The Saga of Billy the Kid/Chapter 13

DOWN from the mesa lands, by the Texas road, three weather-beaten men rode into old Fort Sumner on a February day in 1878. Across their pommels rested long buffalo rifles; frying-pans and certain other cooking utensils clanked from their cantles; and their lean shaggy ponies looked as if they were not on speaking terms with oats or curry combs.

There was some mention of grub among them as soon as they had picketed their ponies by the Pecos River. Wherefore they searched their pockets carefully and fished up one dollar and thirty-five cents in nickels and dimes. They strolled into town where appetizing odours from a restaurant saluted their nostrils.

"Ham and eggs!"

The rich, greasy aroma of the cooking was like attar of roses to these famished souls. They were about to stampede into the place when a sign in the window caught their eyes:

They sighted at the sign from all angles. But the fatal words remained coldly immutable. They counted their nickels and dimes again. But no miracle happened. They laughed in one another’s face with good-humoured hopelessness and invested their finances in a piece of side ​meat, some flour, and canned tomatoes. Going back to their horses they cooked their own meal on a camp fire.

"I've travelled far enough," said one of the hungry triumvirs. "This town looks good to me and I'm going to settle here."

Fort Sumner did not impress the other two so favourably and they climbed into their saddles and again took up the trail westward. The one who was left behind sat cross-legged on the ground and watched them disappear in the distance. Then he got to his feet, stretched himself, and started out to look for a job. He needed one. He was without a penny in the world.

He found Pete Maxwell, richest man in that part of New Mexico and owner of great herds of cattle and sheep, standing on the porch of his home.

Maxwell looked him over with a dubious smile. The visitor looked less like a cowboy than a scarecrow that had decided to quit its vigil in a cornfield and try a more exciting occupation. He was gaunt and bronzed and stood six feet four and a half inches in height. His clothes were frayed and unkempt and, because he had been unable to buy a pair of pants long enough for him, he had pieced out the ones he wore with leggings of buffalo hide, the hair on the outside. But this long-legged, scarecrow man, standing there in the road leaning on his rifle, had a merry twinkle in his eye and an ingratiating note in his drawling voice.

"I may not look exactly like a puncher just now," he went on suavely with an infectious smile, "but I'm an old hand with cows. I can do anything there is to be done around a herd of cattle; I can throw a rope as good as any man and ride anything that ever looked through a bridle."

​"Well," said Maxwell, "go out and see my foreman and tell him I said to put you to work. You'll find his camp about five miles up the river."

"All right."

The man turned to leave.

"By the way," said Maxwell, "what might be your name?"

"Pat Garrett," replied the stranger.

So the man who was to win national fame as the sheriff of Lincoln County, establish law and order west of the Pecos, ring down the final curtain on the drama of Billy the Kid, and become the friend of President Theodore Roosevelt and many other great men of the nation, made his undistinguished entrance upon the stage of New Mexican history.

You might suspect from his name that Pat Garrett was an Irishman direct from the "auld sod," but he was a Southern man with many generations of American breeding behind him and connected with some of the best families in the South. Patrick Floyd Garrett was born June 5, 1850, in Alabama. When he was six years old, his parents moved to Louisiana, where his father became a large slave holder and the owner of two plantations embracing three thousand acres. The Civil War swept away the fortune of the family, and his father and mother died soon after the long struggle between North and South closed at Appomattox. Left without means, Garrett, as a boy of eighteen, struck West in 1869.

He dropped a semicolon into his Western peregrination when he went to work on a cattle ranch in Dallas County, Texas. A bold, roving, adventurous spirit, he fell into the life of a cowboy as if it were his native element and in the next few years punched cattle all over southwestern ​Texas. He put on cowboy habits with his first pair of chapareras and was accustomed, in these care-free days of his youth, to ride into the nearest town on paydays with his roistering companions and spend his wages in drinking, gambling, and riotous fun, which was the way of the breed. He joined a trail outfit starting out from Eagie Lake for the railroad markets in Kansas in 1875, but went only as far north as Denison, where he quit the drive and joined a party of buffalo hunters bound on an expedition into the Texas Panhandle.

From the fall of 1875 until the end of January, 1878, he earned his livelihood as a professional buffalo hunter in the Panhandle and on the Staked Plains. The buffalo were still fairly plentiful in that part of the country when he began his career as a hunter; when he ended it, they had almost disappeared. The vocation was lucrative in 1875; in 1878 it was only precariously profitable. Garrett shared in the last days of a slaughter that is memorable in the history of the continent.

