The Kid

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With a sheriff’s annual salary of only two hundred dollars, Garrett had campaigned hard to finally collect the five hundred dollars from the government for the Kid’s capture at Stinking Springs, the reward getting to him only some months later after much public pressure. So in Fort Sumner he left nothing to chance and invited Alejandro Segura, the justice of the peace, to form a jury of six, including Saval Gutiérrez and José Jaramillo’s father, Lorenzo, with Garrett’s friend Milnor Rudulph acting as foreman of the inquest. It was the jury’s judgment that William H. Bonney died due to a fatal wound inflicted by a gun in the hand of Pat F. Garrett, but in an odd conclusion to such a report, Rudulph wrote in his friendship to the sheriff, “Our decision is that the action of said Garrett was justifiable homicide; and we are united in the opinion that the gratitude of all the community is owed to said Garrett for his deed, and that he deserves to be rewarded.”

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In July 1881 no fewer than eight New York City newspapers hurrahed the killing of “the scourge of the Southwest,” and there were notices about it in all the major cities in the United States and Great Britain. In the Kid’s former hometown of Silver City, an editorial noted: “The vulgar murderer and desperado known as ‘Billy the Kid’ has met his just desserts at last.”

The New York Daily Graphic looked backward to the December 1880 capture of the Kid, when “with fangs snarling and firing a revolver like a maniac, W. H. Bonney fought his way out of his ambushed robber castle at Stinking Springs where he lived in luxury on his ill-gotten gains with his Mexican beauties.” And it vouchsafed that the Kid “had built up a criminal organization worthy of the underworld of any of the European capitals. He defied the law to stop him and he stole, robbed, raped, and pillaged the countryside until his name became synonymous with that of the grim reaper himself. A Robin Hood with no mercy, a Richard the Lion-Hearted who feasted on blood, he became, in the short span of his twenty-one years, the master criminal of the American southwest. His passing marks the end of wild west lawlessness.”

And the Santa Fe Weekly Democrat took on a scoffing tone as it jested: “No sooner had the floor caught his descending form which had a pistol in one hand and a knife in the other, than there was a strong odor of brimstone in the air, and a dark figure with wings of a dragon, claws like a tiger, eyes like balls of fire, and horns like a bison, hovered over the corpse for a moment and with a fiendish laugh said, ‘Ha, ha! This is my meat!’ and then sailed off through the window.”

With the passing years the Kid’s life became just a collection of fabrications that lost American interest to such an extent that in 1925 a journalist opened an article with the question “Who remembers Billy the Kid?” But by then the Chicago journalist Walter Noble Burns was in New Mexico interviewing hundreds of those still alive who were friends of the Kid. Published in 1926, The Saga of Billy the Kid became a huge bestseller that got many things wrong and fictionally duplicated some hoary legends, but depicted a jaunty yet tragic Kid defying death to carry out his oath of vengeance against those who murdered John Tunstall and a majority of the Regulators. “The boy who never grew old,” Burns wrote, “has become a sort of symbol of frontier knight-errantry, a figure of eternal youth riding forever through a purple glamour of romance.”

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Pat Garrett did get his five hundred dollars for the Kid’s homicide, but half a year later he declined to run for reelection as sheriff of Lincoln County—John Poe won that job—and instead, with his Roswell postmaster friend Ash Upson, Garrett wrote The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid, the Noted Desperado of the Southwest, Whose Deeds of Daring and Blood Made His Name a Terror in New Mexico, Arizona & Northern Mexico.

The first fictionalized version of the Kid’s life had been published within weeks of his fatality by the Five Cent Wide Awake Library, which the Kid himself used to dwell on as a boy, and there were four other so-called biographies in 1881, including Billy the “Kid” and His Girl, which appeared in Morrison’s Sensational Series and sold 100,000 copies. The Kid’s assassin was not often extolled, as there was a whiff of cowardice in his actions. Although Garrett’s own book contained some wild inventions up front, its latter half was far more factual: a frank, methodical, self-vindicating account of how the Kid was hunted down. Yet it did not sell well, and it was only because Jimmy Dolan, John Chisum, and generous readers of the Las Vegas Daily Optic donated a fortune to him for slaying the Kid that Garrett could retire to his ranch outside Roswell and found the Pecos Valley Irrigation and Investment Company.

It was just one of many commercial partnerships that failed for him as he shiftlessly moved his family from place to place in pursuit of other luckless schemes. In 1896 he became sheriff of Doña Ana County and lasted five successful but miserable years before President Theodore Roosevelt rescued the famous Pat Garrett by naming him collector of customs in El Paso. Hundreds of written complaints about his incompetence were sent to Washington, however, and he so overspent his time in the Coney Island Saloon downtown that after five years an insulted Roosevelt replaced him.

Garrett’s financial problems continued as he moved Apolonaria and his eight children back to New Mexico, saw his clothing and possessions auctioned to pay off liens, signed a five-year lease on his land in Bear Canyon, and was distressed to see his cattle ranch taken over by a renter with a drove of twelve hundred goats. Garrett became increasingly aware that he’d squandered all his opportunities, and that they’d been available to him only because of his fame as the killer of Billy the Kid. In his fifties he said, “I sometimes wish that I had misfired and that the Kid had done his work of iniquity on me. He was the end of an age and I belong there, too.”

His final end came on an afternoon when Garrett was haggling with his business partners on a road outside Las Cruces. He sought to prevail by telling the thirty-year-old hothead riding a bay horse alongside his buggy, “You forget I’ve dealt with your kind before. I’m the man who killed Billy the Kid.” Seeking an intermission from the arguments, he got his Burgess folding shotgun for defense and climbed down from the buggy to urinate. And he was just unbuttoning his trousers when Jesse Wayne Brazel fired a bullet into the former sheriff’s skull, killing him instantly. It was February 29 in the leap year of 1908. He was fifty-seven years old.

Because Garrett was a nonbeliever, he’d wanted no religious rites at his funeral, so the owner of his favorite El Paso saloon read aloud a graveside eulogy by the English atheist Robert G. Ingersoll: “Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death hope sees a star and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing.”

Even as his celebrity continued, there would be no monuments honoring Pat Garrett, no museums dedicated to his life’s work, no highways named after him. Yet, like so many others, he stayed heard-about and famous because of books and movies that featured a Kid who’d become, to a great degree, each person’s wild invention.