The Kid

When his posse got to the hitching post in front of an adobe bunkhouse, Garrett found no sign of Folliard, Bowdre, or even Yerby. Garrett furtively sidled inside the bunkhouse, his pistol impatient beside his cheek, and found weeping on cots a pregnant Manuela and Mrs. Herrera, her mother. His Spanish was too poor to fully understand their gibberish and finger wagging, so he went out again. He told Deputy Kip McKinney, “They are hailing our advent with terror-born lamentations.”

Reconnoitering Yerby’s property, Garrett’s posse found four horses they decided were stolen and a pair of mules that the deputy sheriff took as his own because he pretended they could have been those purloined by Mose Dedrick from a Wells Fargo stagecoach depot on the Rio Grande and perhaps later sold to the Kid for his fanciful ranch in Los Portales. Which is where they went next, fifty miles southeast of Fort Sumner, hoping to take possession of the sixty cattle rustled from John Newcomb at Agua Azul. The Kid’s hideout near Los Portales was just twenty miles from the Texas border. The Kid having neglected their feeding, a bony yearling and a calf were hungrily tearing dead leaves from whatever manzanita branches were above the snow. But there was at least a fluent freshwater spring that flowed under ice next to a fifteen-foot-high quarry of feldspar, gypsum, and mica that looked like a layer cake dropped from a height on the flatlands, its only welcome being the dark mouth of a cave. The Kid had bragged about his homestead as if it were a magnificent castle, but that was him dreaming again. Garrett scrabbled up to the entrance to find nothing but a damp emptiness, a rolled-up mattress, a pile of foul blankets, and some rusty tin utensils. With no food there other than a shaker of salt and sack of flour infested with weevils, the posse slaughtered the skinny yearling and filled up on steaks and rump roasts before wintering that night in the cave and heading back to Fort Sumner in the morning.

And that afternoon a postman walked into Beaver Smith’s saloon to deliver a letter to Pat F. Garrett from Charlie Bowdre, saying he was anxious to parley with the deputy sheriff and wondered if he could make bail should he ever give himself up. With dickering in mind, Charlie offered to meet him one-on-one the next afternoon in the military cemetery.

* * *

Looking everywhere around him, Bowdre kept his afternoon appointment and found the deputy sheriff smoking a cheroot in a long gray Civil War overcoat just like his own, Garrett’s right thigh resting on a low, whitewashed cemetery wall, his left boot on the ground. He gently lifted his handgun from his side holster and laid it a foot from him on the wall. The outlaw likewise rested his cavalry pistol on the headstone of a private killed in the Indian Wars. Bowdre had a misbegotten, hangdog look.

“You feeling ill, Charlie?”

“Well, I was better, but I got over it.”

“You just need your rest.”

“You, too, I spect. Hear tell you been runnin ragged.”

Garrett flicked ash from his cheroot with a fingernail and with a formality he thought of as Southern gallantry, he said, “I have been told by higher-ups that you’ll be needing to forswear your evil life and forsake your disreputable associates. After

that, every effort will be made by good citizens such as Joseph Lea in Roswell to procure your release on bail and give you the opportunity to redeem yourself.” Hiding his disgust, he thought, Garrett blandly focused on the criminal before him, and Bowdre saw the irrational nullity in his eyes, each as nickel gray as a gun barrel.

Seeking to appease, Bowdre said, “I’d do it if nothing broke or came untwisted, but more’n likely it would. You ain’t the onliest lawman after us.”

“You’d be safe in jail for a piece and probably get out in time to see your child born. But right now you have to give me something to go on.”

“Like?”

“Cease all commerce with the Kid and his gang.”

“Cain’t hardly not feed em if they’s to wander to Yerby’s. But I won’t harbor em more’n needs be.”

Garrett stood from the wall and slapped snow from his overcoat. He took a final drag from his cheroot, dropped it, and squashed it out with his boot. “The upshot is this, Charlie. If you don’t quit them and surrender, you’ll be pretty sure to get captured or killed. We are in resolute pursuit of the gang and will sleep on the trail until we take you all in, dead or alive.”

Charlie Bowdre couldn’t help but smirk as he said, “Mr. Garrett, you may be hangin your basket a little higher than you can reach.”

And then they parted ways.

- 17 -

THE OFF-SCOURING OF SOCIETY

On December 3, 1880, J. W. Koogler—a close friend of the late Huston Chapman—wrote an editorial in the Las Vegas Gazette stirring up a campaign against the Kid, Charlie Bowdre, Dave Rudabaugh, and “others of equally unsavory reputation,” claiming they were “hard characters, the off-scouring of society, fugitives from justice, and desperadoes by profession.”

Koogler was the first journalist ever to call Bonney by his famous nickname as he wrote, “The gang is under the leadership of ‘Billy the Kid,’ a desperate cuss, who is eligible for the post of captain of any crowd, no matter how mean and lawless.” His gang of “forty to fifty men” was “harassing the stockmen of the Pecos and Panhandle country, and terrorizing the people of Fort Sumner and vicinity.

“Are the people of San Miguel County to stand this any longer? Shall we suffer this horde of outcasts and the scum of society to continue their way on the very border of our County?”

Writing Governor Wallace from Fort Sumner on December 12, the Kid sought to justify himself and his actions, maintaining that the Las Vegas journalist “must have drawn very heavily on his imagination.” Concerning a claim in the editorial that he was “the captain of a band of outlaws who hold forth in Los Portales” he maintained, “There is no such organization in existence.” Of the raid on the Greathouse & Kuch ranch and trading post, the Kid noted that Hudgens had no warrants to arrest or subpoena them, “so I concluded it amounted to nothing more than a mob.” After giving his own version of how Carlyle was mistakenly killed by his own vigilantes, “they thinking it was me trying to make my escape,” he said the illicit posse then withdrew. And then the Kid took on an aggrieved tone to say that in his absence, Deputy Sheriff Garrett, acting under John Chisum’s orders, went to the Kid’s cave in Los Portales “and found nothing. And he’d already gone by Mr. Yerby’s ranch and took a pair of honestly purchased mules of mine, which I had left with Mr. Bowdre. The sheriff claimed that they were stolen and even if they were not that he had a right to confiscate any outlaw’s property.” The Kid then petulantly claimed, “J. S. Chisum is the man who got me into trouble and was benefitted thousands by it and is now doing all he can against me. There is no doubt but what there is a great deal of stealing going on in the Territory and a great deal of the property is taken across the Staked Plains as it is a good outlet, but so far as my being at the head of a band of outlaws there is nothing in it. In fact, in several instances I have recovered stolen property when there was no chance to get an officer to do it.” He concluded, “If some impartial party were to investigate this matter, they would find it far different from the impression put out by Chisum and his tools. Yours respectfully, William Bonney.”

* * *

Because the Kid’s exculpatory letter needed to travel over a hundred miles by mail wagon from Fort Sumner to Las Vegas and then was sent in a railcar to the derelict Palacio del Gobernador in Santa Fe, Governor Lew Wallace did not receive it until six days later, on December 18. He’d just returned from his eastern book tour and found a canvas mailbag stuffed full with accolades and praise for Ben-Hur, but he also found the Kid’s letter, handwritten in red ink on ruled paper. Scorning it as he read along, he told his male secretary, “In penitentiaries it’s exactly the same. All the prisoners there are innocent, too.”

But whatever the Kid said would not have mattered, for five days earlier Wallace had coolly approved a notice sent to every post office and newspaper in the Territory:

BILLY THE KID

$500 REWARD