To Hell on a Fast Horse

by Mark Lee Gardner

  “Who can tell,” he once told a reporter. “Pat had lost his money; he’d lost many of his powerful friends. These circumstances are sometimes just as important as a country doctor’s testimony.”

  Out at the Cox place, they held a big barbecue for Wayne Brazel. It was attended by punchers, friends, and ranchers from all over the range.

  So who killed Pat Garrett? The standard outlaw-lawman histories go with Wayne Brazel, yet many of Brazel’s acquaintances and friends doubted he did it. When Brazel was pressed about it, he gave conflicting answers. To some he confided that he had not been the killer, but to others he maintained that he had pulled the trigger. “I’m sorry I had to kill a man,” Brazel supposedly told Albert Fall’s wife. “But I’m sure glad he wasn’t a good man.” Decades later, those close to the affair began to open up, albeit to only a select few. In 1954, Oliver M. Lee Jr. admitted to historian C. L. Sonnichsen that his uncle, Print Rhode, was Garrett’s killer. Lee claimed there had indeed been a meeting in El Paso at which Cox hired Jim Miller to do the job (Lee’s father had been present). Yet before Miller could fulfill his contract, Rhode blasted Garrett in the back of the head with his Winchester that day in Alameda Arroyo. Because Rhode had a family, Brazel agreed to take the blame.

  Unfortunately, Lee added, Cox still had to pay Miller to keep the assassin quiet. Toward the end of his life, Bill Cox’s son, Jim, also implicated his uncle Print in an interview with local researcher Herman B. Weisner. “I want to tell you this,” Cox said to Weisner, “I believed in letting a sleeping dog lie, but I want to tell you one thing. Never from the time that Wayne Brazel left Organ…to the killing of Garrett was his old friend and silent partner, Print Rhode, out of his sight.” These revelations by Lee and Cox are in line with the anonymous letter received by Annie Garrett shortly after her father’s death.

  The reason Garrett had to die had to do with bad blood and plain fear. There is no question that Rhode despised Garrett, and, according to Oliver Lee Jr., Mrs. Cox was terrified that Garrett would eventually kill both her brother Print and Brazel. Albert Fall admitted as much in a letter to Eugene Manlove Rhodes, written just two years after the murder: “Everybody was afraid that he [Garrett] was going to kill someone and a sigh of relief went up when he was finally killed.” As it turns out, Garrett was right when he said they would get him unless he got them first. He was also right when he predicted, on more than one occasion, that he would die with his boots on. Garrett seems to have shared the view of his friend Texas Ranger James B. Gillett, who once said that, “Men like myself, who spend their lives making enemies of the pests of society, must expect to be killed sometime.”

  As for Jim Miller and the thousand head of Mexican cattle, no one ever heard anything more about the cattle. They did hear about Miller, though. He was lynched with three other men in Ada, Oklahoma, on April 19, 1909, for the paid assassination of rancher and former lawman Gus Bobbitt. Carl Adamson, who had not made an appearance at Wayne Brazel’s trial, did make an appearance at his own. In December 1908, he was convicted of conspiring to smuggle Chinese nationals into the United States. Adamson appealed the ruling to the New Mexico Supreme Court where, on August 21, 1911, he received a sentence of eighteen months in the territorial penitentiary at Santa Fe. Adamson died November 1, 1919, in Roswell, New Mexico. Bill Cox, who became famous as a breeder of fine Hereford cattle, acquired Garrett’s Black Mountain ranch from Polinaria in December 1908. By 1910, Cox’s ranch was larger than the state of Rhode Island. He died of an unknown illness in 1923, and in 1945, the U.S. government condemned over 90 percent of the Cox holdings for a missile test site, known today as the White Sands Missile Range.

  Albert Fall continued his political ascension after Garrett’s death, serving in the U.S. Senate following New Mexico’s admission to state-hood in 1912 and becoming the secretary of the interior under Warren G. Harding in 1921. Ten years later, Fall was in prison. His remarkable downfall had come after he accepted “loans”—one for $100,000 in cash—from oil men to whom he had also authorized large federal oil leases. It became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. Fall died a broken man in an El Paso hospital in 1944.

