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Some folks hated him, some loved him, but whatever he did, whatever happened to him was always big news.
—DR. WILLIAM C. FIELD
ON FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6 1899, Pat Garrett was sitting in his Las Cruces office when a well-dressed stranger walked in and introduced himself as Sheriff George Blalock of Greer County, Indian Territory. He was hunting a fugitive named Norman Newman, who a year before had robbed and killed Blalock’s partner. Although Newman had been quickly apprehended, he had escaped from jail on July 1. Since that time Blalock had followed the outlaw across the Texas Panhandle and all over southern New Mexico, having already made three trips to the Territory. Blalock understood that Newman, who was using the alias Billy Reed, was currently employed as a cook at W. W. Cox’s San Augustin Spring ranch. Blalock showed Garrett a warrant for Newman’s arrest that he had earlier sworn out at the Doña Ana County courthouse, and he asked for help in apprehending the fugitive.
Garrett called for his deputy, José Espalín, and the three set out for the Cox place. Blalock warned Garrett that Newman was a desperate character and they had to be prepared for a fight—Garrett knew the type. He decided they would surround the house and approach it from opposite sides. Newman did not know Garrett, so he thought it best if he went in and confronted the outlaw. No one at the Cox place noticed the officers closing in on the structure except for two of Cox’s little girls in the yard, and as they easily recognized Garrett, they paid him no mind. The twenty-five-year-old Newman was standing in the kitchen, just having finished washing the dishes and wiping his hands on a towel.
“Are you Mr. Reed?” Garrett asked.
“Yes.”
“My name is Garrett. I am sheriff of this county and have a warrant for you.”
“All right, Mr. Garrett,” Newman calmly replied.
Garrett reached out with his handcuffs, and the next thing he knew, Newman had punched him in the head. Garrett grabbed hold of Newman, who lunged through the kitchen’s open French door, dragging the two-hundred-pound Garrett out with him. Espalín ran up to the door and shoved his pistol in Newman’s face and shouted at him to stop. Garrett ordered Espalín not to shoot the man, who continued to struggle. Espalín turned his six-shooter around and struck Newman a sharp blow or two on the head with the pistol’s butt, causing him to collapse, taking Garrett down with him. The two officers held on tight, and Garrett fished again for his handcuffs. It was then that an aged bulldog named Old Booze saw the fight, charged across the yard and, growling and snapping his teeth, leapt on Espalín. The deputy let go of Newman and did his best to fight off the crazy dog, cursing, yelling, and kicking at the animal.
With only Garrett holding him, Newman sprang to his feet, fighting and throwing punches at the sheriff. He finally broke free of Garrett’s grasp when his shirt tore apart, leaving Garrett clutching the tattered pieces of fabric. Garrett and Espalín chased after Newman and ordered him to halt. The outlaw went in the house and ran down a hall toward his room when Espalín, assuming that Newman was going for his gun, blasted him with two shots to the back. Newman fell forward, a dead man.
The coroner’s inquest in Las Cruces exonerated all three lawmen of any wrongdoing. Sheriff Blalock transported Newman’s body back to Greer County, Oklahoma, for burial. But when the sheriff went to apply for the reward on the outlaw, it was pointed out that the governor had offered the reward for Newman’s “arrest and conviction.” Garrett knew all about that, too.
This incident did not endear Garrett to the Cox crowd, who had taken a liking to the young Newman. Cox’s wife, pregnant at the time, had been in the pantry when Garrett came after Newman in the kitchen. Her brother, Print Rhode, was so mad about the deadly scuffle and shooting—which could have injured his sister and the Cox girls—that he threatened to kill Garrett on sight. Rhode, whose full name was Archie Prentice Rhode, had been born to a dry goods merchant in Lavaca County, Texas, in July 1868. At about the age of twenty, he had traveled to southern New Mexico with the family of W. W. “Bill” Cox. He was stocky, with strong arms and hands, standing nearly five and a half feet tall and weighing around 140 pounds. He had pale blue eyes and a light, sandy complexion that easily burned in New Mexico’s intense sunlight. When he was not wearing his wide-brimmed hat, it was plainly evident that Rhode’s reddish brown hair was fast disappearing from his forehead.
One old-timer remembered Rhode as someone who wanted to be a tough guy and had a hard time getting along with folks. That did not seem to be a problem with the Cox clan, who thought he was dependable and fiercely loyal. That loyalty also found its way to Oliver Lee, who married Winnie Rhode in October 1898, making Lee a brother-in-law of both Bill Cox and Print Rhode. Rhode, in fact, took the stand for Lee at the Hillsboro trial. Pat Garrett was a neighbor so Bill Cox tried to stay on friendly terms with the lawman and his family, but Rhode did not care for Garrett, and the sheriff, who had dealt with a number of outlaw wannabes, felt the same way about Rhode. The two had even more reason to dislike each other after the robbery of the George D. Bowman & Son Bank in Las Cruces on February 12, 1900.