In January, 1878, having received the money for his last buffalo hunt and having lost it, it is said, at cards in Tascosa, Garrett with two companions headed toward the setting sun to seek his further fortunes. With empty pockets and light hearts the three adventurers travelled with only such equipment as they could carry on their ponies and lived on the game that fell to their rifles. When, after the long, hard winter’s ride across the trackless wilderness, Garrett finally arrived at Fort Sumner, it is small wonder that he should have determined forthwith to locate in the crude little frontier settlement that must have seemed like Heaven to his weary soul.

For six months Garrett punched cattle for Pete Maxwell, living up to the encomiums he had passed upon himself ​when he got the job and proving his skill in every phase of cowboy craft. He and Maxwell had a disagreement finally, and Maxwell discharged him. Garrett had enough money to open a small restaurant, which he operated until Beaver Smith took him into partnership in a general merchandise store and saloon. He was by this time an established citizen and an integral part of the life of the place. During a residence of more than two years in Fort Sumner, he married twice. Juanita Martinez, his first wife, died a few weeks after the wedding. His second wife, Apolinaria Gutierrez, another Fort Sumner girl, whom he married in 1880, bore him five children and still lives, as his widow, in Las Cruces.

Fort Sumner was at that time an abandoned army post. Among the military establishments of the Southwest, it had distinction as the scene of the Government's first experiment in educating the Indians to ways of peace and self-supporting thrift in a concentration colony. From the days of the first Spaniards, the Navajos in the north western part of New Mexico and the Mescalero Apaches in the southeast had swept out of their mountain fastnesses to harry the settlements in innumerable raids and wars. Campaigns against them had brought only short-lived peace. Left unguarded to their own counsels in their wild homelands, they were ready in a short time for other outbreaks.

To end these constant depredations, the Government rounded up almost the entire tribe of Mescalero Apaches in the early '60's and settled them under the guns of Fort Sumner at Bosque Redondo on the Pecos River. Kit Carson a little later crushed the Navajos in his famous campaign of 1864 in the Cañon de Chelly country and transplanted several thousand of these warlike natives ​to the Fort Sumner colony. A band of Utes, captured in Colorado, swelled the Indian population of Bosque Redondo to nearly ten thousand.

Kit Carson, then a brigadier general, was appointed superintendent of the settlement. He had lived among the Indians, understood them, and had the welfare of the race at heart. Guarded by troops, the Indians were kept at farming and constructive labours. Fifteen hundred acres were planted to grain and vegetables. An irrigating ditch seven miles long was constructed to water their farms. For a time, the colony was contented and prosperous and New Mexico's Indian problem seemed on the verge of solution. But there came a year of crop failure, supplies ran short, the aboriginal agriculturists were threatened with starvation, and trouble developed between Navajos and Apaches, who had been immemorial enemies. As a result, the Indians were sent back to their old homes, and the Government's experiment at transforming warrior tribes into peaceful farmers ended in disaster.

Fort Sumner stood on the north bank of the Pecos where the river makes a wide turn to the southeast. After its abandonment as a military post, settlers moved into its buildings, and it became a town that remained an army post with the army left out. In Garrett's day, Pete Maxwell lived with his mother, Mrs. Luz Maxwell, and his sister, Paulita Maxwell, and the family servants, in a great two-story house that had been officers' quarters and faced the spacious parade ground to the east. To the north and south were rows of adobe houses that had been the barracks of the soldiers and were now the homes of Mexican and white families. Stores and saloons backed against the river suggested that the wide, unpaved space ​in front of them was the main street. To the northeast stood the old military hospital, used now as a place of habitation and as a dance hall. Near it an excavation, left when earth had been taken to make adobe bricks for building purposes, had been filled with water and formed a little lake with grassy, flower-sprinkled shores. At the northern edge of town was a peach orchard, planted by the Indians and covering many acres. In the warm spring days, the orchard in full billowy bloom was like heavy, low-lying pink smoke from a fragrant censer, and in the summer it was a source of pies and cobblers for every housewife who cared to gather the ripened fruit.

But the glory of Fort Sumner was a broad, smooth avenue four miles long leading northward to the little Mexican village of Punta de la Glorietta and lined its entire length with twin rows of giant cottonwoods, thirty feet apart, that testified to the constructive labours of Indians under the urge of soldier bayonets. Shady and cool on the hottest days, this noble thoroughfare had on one side the bronze-red Pecos swishing noisily down from its mountain sources and on the other the fields and orchards of Mexican farmers. Mocking birds still sing in the towering branches of the survivors of these old trees that have seen pass beneath them, as along a king's highway, the pageantry of the frontier past—pioneers, Indians, soldiers of the old army, descendants of Spanish conquerors, Kit Carson, Billy the Kid and his outlaws, Pat Garrett and his man-hunters, John Chisum the cattle king, and the multitude of forgotten men who played their part in building civilization in the Southwest.

