To Hell on a Fast Horse

by Mark Lee Gardner

  For this to happen, he knew that Lincoln County needed a new sheriff, one who understood the risks but was willing to see the job to its conclusion. Lea, who was every bit as tall as Garrett, became convinced that Garrett was the man for this job. He persuaded Garrett to pick up and move to the Roswell area (Fort Sumner was just outside of Lincoln County) and run for election as sheriff that fall. By early June, Garrett and Polinaria were settled into their new home, and the census taker recorded Garrett’s occupation as farmer.

  William Bonney was noted in that census. He shared an adobe dwelling at Fort Sumner with his friends Charlie and Manuela Bowdre (it was rumored that he and Charlie shared more than the house). The census taker wrote down that Charlie and Billy both “work in cattle,” which, like most things about Billy, was true yet not true. Sometime that same year, a traveling photographer arrived at Fort Sumner. With tintype portraits going for only a few cents apiece, a professional photographer could draw settlers from miles around. Billy decided to have his picture taken, if only to have a few tintypes to present to the girls he was sweet on. Although Paulita Maxwell insisted that Billy was a neat and tasteful dresser around Fort Sumner, Billy is rather odd-looking in this tintype, wearing rumpled, trail-worn clothes: a loose sweater, unbuttoned vest, a showy bib-front shirt embroidered with a large anchor across the chest, a bandanna knotted clumsily about the neck, and a narrow-brimmed felt hat with a large dent in the crown.

  Billy the Kid, from the tintype made at Fort Sumner.

  Collection of the author

  Billy was never without a weapon, and in the photograph he is grasping the muzzle of a Model 1873 Winchester carbine, with its butt resting on the floor. Around his waist is a cartridge belt and holster with the curved butt of a six-shooter sticking out. These were the tools of the Kid’s trade—and what he needed to survive. Billy apparently paid for four tintypes, which would have been made simultaneously with a camera that featured four individual lenses mounted on the front. After developing the tin plate with its four identical images, the photographer would simply snip it into four parts and mount the portraits in thin paper mattes. The single surviving photograph of Billy the Kid in all his glory is anything but a flattering portrait—his mouth is partially open, exposing his buckteeth, and his eyelids appear to be drooping, snake-eyed. Nearly everyone remembered Billy as attractive, extremely likable, and full of life. It is as if he was just too big—or too elusive—to be captured in a tintype that would fit in the palm of one’s hand.

  At the time that this photograph was taken, Billy had become the most prominent member of a very successful gang of livestock thieves that operated back and forth between the rowdy cow town of Tascosa, Texas, southwest to the mining boomtown of White Oaks, New Mexico, a distance of some three hundred miles. With markets on both sides of the state line, and several large ranches with not nearly enough cowhands to be everywhere at once, it was easy enough to round up a few head of cattle, alter the brands, write up a fake bill of sale, and be gone down the trail before the owner knew what hit him. And with beef bringing between $15 and $25 per head (the gang got $10 for their stolen beef ), a loss of fifty head of cattle was a painful hit to the account books. The cattlemen of this area knew who Billy was and were desperate that he and his cohorts be captured or run out of the country.

  Unless a horse or cow was padlocked in a barn stall, not a one of them between Tascosa and White Oaks was safe. The Mescalero Apache reservation south of Fort Stanton was one of the gang’s favorite targets, because the Mescaleros were exceptional horsemen and had fine horse herds. The Mescaleros called Billy and his fellow horse thieves the “broad hat people.”

  “At Fort Stanton Billy the Kid was making a raid on the Indians all the time for their horses,” recalled Percy Big Mouth. “We made a big brush corral at Fort Stanton right near the fort…to protect us against Billy the Kid. One night they came over, tore all the brush down and got all our horses. The soldiers would go after Billy.”

  But the soldiers never got Billy, no one did. On the evening of August 9, 1879, Sheriff George Kimbrell with a military escort numbering one officer and fifteen men trapped the Kid in a cabin six miles from Lincoln. Even though they greatly outnumbered the outlaw, neither the sheriff nor the soldiers were interested in busting into the cabin and shooting it out with Billy the Kid. Kimbrell chose to wait until daylight and negotiate a surrender. But that was far too much time to give the Kid. Demonstrating that he still retained the slim figure and athleticism of his Silver City days, Billy clawed up the chimney and slipped away in the darkness, leaving his weapons—and the posse—far behind.