That anyone would dare rob a bank in Garrett’s town in broad daylight seems beyond foolhardy, but then again, criminals are not always known for their intelligence. Still, William Wilson and Oscar Wilbur nearly pulled it off. After riding into Las Cruces and sticking their guns in the face of the bank’s cashier, they quickly collected more than $1,000 in greenbacks and then calmly walked out the door and got back on their horses. They slowly rode away until someone in town fired two pistol shots to sound the alarm. The robbers then spurred their mounts into a gallop and struck out to the east toward the Organ Mountains. Twenty minutes later, Garrett started two posses—with Deputy Ben Williams leading one while Garrett rode in front of the other. The posses had no luck tracking down the suspects the first day, but by the end of the next day, six men had been arrested who either fit the robbers’ descriptions or were thought to be connected in some way to the holdup. None of the bank’s money was found, and all six were soon released. Garrett and his men continued to scour the Organs for the robbers, but by the end of the week, they seemed to have gotten away.
Wilson and Wilbur did get away, but not clean. Garrett was given a tip that told him who the robbers might be, as well as information that they had been living in Hanover, in Grant County. Garrett sent Ben Williams there to investigate, and the deputy found out that Wilbur’s wife had told her friends a short time before the robbery that she was moving to San Antonio. Williams traveled to San Antonio, nearly six hundred miles from Las Cruces, where he soon located Wilson and Wilbur, and, with the help of a local deputy sheriff, captured them. Once back in Las Cruces, Wilbur turned state’s evidence on the promise of a lesser sentence. He said that Print Rhode and Will Cravens had provided the horses for the robbery and that they had been paid $100 each as their share. On March 22, Rhode and Cravens were arrested and charged as accessories to robbery. They were released after each posted a $1,000 bond.
The four men’s cases were brought before the court on April 20. Both Wilbur and Wilson pled guilty and awaited their sentence while Rhode and Cravens pled not guilty. Judge Parker presided over the four-day trial of Rhode and Cravens, and, once again, Garrett had to sit still while he heard the defense attorney, Albert B. Fall, ridicule a case he had put together. Fall was not the prosecution’s biggest worry, however. Their primary problem was Wilson, who contradicted all of Wilbur’s claims concerning Rhode and Cravens’s involvement. Garrett took the stand and did his best to vouch for the truthfulness of Wilbur’s confession, but at that point, even if Honest Abe Lincoln had come back from the dead, he would have had trouble overcoming the doubt cast in the minds of the jury. Rhode and Cravens were found not guilty. Garrett was not happy, but at least he had put two of the robbers away.
PAT GARRETT PROBABLY COULD have held the sheriff’s position in Doña Ana County for the rest of his life, but he chose not to run again in 1900. He told a newspaper reporter that times had changed in the Territory, and the sheriff’s office no longer needed his “peculiar talents in the line of good marksmanship and quick action at the head of posses.” Polinaria and the children may have had something to do with his decision, and there was also his ranch and his mining investments that could always use more of his attention. His decision is puzzling, though, because the sheriff’s office provided a steady income, and the way Garrett liked to gamble—both at the poker table and in business—the Garrett family definitely needed that income. Nevertheless, Garrett’s term as sheriff expired on December 31, 1900, after which he retired to private life—for just twelve months.
In December 1901, Pat Garrett’s name was once again in the nation’s press, and in a very big way. Teddy Roosevelt, the hero of San Juan Hill (“that damned cowboy” to his critics), became the nation’s president after the assassination of President William McKinley, and as the position of collector of customs at El Paso was set to expire at the end of the year, Roosevelt decided to put his own man in the position. He soon set his sights on ex-lawman Garrett.
It is unknown how Garrett’s name first came into consideration, but El Paso was practically his second home (not really a good thing), where his penchant for stiff-bosomed shirts, high collars, and Prince Albert coats had earned him the nickname “dandy sheriff.” Garrett likely learned that the present collector would not be reappointed and began building support to get the nomination. By December 5, he was on a train to Washington, D.C., to lobby the president in person. Traveling with him was nemesis-turned-strange-bedfellow Albert B. Fall. In a highly sensational move, Fall had switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party after the 1900 elections. Once in Washington, Garrett and Fall stepped up the pressure on the president, by making sure he received written endorsements and telegrams, as well as visits from prominent New Mexico politicians—all good Republicans, of course. On December 9, Garrett met with an old associate from New Mexico’s bloody outlaw days: Lew Wallace.
