by Tony Masero
Paul Dowlin’s Mill was built around 1850 with the settlement surrounding it eventually changing its name to Ruidoso in 1882. Events around the owner, his demise and subsequent owners are historical record.
The Colonel and Peter Friday characters were inspired by an actual special prosecutor, Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain who worked successfully in Lincoln and was travelling home with his young son when they disappeared suspiciously near White Sands in 1896.
The shootout at the Caulfield ranch is a fictional mix of confrontations with the Kid. In 1880 at Coyote Springs, a White Oaks posse almost captured the Kid but they killed his horse instead. He fled on foot over forty miles to ‘Whiskey’ Jim Greathouse’s Stage Station and Tavern. There, after a few days he was again surrounded and a shootout took place during which a deputized blacksmith named James Carlyle was killed causing the posse to withdraw. The Kid escaped again.
The Kid pistol-shot deputy James W Bell and killed his fellow lawman Robert M Ollinger with the deputy’s own 10-gauge shotgun during his escape in shackles from the Lincoln Jail in April 1881 whilst awaiting execution due to be carried out the coming May.
Patrick Floyd Garrett, the Kid’s killer, born of a wealthy plantation family lived from 1850 until 1908 and built his house in Roswell in 1880. His Little Creek Canyon Ranch though was situated further west near Alto. He and his second bride, his dead wife’s sister, had nine children together. He eventually was shot and killed by a neighbor over an argument concerning some goats grazing on his land.
He got his wish with another of the outlaws, Charlie Bowdre who was mistaken for the Kid whilst wearing a similar looking hat, he was shot down at Stinking Springs by Garrett’s posse and died in the lawman’s arms, whispering, ‘I wish…. I wish….’
You have to wonder what he was wishing for, perhaps a different choice of headgear.
The one room church and tower at San Patricio still stands, it was built in 1884 and has subsequently been abandoned and superseded by the Catholic church of St Jude Thaddeus.
The shootout over the bet with the Texan, Charley Wilson actually occurred according to an interview with Francisco Trujillo given on May 10, 1937, a Mexican who knew the Kid. The incident took place in a saloon in Bosque Grande. He also records a somewhat slightly different ending than the accepted one for the Kid, although there are many versions, the exact truth of which may never be known.
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