  At one time, Wayne Brazel wanted to join the New Mexico Mounted Police, and he asked Albert Fall for an endorsement. On February 7, 1908, just three weeks before Pat Garrett was killed, Fall wrote Governor Curry a short letter recommending the cowpoke. Brazel probably never had a chance of being accepted, but the Garrett murder quashed all hope of his joining the force. In September 1910, Brazel married a pretty, young schoolteacher named Olive Boyd. Exactly nine months later, she gave birth to a son, and two months after that, she died of pneumonia. Four years later, Wayne Brazel disappeared without a trace. Not even his brother had a clue as to where Brazel ended up. In 1935, Brazel’s grown son, Jesse, hired a private investigator, El Paso attorney H. L. McCune, to track down his father. After much sleuthing, McCune reported back with an incredible tale: Wayne Brazel had drifted to South America, where he was shot dead by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

  Print Rhode and his family moved to Yavapai County, Arizona, shortly after the Garrett killing. He purchased a farm there and leased part of it to a brother-in-law, thirty-six-year-old Henry L. Murphy. The two families were neighbors. In an extraordinary parallel to what had happened in New Mexico, an unknown dispute arose between Rhode and Murphy, with a vengeful Rhode deciding he wanted his brother-in-law off his land. But Murphy was just as determined to hold Rhode to the terms of the lease, even in the face of Rhode’s angry threats. On July 8, 1910, Rhode confronted Murphy on a lane near their homes, pulled a .38-caliber revolver from his trouser pocket, and fired three shots at his unarmed brother-in-law. Only one bullet hit Murphy, but it was enough. He died quickly as his killer looked on, emotionless.

  Arrested for murder, Rhode was transported to Prescott, where he received telegrams from Bill Cox and Oliver Lee offering financial aid and legal assistance. But no amount of money and legal firepower could save Print Rhode from justice this time. In May 1911, a jury convicted him of murder, and he entered the territorial prison at Florence as prisoner number 3585 with a twenty-year sentence. Even though Bill Cox was unable to help his brother-in-law in the courtroom, his influence in political circles was another matter. On December 23, 1913, Arizona’s Progressive governor, George W. P. Hunt, released Rhode “on honor” to New Mexico’s governor and Cox. Rhode received a parole a year later and a full pardon on April 28, 1916.

  In San Elizario, Texas, a quiet town on the Rio Grande just a few miles southeast of El Paso, Print Rhode died peacefully in his home on October 14, 1942. There was no deathbed confession—at least not one that we know of.

  Pat Garrett’s killer took his secret to his grave.

  Print Rhode’s Arizona prison record.

  Pinal County Historical Museum

  Epilogue

  Fame is a food that dead men eat.

  —AUSTIN DOBSON

  IN OCTOBER 1905, PAT Garrett visited old Fort Sumner with Emerson Hough. Garrett had agreed to help Hough with a book to be titled The Story of the Outlaw, and they had an understanding that Garrett would receive a share of the royalties. Sumner was no longer the place Garrett had known in 1881. Its adobe buildings had been torn down some years back, and the large parade ground was a mess of weeds and sagebrush. After some searching, Garrett located the ruins of Pete Maxwell’s residence, and he started taking Hough through the events of July 14—twenty-four years earlier.

  “It was a glorious moonlight night,” Garrett began. “I can remember it perfectly well.”

  As Garrett told the story of how he killed Billy the Kid, Hough listened in awe, keenly aware of his great fortune in being in the famed lawman’s presence at the very place where justice had finally caught up with the Kid, where a snap shot in the dark had given birth to a legend.

  The friends next drove their buckboard to the barbed-wire-enclosed cemetery, which also seemed to be falling down. The Kid’s crude wooden marker had
disappeared long ago, and Garrett spent some time kicking around the greasewood and cactus, trying to figure out where the grave was. He finally found it, and he stared down at the ground for a few moments in silence. Garrett then walked to the buckboard, dug out a canteen, and opened it.

  “Well, here’s to the boys, anyway,” Garrett said, quietly. “If there is any other life, I hope they’ll make better use of it than they did of the one I put them out of.”

