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A little before his election as sheriff of Lincoln County, Garrett had settled on a ranch a mile east of Roswell. Land was worth almost nothing, and he eventually acquired twelve hundred and fifty acres along the Hondo River not far from its junction with the Pecos. Afterm his term as sheriff had expired, he came back to his ranch, but the lure of a more exciting life led him, in 1884, to accept the captainey of a company of Texas Rangers with headquarters at Atacosa. A year and a half passed in this capacity and he became manager of a cattle detective agency in the Panhandle and did effective work in breaking up a band of cattle rustlers and trail cutters that preyed on herds bound north from Texas ranges to the Kansas railroads. He later managed a cattle ranch in the White Mountains, and in 1887 returned to his Roswell ranch.

He was credited with the discovery of the great reservoir of artesian water underlying the country about Roswell, and was one of the organizers of the Pecos Valley Irrigation Company, an enterprise which twenty years later would have made his fortune but which, in that day of meagre settlement, did not realize the bonanza hopes of its promoters. Embittered by defeat when he ran for sheriff of the newly formed county of Chavez, which had been cut out of Lincoln County, he sold his land and moved to Uvalde, Texas. His new trail led him away from the wealth that inevitably would have come to him if he had waited patiently on his ranch. Artesian water eventually transformed the region around Roswell into a rich agricultural oasis. The land he owned is valued today at one hundred and fifty dollars an acre. For five years he was a rancher near Uvalde. Then Governor W. T. Thornton of New Mexico appointed