Billy the Kid made Fort Sumner his headquarters from the fall of 1878 until his death. Of the men who had followed him during the Lincoln County war, Charlie ​Bowdre, Tom O'Folliard, Doc Skurlock, Fred Wayte, Jim French, John Middleton, and Hendry Brown remained with him. Bowdre sold out his ranch on the Ruidosa and set up housekeeping with his Mexican wife in rooms in the old hospital in Fort Sumner. O'Folliard lived with him. Others who joined the Kid's band here were Tom Cooper, Dave Rudabaugh, Billy Wilson, Tom Pickett, and Tom Webb—all cattle rustlers, Rudabaugh having recently broken jail at Las Vegas after killing the jailer.

There was no vendetta now to give to the Kid's activities even a spurious legitimacy in the minds of the people. From now on, he was an outlaw pure and simple and his Fort Sumner years marked the heyday of his career. He was not a robber of the Frank and Jesse James sort; he looted no banks, held up no travellers on the highway. He confined himself exclusively to stealing livestock, and his operations covered half New Mexico. He rounded up cattle on the Canadian River and in the Texas Panhandle and sold them in the southern part of the territory; or he stole beeves in the south and marketed them in Las Vegas and the northern settlements. He was well known everywhere, and those who bought from him were under no illusions regarding the transactions. So easy was it for him to dispose of his stolen stock that he had regularly established marketing connections. Pat Coughlin, known as the "King of Tularosa," who had grown rich on government contracts as Murphy had before him, was one of his most important customers and had an agreement with him to take at a fair price all the cattle he could rustle. The Kid did a thriving business with His Majesty of Tularosa until the arrest and conviction of Coughlin broke off the alliance.

The Kid made outlawry pay. It was a hard life but it ​was the kind of life he loved and easy money was the reward of its hardships. When he had filled his pockets by the sale of other men's steers, he returned to Fort Sumner to rest and invite his soul and spend his money with a free hand at bars, gambling tables, and fandangos among companions as reckless as himself. A short life but a merry one summed up his philosophy, and when his funds ran low, he was off on another raid; living in the present, snapping his fingers at the future, like the buccaneers of old Caribbean days who, having squandered in the boozing-kens of Port Royal or Tortuga the gold looted from treasure galleons, financed another carouse by sacking Porto Bello or Maracaibo. He was, after his fashion, a Sir Henry Morgan of the purple sage, his flagship a bronco pony, the cattle ranges his Spanish Main.

Joe Grant was saved from oblivion by a bullet from Billy the Kid's six-hooter in January, 1880. Grant was from Texas, posed as a bad man, and pretended to want to join the Kid's gang. Nothing more is known about him and he would have been utterly forgotten long ago if he had not achieved the ultimate distinction of being killed by a famous desperado. Grant was in the braggadocio phase of intoxication in José Valdez's saloon when the Kid and some companions entered.

"Say, Kid," blustered the Texan, "I'll bet you I kill a man to-day before you do."

The Kid smiled off the challenge. Grant noisily urged him to accept it.

"If you think I don't mean it, I'll bet you twenty-five dollars and put up the cash."

He shoved a roll of bills across the bar into Valdez's hands, and to humour the drunken fellow the Kid covered the money.

​With some Chisum cowboys the Kid came into the saloon again in the evening, having in the meantime forgotten about Grant and his wager. Valdez held whispered confidence with him at the end of the bar.

"Better be on your guard, Billy," he said, "Grant's full of whisky and ugly. He took a couple of shots out of the back door at nothing this afternoon and muttered something about getting you. He might want to kill you for the glory of it or the the reward."

The Kid walked up to Grant in friendly wise.

"That's a pretty ivory-handled gun you've got, Grant," he said. "Let me have a look at it."

Suiting the action to the word, he coolly lifted Grant's six-hooter from its holster and examined it with a show of admiration. He noted empty cartridges in two chambers. Before handing the gun back he revolved the cylinder so that in the first two attempts to fire it the hammer would fall on the empty shells. The crowd had a drink or two. Edging around a corner of the bar and facing the Kid, Grant jerked out his revolver.

