains and several seasons as a hide hunter. His gangly frame, soaring to six and a half feet in his boots and hat, gave him instant recognition among residents. “Juan Largo,” the Hispanics dubbed him, and at their bailes he cut as fine a figure as Billy Bonney. Pat acquired a Hispanic wife and, after her untimely death, another. For a time he worked the range, then tended bar in Beaver Smith’s saloon, where he became even better known to the valley dwellers.
Garrett, thirty in 1880, quickly gained a reputation as a tough, resolute fellow, quiet and soft-spoken but not to be trifled with. “Coolness, courage, and determination were written on his face,” noted one who knew him.18 John Chisum admired his marksmanship, horsemanship, and cool bravery. As early as April 1879, Chisum recommended him to Governor Wallace as an ideal man to help bring order to the Pecos. As the election of 1880 approached, Chisum and Lea persuaded Garrett to move to Roswell and run for sheriff of Lincoln County.19
Billy naturally favored Garrett’s opponent, Kimball. Billy had nothing against Pat; they had known each other at Fort Sumner in the autumn of 1878, although probably not in close friendship. But Kimball had treated Billy fairly and with understanding during the three months of “imprisonment” following his pact with Governor Wallace, and that had planted a lasting gratitude. Now Kimball winked at Billy’s illicit activities when he operated in the neighborhood of White Oaks and, as Wild noted, played cards with him when he came to Lincoln. As the election neared, Billy’s visits to White Oaks increasingly featured politicking in behalf of Kimball, especially among Hispanic voters.20
Garrett’s law-and-order platform, however, proved enticing to the people of Lincoln County. On November 2, 1880, they went to the polls to award him the sheriff’s badge, 320 votes to 179 for Kimball.21 Acknowledging the electorate’s decision, Kimball promptly appointed Garrett a deputy sheriff for the two months remaining until he formally took office on January 1. With Kimball therefore a lame duck, throughout November and December 1880 Garrett functioned as sheriff in all but name.
More important for Azariah Wild’s purposes, Garrett also served as a deputy U.S. marshal. Through some clerical error, Marshal Sherman had mailed two commissions for John Hurley. On one, Wild simply crossed out Hurley’s name and substituted Garrett’s.22 Thus did Pat Garrett become a key figure in Wild’s strategy.
By November 1880, Billy Bonney had achieved a reputation that made him a major target of two separate manhunts. The Panhandle stockmen had been persuaded that he was the worst of the thieves preying on their herds, and their expedition to New Mexico aimed at eliminating him. Likewise, Operative Wild’s wanted list, doubtless heavily influenced by John Chisum, featured Billy along with Cooper, Wilson, and others.
Billy only partly deserved his new reputation. Until the fall of 1880, consistent with his continuing ambivalence about a life of crime, he had engaged in the narrowest possible range of criminal activity. So far as is known, he never held up a bank or a stagecoach, never burglarized a store or waylaid a traveler. He confined himself to stock theft, the offense least condemned by frontier citizens. As his friend Dr. Hoyt observed, “his only peculations had been rounding up cattle and horses carrying someone else’s brand, a diversion more or less popular among many old-time cattlemen, and at that period not considered a crime—if one could get away with it.” Of Billy and his friends a newspaper commented, “They neither murder men, except in self-defense, nor outrage women. The cow and the horse are their objective and offensive pursuit.”23
As Billy spent more and more time at White Oaks, however, he turned to other kinds of crime as well. When in town he frequented the West and Diedrick stables and consorted with men such as Wilson and Cooper, whom Wild knew to be “shovers of the green.” It would be surprising indeed if Billy did not also shove the green.
The people of the mining camp, moreover, singled Billy out as a particularly undesirable visitor. They feared and resented his presence. As newcomers to the territory, prospectors drawn by a mineral bonanza, they knew nothing of the qualities that endeared him to so many residents of Lincoln and Fort Sumner. They knew only that he used White Oaks as a dumping ground for stolen cattle and as a source of stolen horses to be dumped elsewhere. Moreover, few Hispanics had gravitated to White Oaks, which deprived Billy of his usual reservoir of ardent defenders.
Finally, Wild assembled convincing evidence that Billy had perpetrated another federal crime—robbing the U.S. mail. On October 16 bandits stopped the mail buckboard near Fort Sumner and relieved the driver of his pouches. The soldiers at Fort Stanton had just been paid, and many had mailed cash to banks or to family elsewhere. Witnesses named Billy Bonney and Billy Wilson as prominent among the robbers.24
From small-time rustler, therefore, Billy had progressed to big-time rustler of both cattle and horses, and he had branched out to other forms of crime as well. By the autumn of 1880, he had become far more unambiguously the criminal than when he had “skinned out” from Lincoln a year earlier, far less deserving of the clemency Governor Wallace had promised in exchange for his testimony.
November 1880 was to bring even more notoriety. As a result, for the Panhandle stockmen, for the possemen gathering under Wild’s federal auspices, and for the new sheriff with a mandate to clean up Lincoln County, Billy Bonney would suddenly become the man to get.