  By the fall of 1880, the gang of rustlers included several ne’er-do-wells who had not been close to Billy during the Lincoln County War. Among them were Dave Rudabaugh, Tom Pickett, and Billy Wilson. The twenty-six-year-old Dave Rudabaugh had a handsome, though weather-beaten, face and a black mustache. His blue eyes and winning smile made him look like a decent guy, but he was an accomplished train and stage robber, a hired gun, and a murderer. A year earlier, Rudabaugh had killed a Las Vegas jailer while attempting to break a friend out of jail; he had been on the run ever since. Many considered Rudabaugh a far worse character than the Kid, and some people said that even Billy was afraid of him.

  Thomas Pickett was twenty-four years old, the son of a well-to-do Wise County, Texas, rancher who had been a Texas Ranger, a justice of the peace, and a Texas state legislator. Young Tom joined the Texas Rangers in 1876, but his troubles started almost immediately when he was charged with several counts of stealing cattle. He eventually ended up in New Mexico, where in 1879 he worked as a policeman in Old Town Las Vegas. In mid-May 1880, when he found out that someone wanted to send a bullet or two into his brain, Tom hastily resigned from the Las Vegas force and traveled to White Oaks, where he became the assistant city marshal and a bartender in Patterson’s saloon. A close shooting scrape a month later—so close that a bullet creased his cheek—convinced him to move on again. Pickett drifted to Fort Sumner, where he hired on under Charlie Bowdre at the Yerby ranch.

  William “Billy” Wilson, two years younger, slightly stouter, and far quieter than the Kid, was born in Ohio. Before coming to New Mexico, he had navigated the hell-raisers and prostitutes of Dodge City, Kansas, where he likely ran into Dave Rudabaugh. He carried the two most popular firearms in the American West, a Winchester Model 1873 carbine and a Colt Single Action Army revolver. Both weapons were chambered in .44 caliber and, thus, fired the same ammunition.

  Wilson put the gang on the U.S. Treasury Department’s radar when he began freely passing $100 counterfeit notes in Lincoln. Secret Service “Special Operative” Azariah Wild arrived at Fort Stanton on October 1, direct from New Orleans, determined to have Wilson, and anyone else connected with the counterfeiting ring, arrested. Once in New Mexico, however, the forty-two-year-old Wild got a crash course on Lincoln County and how big a challenge he faced. It did not take Wild long to become a supporter of Pat Garrett.

  Joseph C. Lea had started the campaign to elect Garrett to be sheriff, but it only kept rolling with the support of other key power brokers in Lincoln County. These included Fort Stanton post traders Will Dowlin and John C. DeLaney, Lincoln merchant Joseph La Rue, and La Rue’s clerk, the infamous Jimmy Dolan. Garrett’s supporters succeeded in forcing his name on the ballot in place of the incumbent, Sheriff Kimbrell. Kimbrell, who was known to drink and play cards with those for whom he possessed arrest warrants, decided to run anyway.

  Among those campaigning for Pat Garrett was nineteen-year-old George Curry, then working on the Block ranch, a sheep operation twenty-five miles from Fort Stanton in the Capitan Mountains. On Monday evening, November 1, 1880, a young stranger appeared at the ranch about suppertime, and, as was customary, Curry invited him to a place at the table. The stranger, slight of build, was dressed as a puncher and spoke fluent Spanish. Curry observed that the Hispanic ranch hands knew the young man, but the stranger never offered his name, and, as was
also customary, Curry did not ask. As they continued to talk after supper, Garrett’s name came up.

  “Do you know Garrett?” the stranger asked.

  “No, I don’t, but from all I hear he is a splendid man,” Curry answered.

  “Do you think he will be elected?”

  “I don’t know,” Curry said, “but I’m sure he will carry this precinct. I have a gallon of whiskey on hand, and I think that will help carry it.”

  “You are a good cook and a good fellow,” the stranger said before riding away, “but if you think Pat Garrett is going to carry this precinct for sheriff, you are a damned poor politician.”

  After the stranger was gone, Felipe Miranda, the sheep boss, told Curry that the man he had been talking to was William H. Bonney. And Bonney was right. Las Tablas was the home of Billy’s good friend Yginio Salazar, and the next morning, Kimbrell carried the precinct.