“He said he would do anything I asked him to do,” Garrett wrote Polinaria about the meeting, “says I did him a great favor once (in the ‘Kid’ affair), so he is anxious to express his gratitude.”
Wallace went with Garrett to the White House, after which several newspapers reported that Roosevelt had decided on Garrett for the collector of customs and that the president would send the appointment to the Senate. Texas Republicans were not pleased, feeling that the post should go to a Texan. Telegrams began to pour in opposing Garrett’s nomination. Many in the anti-Garrett crowd claimed that the ex-lawman was unfit for the office; others attacked his character. One letter writer argued that the appointment of a man who had made a record for himself as a killer would reflect poorly on Roosevelt’s administration.
Garrett visited the White House once again on December 15 to make his final appeal for the El Paso post.
“Garrett, they say you’re a drunkard,” Roosevelt said, bluntly.
“It isn’t true, Mr. President. But I’ve been drinking all my life.”
“You are charged with being a gambler,” Roosevelt added.
“I know the difference between a straight and a flush, Mr. President, and in my section of the country, a man who doesn’t know this doesn’t know enough to keep the flies off in fly season.”
“I am told you are an atheist and an infidel.”
“I have pronounced views on some subjects, Mr. President, but I know enough to keep them to myself when they don’t agree with the men around me.”
Roosevelt liked the straight-shooting Garrett and forwarded his appointment to the Senate, where it was soon confirmed. On December 20, Roosevelt invited Garrett back to the White House for the signing ceremony. The president signed Garrett’s commission with a gorgeous gold-clad and engraved Wirt fountain pen. Handing the pen to the ex-lawman, Roosevelt looked his new collector in the eye and said, “Mr. Garrett, I am betting on you.”
“Mr. President, you will win that bet,” Garrett replied, a proud smile breaking across his face.
THIS APPOINTMENT OF PAT GARRETT created a surge of new interest in the story of Billy the Kid. A reporter for the Silver City Enterprise hunted up sixty-four-year-old Harvey Whitehill, former sheriff of Grant County, and prodded him for his recollections of the Kid, which Whitehill gladly gave. An El Paso reporter tried to do the same with Garrett, but he had no interest in revisiting that part of his life for the press. When the reporter asked him where he might find a copy of Garrett’s The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid,Garrett refused to tell him. “The new collector, if he has his way,” wrote the reporter, “will bury the event.”
Garrett had buried Billy back in 1881, but there was no way he could bury the legend that was already taking on a life of its own. The Kid was a double-edged sword for Garrett. The ex-sheriff’s reputation and fame had been established by hunting down and killing Billy. That act put many people in Garrett’s debt, not the least of whom was Lew Wallace, who easily could have ignored Garrett’s request for assistance in swaying the president. It was, in fact, Garrett’s reputation as the killer of Billy the Kid that got the attention of Roosevelt, who was famously infatuated with the American West. But at the same time, the Kid cast a dark shadow over Garrett. He had never been able to escape the accusations that he was nothing but a coward and a murderer. This, coupled with Americans’ fondness for transforming their outlaws into heroes, left Garrett exasperated and, at times, bitter.
Garrett’s presidential appointment finally gave him a status and respectability he had not known as a county sheriff. The El Paso customhouse monitored a flood of goods coming from Mexico, everything from livestock to tourists’ trinkets. The annual duties collected amounted to some $40,000. Unfortunately, Garrett did not have the autonomy in his new position he had known as sheriff. There were plenty of critics, disgruntled about his appointment, and politically sensitive Washington bureaucrats watching his every move. Complaints against Garrett’s interpretation of Treasury Department rules soon appeared in the newspapers. One story, which ran under the headline “Made the General Pay,” reported on how Garrett refused to refund the duties collected of General Harrison Gray Otis for items he was bringing into the United States as gifts for his grandchildren. Otis, editor of the Los Angeles Times, filed a protest with the Treasury Department. A much bigger flap, however, came over Garrett’s appraisal of three-thousand-plus cattle imported by the Corralitos Ranch of Casas Grandes, Mexico. The cattle company vigorously protested the duties charged by Garrett, who ended up traveling to New York City to argue the case before the Board of Appraisers—not very successfully.
Pat Garrett as collector of customs, El Paso, circa 1903.