13
The Celebrity
Despite growing visibility as an outlaw, the Kid still sought release from the legal troubles that continued to plague him. Nor had his case been entirely forgotten.
As with his other involvements growing out of the Lincoln County War, Governor Wallace had entrusted Billy’s case to Ira E. Leonard, the Las Vegas lawyer who had stood in for the governor at the spring 1879 term of territorial court in Lincoln and later at the Dudley court of inquiry. A Missouri judge before migrating to New Mexico for his asthma, Leonard badly wanted to replace Warren Bristol on the bench of the Third Judicial District Court. In urging the appointment on the president, Wallace created an obligation that Leonard, who had moved his practice to Lincoln, satisfied in part by following up on the governor’s promises to Billy Bonney.
Since Leonard had penned one of the letters to the Secretary of the Treasury that brought Azariah Wild to Lincoln, the Secret Service operative promptly linked up with the attorney. On October 6, 1880, less than a week after Wild arrived in Lincoln, Leonard began to unfold a plan that could benefit both his purposes and Wild’s.
Wallace, Leonard revealed, had been pressing him to do something for Billy Bonney. For his part, however, the governor “had failed to put it in shape that satisfied Judge Leonard.” At the same time, Leonard had received a letter from Billy saying that he was tired of dodging the law and wanted the issue resolved. Wild concluded, as Leonard surely intended him to conclude, “that we can use Antrom [sic] in these [counterfeiti
ng] cases provided Gov Wallace will make good his written promises and the U.S. Attorney will allow the case pending in the U.S. Court to slumber and give him (Antrom) one more chance to reform.”
What Leonard had in mind, with Wild’s connivance, was the same kind of deal with Billy in the federal court that Wallace had promised him in the territorial court. Billy would provide evidence leading to the arrest and conviction of the counterfeiters, and in return the U.S. attorney for New Mexico would be induced to let the federal charges against him “slumber.” Leonard posted a letter to Billy asking him to come at once for consultation. Wild looked forward to meeting the young outlaw within a week.1
Billy came, but in six weeks rather than one, and then on other business as well. By that time, Wild and Leonard had fallen out—over Leonard’s insistence on dictating strategy, according to Wild.2 Billy’s other business, moreover, not only prevented him from meeting with Leonard but also gave him new public visibility as a criminal. His last chance at clearing away his legal troubles fell casualty to the rupture between Leonard and Wild and to his own misbehavior.
“Padre Polaco,” people called the jovial old storekeeper at Puerto de Luna, forty miles up the Pecos from Fort Sumner. The appellation recorded his Polish birth and his former status as a priest, but also it was much easier to pronounce than his proper name, Alexander Grzelachowski (Gre-ze-la-hóf-ski). Padre Polaco’s mercantile business prospered, and he ran some stock on the grassy plains east of Fort Sumner. The Kid stopped often at the Grzelachowski store in Puerto de Luna and bantered with the friendly proprietor.3
Cordial relations did not always restrain Billy from stealing from people he looked on as friends. As Will Chisum remarked, “When he wanted something, he would just take it.” About November 15, 1880, with O’Folliard, Bowdre, Wilson, Pickett, Buck Edwards, and Sam Cook, Billy rode up to Barney Mason, herding some of Pete Maxwell’s cattle east of Sumner. According to Mason, “they asked me where A. Grzelachowski’s horses were. I told them. Wilson told me to give him Pete Maxwell’s rifle and I did so. Another one asked me for the loan of a saddle and they told me that they had come to steal the Padre Polaco’s horses.” They did: four stallions, four geldings, four mares, and four fillies, valued in all at sixteen hundred dollars.4
Mason readily complied with the demands on him because, he later explained, he feared for his life. These rustlers were suspected of robbing the mail, and he thought they might have read his exchange of correspondence with Pat Garrett. The newly elected sheriff counted Mason a trusted friend, although he had a checkered past and as recently as October had been caught altering the brands of cattle that did not belong to him.5 A Texan of Irish heritage, twenty-six, short, stocky, red-faced, red-haired, and hot-tempered, Mason had in fact been summoned by Garrett to a mission menacing to Billy and his friends. Within less than a week, it would take Mason to White Oaks as an “informer” on the payroll of Azariah F. Wild.6
Billy too headed for White Oaks, intent on disposing of Padre Polaco’s horses. With him went Wilson, Cook, Edwards, and Rudabaugh. Forty miles short of their destination, the party reined up at the Greathouse and Kuch ranch, a way station on the road linking Las Vegas and White Oaks.