"I'll win my bet with you right now," he roared and, levelling the weapon full at the Kid's face, pulled the trigger, the hammer clicking harmlessly. Before the look of surprise faded from his drunken face, the Kid killed him with a bullet through his throat which cut his windpipe and shattered his backbone. The Kid laughed quietly as he dropped his six-shooter back into the scabbard.

"That's a good joke on Grant," he said. "And as I win the bet, Valdez, you might as well pass over that fifty dollars."

They will tell you in New Mexico that the Kid broke with John Chisum in these later years and, in his thefts, ​did not spare the herds of the cattle king. There is some doubt as to whether the Kid stole Chisum's cattle, though it seems probable he did. Certainly he quarrelled with Chisum and threatened his life, but on the surface at least this quarrel was patched up. There is one story that in appreciation of the Kid's services in the Lincoln County war, Chisum gave him permission to help himself to Chisum steers whenever he needed money. There is another that the Kid look this liberty without Chisum's permission on the grounds that Chisum owed him for his services in the vendetta and had not paid him. Mrs. Sallie Roberts admits that a little unpleasantness arose between Chisum and the Kid but denies that it ended their friendship. She attributes this unpleasantness to busybodies who had carried malicious tales to the Kid that Chisum had been talking about him in uncomplimentary vein.

"Billy met Uncle John in Fort Sumner," said Mrs. Roberts, "and accused him of talking about him and drew his gun. If Uncle John had lost his head he might have been killed, but he remained perfectly cool. Before making any answer, he calmly tamped some tobacco in his pipe, lighted it, and blew a mouthful of smoke into the air.

"'Don't believe everything you hear, Billy,' he said quietly. 'I have always been your friend and expect to remain your friend.'

"He soon calmed Billy down and they had a drink together, shook hands, and parted just as good friends as ever. If Uncle John paid Billy any money on that occasion, I never heard of it. I will say, too, that we never thought Billy stole any of our cattle, and it would be difficult to make me believe that he did. He had been a ​good friend of ours for several years, and, once a friend,it was hard to change him."

Frank Coe gives another version of the story.

"The Kid," said Coe, "figured Chisum owed him five hundred dollars. He said Chisum had promised to pay him for fighting on the McSween-Chisum side during the feud and had not kept his promise. He had tried to find Chisum and collect the debt but Chisum had always dodged him. They met finally in Fort Sumner.

"'Hello,Chisum,' said Billy. 'I've been looking for you to collect that money you owe me.'

"Chisum smiled that dry smile of his that saved his life more than once.

"'And I have been looking for you to pay it to you, Billy,' he said.

"The Kid remarked that right then was a good time to it and Chisum wrote him a check for the five hundred dollars.

"'Don't you fail to let this check go through,' said Billy as he stuffed it in his pocket. 'If you stop it, I'll kill you if it's the last thing I ever do.'

"'Don't worry,' replied Chisum. 'You can cash it anytime you like. I'll honour it.'

"That's all there was to it," added Coe, "except that Chisum honoured the check."

Billy the Kid lost three members of his band in 1880 at Tascosa on the Canadian River in the Texas Panhandle, where he was camped for several weeks disposing of a herd of horses stolen in the Bonito Cañon, many of them from Charles Fritz, into whose family Jimmy Dolan, Murphy's old partner, had married. Hendry Brown, Fred Wayte, and John Middleton, all of whom had taken part with the Kid in a number of desperate affrays, ​decided to forsake outlaw life and tried to persuade the Kid to join them and adopt ways of peace. Brown and Wayte went to the latter's old home in the Indian Territory where Wayte settled down and eventually, it is said, served as a member of the Oklahoma legislature. Brown travelled on into Kansas, where he became marshal of Caldwell, an old cattle-trail town. While an officer of the law, he remained at heart an outlaw, and always he heard a still small voice calling him back to the old, wild life. With three companions, he rode into Medicine Lodge, Kansas, one day, with his marshal's star still on his breast, and held up the bank, killing Wiley Payne, the president, and George Jeppert, the cashier. A posse of citizens pursued the robbers, killed two in flight, and hanged Brown and the other bandit to the limb of a cottonwood tree. John Middleton changed his name, went into business in a Kansas town and, it is said, lived the remainder of his life as a law-abiding and prosperous citizen.

Meanwhile, with the Kid in Fort Sumner at frequent intervals, he and Pat Garrett warmed to each other and became, if not bosom cronies, at least intimate friends; which, in the light of subsequent events, might suggest to a cynical philosopher a few quaint reflections on friendships in this world.