  There was another life, of course, a robust mythic afterlife. By the 1930s, Billy the Kid had become a gold mine. Over the previous fifty years, his story had been revisited in the occasional newspaper article and magazine feature, but he officially achieved pop culture status with the 1926 publication of Walter Noble Burns’s The Saga of Billy the Kid. Burns’s book was just that, an enthralling, if not entirely accurate, full-blooded tale partially told by the participants themselves—Burns had interviewed several key Lincoln County old-timers about the Kid, the Lincoln County War, and Pat Garrett. Somewhat surprisingly, Burns saw Garrett as a heroic figure, the “last great sheriff of the old frontier,” a characterization that drew criticism from the book reviewer for the New York Times. Like the typical Kid lover and Garrett hater—one always equals the other, it seems—the reviewer criticized the sheriff for shooting Billy in the dark “without giving him a chance to fight for his life.” Be that as it may, Burns’s book was a tremendous bestseller. Its success prompted New York trade publisher Macmillan to issue a new edition of Garrett’s rare The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid (Uncle Ash would have been pleased). And in 1930, Burns’s book was the basis of the film Billy the Kid, directed by King Vidor and starring Johnny Mack Brown as the title character.

  As the Great Depression wore on, the American public embraced Billy the Kid, the young outlaw-hero who defied authority, just as they embraced the thrilling exploits of modern-day bank robbers John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde. Some of those 1930s “public enemies” found Billy’s story irresistible as well, perhaps even inspirational. After Bonnie and Clyde were shot to death in a horrific ambush on May 23, 1934, a book was found, among other things, resting in the backseat of their blood-spattered car—The Saga of Billy the Kid. Everyone fell in love with the myth, the legend, and that myth got another boost in October 1938, with the premiere of composer Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid, which featured a dancing, dudish Billy with iconic black-and-white-striped trousers. The ballet, its score overflowing with traditional cowboy songs, received glowing reviews, including one from Copland’s proud mother, who told the composer that his piano lessons as a child had finally paid off.

  By 1938, Billy’s grave at old Fort Sumner (which had received a large tombstone six years previous) was getting hundreds of visitors annually, an impressive figure considering that Fort Sumner was not the easiest place to get to via automobile in Depression-era America. This prompted the cemetery’s owner to consider building a museum and charging admission, until a grandson of Lucien Maxwell (Lucien and Pete Maxwell are buried in the cemetery) sued and won a permanent injunction that kept the cemetery free of charge. Also in 1938, the Works Progress Administration granted $8,657 to restore the old Lincoln County courthouse. The New Mexico legislature subsequently asked the federal government to designate the courthouse as a national monument. There were a few who viewed the creation of such a monument as immortalizing a cold-blooded killer, but their criticisms were ignored. Billy had become too much of a juggernaut. Although the courthouse failed to receive the federal designation, it was dedicated a state monument in a special ceremony featuring Governor John E. Miles on July 30, 1939. Also speaking that day were Billy’s old friend George Coe and former territorial governor Miguel Antonio Otero. A crowd of approximately a thousand stood in the rain and watched the proceedings.

  People like George and Frank Coe, Yginio Salazar, Jesus Silva, and Almer Blazer suddenly became minor celebrities, and tourists and newspaper reporters wanted to talk to them. George Coe was quick to catch on and published his own book, Frontier Fighter, in 1934. In addition to the people and places associated with the Kid, tourists and aficionados also wanted to see Billy artifacts, pieces of the True Cross, so to speak. The Kid had few personal possessions at the time of his death, yet certain individuals later claimed to have the Kid’s gun, spurs, knife, the broken shackles from his courthouse escape, even a wad of hair from one of Billy’s haircuts. Maybe some of these items were the Kid’s, maybe none of them. One artifact that could not be disputed, one that would command a high price on the open market, had hung behind the bar in Tom Powers’s Coney Island saloon since 1906. It was the gun that killed Billy the Kid.

  Over the years, Powers had amassed an amazing collection of fire-arms that once belonged to famous westerners, including outlaw Sam Bass, Apache chief Victorio, El Paso marshal Dallas Stoudenmire, Texas gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, and Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. In 1906, Powers had talked his friend Garrett into letting him display the Colt pistol used to kill Billy the Kid and also Garrett’s favorite Winchester rifle, both originally captured from Billy Wilson at Stinking Spring. Part of what made the saloon keeper’s collection so valuable was that he had written documentation for each weapon. Garrett gave Powers a signed affidavit giving the history of the weapons (along with their serial numbers).

  “These guns are my prize souvenirs,” Garrett wrote, “because of their association with the Lincoln days and because I carried them through many trying times. During my life, I have owned many guns of all types and calabres [sic], but these two have been my favorites and the ones that I relied upon to protect and defend the people whom I have served.”