  Fortunately for Garrett and his backers, the Las Tablas outcome was not repeated in the other precincts. Garrett, who generally spoke in a low tone and rarely talked of himself, had not been the best campaigner for public office, but the people who supported him were interested in action, not words. Garrett handily won the election, receiving 320 votes to Kimbrell’s 179. The day after the election, Acting Governor W. G. Ritch (Wallace was away from Santa Fe at the time) penned a proclamation calling for the people of the Territory to recognize November 25 as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise.

  “Peace now prevails within our borders,” Ritch proclaimed. “On every hand, among the humble and weak, as well as among the bold and powerful and wealthy, are found causes to remember with thankfulness the goodness which crowns the year.”

  This was easy to say from the Governor’s Palace in Santa Fe, but there was still a whole lot of hell going on in Lincoln County.

  5

  OUTLAWS AND LAWMEN

  There is only one way to deal with outlaws: Offer rewards for them dead or alive, the former preferred.

  —THE DENVER TIMES

  FRANK PAGE HAD COME from Arkansas to New Mexico Territory for his health—he was a consumptive—and got a job working as a bookkeeper for Alexander Grzelachowski, a merchant in Puerto de Luna. Grzelachowski was a former Catholic priest known to the locals as Padre Polaco. About the second week of November 1880, the Kid and Billy Wilson stepped into Grzelachowski’s large mercantile. The store clerk had seen these outlaws approaching and abruptly left the store without saying anything to Page. The puny bookkeeper, whose affliction had whittled his body weight down to about a hundred pounds, went out to meet the two men. After making some minor purchases, the outlaws suddenly spotted three shiny Colt double-action “Lightning” revolvers the store had gotten in just recently. Unlike a single-action revolver, which required the shooter to manually cock the gun’s hammer, a double-action revolver cocked the hammer and fired the pistol with a single pull of the trigger. It was quick and deadly. The Lightning was also fairly light, weighing in at about one and a half pounds. Page handed over the .38-caliber six-shooters to the Kid and Wilson to examine.

  As the two outlaws dry fired the pistols and spun their cylinders, the bookkeeper left them to wait on a woman who had just come into the store. The Kid and Wilson promptly shoved the pistols into their belts and quietly slipped outside. When Page returned to the counter, he was outraged to see that the pistols were gone. He quickly figured out where the two men were staying, and he barged into their room. He saw the pistols lying on the bed and began scolding the two as he gathered up the handguns. He told them they “were fine men to take advantage of a poor invalid,” and that he would not stand for it. Page watched the Kid’s face turn red—he was not used to being spoken to this way—and he observed the Kid’s hand move toward the .45 six-shooter in his belt. Suddenly, Wilson said something to the Kid in Spanish. Page later learned that Wilson said, “Don’t kill him.” Billy’s dark mood instantly disappeared, and he and Wilson walked with the bookkeeper back to the store, all the while telling him that they had been playing a prank on him when they took the pistols.

  But Billy was still intent on getting one of the Lightnings and he told Page that one of the local saloon owners owed him $50 and that he would sign an order on the man for the amount of the pistol and a box of cartridges. This was a common way of doing business at the time when cash was not readily accessible—if the parties trusted each other. By now, Page should have known better, but he went along with this. He had the Kid sign the order, which came to $34.90, and Billy took one of the pistols with him. A day or two later news arrived that some horses had been stolen from Grzelachowski’s ranch, twenty miles east of town, and people were saying that the Kid and Wilson were the thieves. Page apparently never laid eyes on the Kid again, but every time he opened the store’s books, he was reminded of his encounter with Billy the Kid because the order on the saloon owner was never paid: the man said Billy owed him the $50.

  NOT ONLY WERE BILLY and the gang stealing cattle and horses, but they had also been robbing the U.S. mail, a handy source of cash money. Because there was no money order office at Fort Stanton, the soldiers there sent cash back home in registered letters. All the gang had to do, then, was hold up a stagecoach and dig through the mail to find the registered envelopes. Near Fort Sumner on the night of October 16, the gang stopped the outbound stagecoach and relieved it of its mail sacks. A female passenger recognized Billy Bonney as one of the thieves—they robbed her, too.