For the Kid, this was a favored place for holding and disposing of stolen stock. One of the proprietors, Fred Kuch, had boasted to Operative Wild of his extensive smuggling operations in Mexico. The other, “Whiskey Jim” Greathouse, had a long record of selling whiskey to Indians and otherwise operating on the dark side of the law. “Greathouse was a rather tall man, with a heartless, staring countenance, and always wore a white hat, clown fashion,” recalled one who knew him. He was said to have introduced Billy to Dave Rudabaugh, and since Billy’s advent in the White Oaks neighborhood he and Whiskey Jim had been sometime partners in crime.7
Billy sold four of the horses to Greathouse and headed for White Oaks to sell the rest. There, on the night of November 20, the horse thieves stocked up on provisions—blankets, overcoats, rifles, and other merchandise. The angry excitement in White Oaks over the presence of the outlaws suggests that they failed to pay for these goods. They left the newly acquired property at the West and Diedrick livery to be hauled out to their camp.8
The next day the party again showed up in White Oaks, and coincidentally that very night Barney Mason, now working for Garrett and Wild, wandered into the West and Diedrick corral and came face-to-face with the two Billies and Dave Rudabaugh. Nervously, Barney beat a hasty retreat and alerted the law to the whereabouts of the outlaws. By the time a posse reached the scene, however, they had disappeared.9
Early on November 22, tipped off that the outlaws were camped at a sawmill near town, Deputy Sheriff William H. Hudgens and a posse of eight set forth to investigate. They found the camp abandoned but spotted a fresh trail and followed it. A few miles out, they met a wagon bearing Mose Diedrick, Dan and Sam’s brother, and another man. Correctly surmising them to be on the way back from delivering provisions to the quarry, the deputy placed them in arrest, then continued rapidly on the trail.
Camped at Coyote Springs, Billy and his friends had little warning of their peril. They managed to mount before firing broke out, but both Bonney and Wilson had their horses shot from beneath them and had to flee on foot. Rudabaugh, Cook, and Edwards escaped in other directions. In the outlaw camp, the posse appropriated the provisions brought out by Mose Diedrick together with other possessions abandoned in the haste of flight. Bonney and Wilson, joined by Rudabaugh, made their way back to the Greathouse ranch.10
That the Kid and his comrades had stirred up the people of White Oaks became apparent at dawn on November 27, when they awoke to find the Greathouse ranch closely surrounded by Hudgens and a posse of thirteen men. Joe Steck, a Greathouse employee, went outside that morning, encountered an array of Winchesters, and returned with a note calling on the men inside to give up. “I took the note in and delivered it to the one I knew to be Billy the Kid,” recalled Steck. “He read the paper to his compadres, who all laughed at the idea of surrender.” Accompanied by Greathouse, Steck returned with the outlaws’ refusal.11
Efforts now focused on Billy Wilson, who faced less serious charges than Bonney and Rudabaugh. He balked at coming out to talk but asked to have Jimmy Carlyle, a popular White Oaks blacksmith, come in and discuss terms of surrender. Hudgens agreed only after Greathouse offered himself as hostage for Carlyle’s safety.
Unarmed, Carlyle entered the house and promptly found himself a prisoner. The men inside, presumably excepting the Kid, were drinking heavily at Whiskey Jim’s bar. Billy made Carlyle drink too, so much so that by noon, according to Steck, he was “getting under the influence of liquor and insisting on going out.” Billy refused to release him, at the same time keeping up an intimidating banter that, combined with the liquor, worked Carlyle into a panic. Hour after hour the standoff continued, as both sides grew increasingly nervous and as Carlyle came more and more to fear for his life.
The crisis occurred at about 2:00 in the afternoon, when the anxious possemen sent in an ultimatum threatening to kill Greathouse if Carlyle were not released within five minutes. Shortly, one of the posse fired a shot, probably accidentally. Steck, just emerging from the house once again, described what happened next: “I stopped and turned when, crash, a man came through a window, bang, bang, the man’s dying yell, and poor Carlyle tumbled to the ground with three bullets in him.”
Gunfire rattled from the barricades on all sides of the house, with “bullets flying from all directions,” remembered Steck, and then the battleground fell silent. Carlyle lay lifeless where he had fallen, ten feet from the shattered window.
Cold, hungry, thirsty, and dismayed by the slaying of Carlyle, the posse lost heart. Couriers had already been sent for reinforcements and provisions, but the possemen decided to pull out and ride to meet them. That night, discovering the siege lifted, the Kid and his friends slipped out and made their way toward the Pecos. When the lawmen returned the next morning, they
resolved that Whiskey Jim would never again harbor the likes of the Kid and his fellows, and they burned the ranch buildings to the ground.
How Carlyle came to be killed remains a matter for speculation. Billy later contended that the posse bore all the blame. “In a short time” after the dispatch of the ultimatum, he declared, “a shot was fired on the outside and Carlyle thinking Greathouse was Killed Jumped through a window, breaking the Sash as he went and was killed by his own Party they thinking it was me trying to make my Escape.”12
Considering the tensions that had built up during seven hours of deadlock, an accidental shot could have triggered Carlyle’s attempted escape. For the same reason the posse could well have believed the man crashing out of the window to be one of the fugitives trying to escape, and they may have opened fire on him. They thought that of Steck, emerging from the front door at the same time, and sent a fusillade in his direction.
Billy left unsaid whether anyone inside fired at Carlyle. Dave Rudabaugh was more candid. Later, aboard a train that took the three outlaws to jail in Santa Fe, Billy Wilson appealed to a lawman he knew to “help me out of this scrape.”
“That is a hard thing to ask of me after you killed Carlyle in cold blood,” was the answer.
“I didn’t shoot at him and tried to keep the others from doing so,” protested Wilson.
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