  According to the affidavit, Garrett gave Powers permission to display the weapons until he requested their return.

  Polinaria Garrett with the gun that killed Billy the Kid.

  Robert G. McCubbin Collection

  In October 1930, Powers, who apparently suffered from depression, took a pistol, pointed it at his chest, and shot himself just above his heart; he died three months later. Polinaria Garrett sued the Powers estate for the return of her husband’s six-shooter, and the case received national publicity. The pistol that killed Billy the Kid was said to be worth more than $500. The Powers estate claimed that a financially desperate Garrett had finally sold the gun to Powers in 1907, and that may very well have been true. Even if Garrett had not sold the gun to Powers, he certainly owed Powers money when he died. However, Polinaria testified that Pat had given her the weapon in 1904, and two years later he had asked her permission to let Powers display it in his saloon. Polinaria also claimed that Powers had promised that the gun would be returned to her after his death. Garrett’s widow was a small thing, but she could be just as feisty, if not more so, than her husband. The Garrett children loved to tell the story of how Pat once teased Polinaria about her English, and from that day forward, she never spoke to her husband in English again! She was not about to give up that pistol.

  The El Paso County Court awarded the pistol to Polinaria, but the Powers estate appealed the decision to the Texas State Supreme Court. More than a year later, the appeals court affirmed the earlier ruling, that Pat Garrett had no right to sell the pistol without his wife’s consent. The pistol belonged to Polinaria. On October 7, 1934, as a newspaper photographer snapped pictures, Mrs. Pat Garrett stood on the front porch of her Las Cruces home and received the prized weapon from her attorney, a man with the intriguing name U. S. Goen. It was a rare triumph for the Garrett family, which had struggled mightily after Pat Garrett’s death. In early October 1936, Polinaria traveled to Roswell (the home of her daughter Elizabeth) where she was crowned Queen of the Old-Timers and rode in the annual Old-Timers parade. Two weeks later, she died from a heart attack. It seems strange that of all the surviving accounts and interviews from those who knew the Kid and Garrett, there is not one from Polinaria.

  Fortunately, Polinaria was not around to see what film producer and director Howard Hughes did to her husban
d’s memory. In 1939, after success with such movies as Hell’s Angels and Scarface, Hughes chose Billy the Kid for his next big film. Hughes signed a contract with Garrett’s surviving children, Oscar, Jarvis, Pauline, and Elizabeth, presumably for the rights to their father’s story. Filming began in Arizona late in 1940. The finished movie, titled The Outlaw, had a limited release in 1943 and then a wide re-release three years later. Panned by critics and condemned by religious groups, The Outlaw became a true blockbuster, primarily because of the film’s curvaceous new starlet, Jane Russell.

  While most Americans were staring at Russell’s breasts, Pat Garrett’s children were looking at the disturbing portrayal of their father by character actor Thomas Mitchell. Mitchell’s Garrett was a dumpy, conniving, vengeful weasel of a man, and the Garretts were furious and humiliated. In March 1947, they sued the Hughes Tool Company of Houston, Texas, of which Howard Hughes was head, for $250,000 for breach of contract. The memory of their father, they claimed in the suit, was “cruelly and unjustifiably besmirched.” The result of their lawsuit is unknown. The family’s goal, a rather naive one, was to correct the false impression of their father created by the film. But truly, no one cared much about Pat Garrett anymore but them.

  Just three years later, in 1950, the Garrett family was angered once again over a perceived threat to their father’s legacy. An old man living in the small town of Hico, Texas, was claiming to be Billy the Kid. A popular myth, one that existed even in Garrett’s time, was that Billy had not been shot down that summer night in Fort Sumner but had somehow survived. One version of the story had Garrett killing another man and claiming it was the Kid so he could get the reward. Another version had Garrett in cahoots with the Kid to fake the outlaw’s death. The myth played perfectly to the romantics, who hated the story about young, charismatic Billy, the Robin Hood of the Southwest, dying so tragically. But a living Billy meant that Garrett’s greatest claim to fame was all a lie. It was as if the Garrett family could not win. Their father was either the villain for killing Billy, or he was unworthy of his dedicated-lawman reputation because he had not really killed the Kid and perhaps committed fraud in the process.