  On the night of November 20, Billy and the gang rode into White Oaks. Billy needed to fence some of Padre Polaco’s horses, and he also wanted to see lawyer Ira Leonard, who was then living there. The Kid knew that Leonard was a conduit to Governor Wallace, and he had written Leonard the previous month offering his services, saying he was tired of “dodging the officers.” In other words, Billy was willing to squeal—again. But Leonard was not there, and there would be no more deals with the outlaw. Instead, the gang went on a robbing spree in White Oaks, stealing rifles, blankets, overcoats, and some mules. They galloped out of town before most people knew what had happened.

  Although the Kid and his cohorts usually had Lincoln County’s residents quaking in their boots, some of White Oaks’s citizens were not about to put up with the gang’s thievery. When Deputy Sheriff Bill Hudgens learned that the gang was hanging out at Blake’s Sawmill, a few miles outside of White Oaks, he quickly put together a posse to go after them. Hudgens, a twenty-nine-year-old saloon operator, had grown up in the same Louisiana parish as Pat Garrett, and he had built the first house in the mining camp just the year previous. The posse that left White Oaks on November 22 was made up of nine determined citizens and included former Texas Ranger James W. Bell. After hunting for just a few hours, they found a deserted camp and a trail left in the snow that they believed was from Billy and his cohorts. As Hudgens’s posse followed the trail, they came upon two men who were connected with the gang. The men were on their way back to White Oaks after delivering news and provisions to the outlaw camp. Hudgens arrested the men and then continued the search.

  At a place known as Coyote Springs, the posse was suddenly hit by a spray of gunfire by the outlaws who had heard them approaching their camp, the bark of Billy’s new Colt Lightning undoubtedly adding to the chaos. But the posse recovered quickly, and as men cursed and bullets flew through the air, several horses on both sides were killed. Billy’s mount was shot out from under him. When it became a little too hot for the outlaws, they fled in different directions. Hudgens’s men inspected the camp and found Billy’s dead horse, along with his fine saddle, and a number of provisions strewn about the ground. Hudgens apparently decided they had done enough for one day and led the posse back to White Oaks. The Kid and Billy Wilson, both on foot, headed for a stage stop and store north of White Oaks on the Las Cruces–Las Vegas stage route. Somewhere along the way, they reunited with Dave Rudabaugh.

  Jim Greathouse, a former Texas buffalo hunter, and Fred W. Kuch ran the store, as well as a ranch at the same loc
ation. In addition to peddling a few dry goods and providing grub to stagecoach passengers, they were eager buyers of stolen stock, and their reputations were at about the same level as the Kid’s. They were also well known to be chummy with the outlaw band. When some freighters arrived in White Oaks with the news that they had spotted the Kid at the Greathouse-Kuch roadhouse, another posse immediately left town to hunt down the outlaws.

  This hastily organized second posse consisted of thirteen men under the leadership of Constable Thomas B. Longworth. Several of them were veterans of the first posse, such as Hudgens and James W. Bell. Blacksmith Jimmy Carlyle, twenty-six years old and a popular fellow in White Oaks, had been in the first posse but was eager to be in the second because the gang had his mules. And he wanted the personal satisfaction of helping to make the arrests or, if need be, shooting the rustlers dead.

  The posse arrived at the Greathouse-Kuch establishment early on the morning of November 27, a Saturday. Sleeping soundly inside were Greathouse, Kuch, the Kid, Wilson, Rudabaugh, and a German cook named Joe Steck. The posse quietly surrounded the house, created makeshift breastworks, and waited in the snow for the sun to come up. Steck was the first to come outside (the Kid was not an early riser—long nights of women, dancing, and gambling will do that), and quickly he was staring into the wrong ends of two rifles. Strangely enough, Steck did not know the identities of the men staying there that night. The cook had apparently acquired the healthy habit of not asking too many questions. When the posse members prodded him about Billy the Kid and the others, Steck confidently said he did not know anything. At first, the lawmen thought Steck was playing dumb, but after they described the characters they were after, Steck confirmed that three men in the house matched those descriptions. Hudgens scribbled a note to the Kid demanding that he and his two companions surrender—escape was impossible, Hudgens wrote. Steck was sent inside to deliver the note.