University of Texas at El Paso Library, Special Collections Department
Other complaints revolved around Garrett’s alleged lack of “tact and common politeness” in performing his duties. It is easy to imagine the fifty-three-year-old Garrett, who was once the law in New Mexico, exhibiting a decided lack of patience, even a short temper, with anyone who attempted to get around their customs duties, sought some personal favor, or simply argued with him about a decision. The Treasury secretary reprimanded Garrett via letter, essentially ordering him to be more polite. Garrett was outraged. But he received an even harsher rebuke from the secretary after he got into a fistfight with a former customhouse employee, George M. Gaither. Garrett had been forced to accept Gaither as a temporary inspector because of the criticism over Garrett’s cattle appraisals, a sore point with the collector. Gaither’s appointment was for a thirty-day trial period, and Garrett had no intention of keeping the man at the customhouse a single minute after the trial period expired. But after Gaither was dismissed, he went about El Paso claiming that Garrett had reneged on a promise of a full-time job. When Garrett ran into Gaither on the street, he called the man a goddamned liar—Garrett hated liars—and that was when the fistfight broke out. This made the papers as well, but Garrett still held on to his collectorship.
What many believed finally cost Garrett his job occurred in San Antonio in April 1905. President Roosevelt was visiting the home of the Alamo for a reunion of his famed regiment of Rough Riders. He had invited Garrett to join him there and to sit at his table at an outdoor lunch planned for the Rough Riders. But Garrett brought along as a guest his good friend Tom Powers, the owner of a saloon and gambling establishment called The Coney Island, which was Garrett’s favorite watering hole in El Paso. Garrett even arranged to have a photograph taken of himself and Powers with the president. But Garrett did not tell the president anything regarding Powers’s well-known reputation as a professional gambler, and when Roosevelt found out later, he was extremely upset. Eight months later, as Garrett’s four-year term as collector was coming to an end, he learned that Roosevelt had decided not to reappoint him.
Roosevelt told Garrett and others that the Powers incident had not had anything to do with his decision, but there is no question that it put an end to Garrett’s political career. First, the Texas Republicans had never forgiven Roosevelt’s administration for not giving the collectorship to a Texan. Then there was the icy relationship between Garrett and the Treasury secretary. The secretary told the president that Garrett had been an inefficient collector, and that he had heard reports from El Paso that Garrett was often absent from his post, was in debt, and had not curbed his gambling and drinking. Last, Roosevelt had not fared well in the press for handing government appointments to men with what were perceived to be notorious pasts. His appointment of Bat Masterson as a deputy U.S. marshal for New York had prompted the New York Evening World to write, “The President likes killers.”
As soon as Garrett realized his job was in jeopardy, he rushed to Washington to plead his case with Roosevelt. Against the advice of friends, Garrett insisted on taking Tom Powers with him. Powers had considerable influence in El Paso, and he somehow believed he could help his friend with the president. But Roosevelt would not see Powers, though Garrett stuck up for his friend, telling the president that he would gladly introduce Powers to anyone. Even so, it quickly became clear to Garrett that the president had already made up his mind. The Washington Postnoted that Garrett looked dejected after visiting the White House and in other ways exhibited “the bitterness of defeat.” In a last-ditch effort, Garrett’s writer friend Emerson Hough wrote a letter, pleading with Roosevelt, even promising that Garrett’s resignation would be on the president’s desk no later than July 1, 1906. This six-month reprieve would allow Garrett to maintain his pride and say he left the job himself. By the time Hough wrote his letter, Roosevelt had appointed a Texas Republican to take Garrett’s place.
Garrett with President Theodore Roosevelt at the San Antonio Rough Riders reunion, 1905. Tom Powers is the man in the Stetson, second from the right.
University of Texas at El Paso Library, Special Collections Department
When he returned to Texas, Garrett answered a few questions from a Fort Worth reporter about his future prospects. “I have a ranch in New Mexico,” he said. “And I will go there for a time. Just what my future plans will be I do not know. However, I am going to do something and don’t expect to remain idle. I have no complaint to make against anyone for my removal. I simply take my medicine.”
GARRETT HAD LITTLE TIME to dwell on this. By January 1, 1906, he was in Santa Rosalía (present-day Camargo), Chihuahua, Mexico, investigating a brutal slaying involving an American rancher named O. E. Finstad. The Mexican authorities believed that Finstad had murdered his brother-in-law and another man; Finstad said they were attacked by “assassins.” Garrett, who was licensed to practice law in Mexico, had been employed by either Finstad or, more likely, Mrs. Finstad to help with the defense. The Finstads no doubt believed that Garrett’s notoriety as a lawman would bring attention to their case, and it did. Garrett conducted his own investigation and determined that Finstad and his associates were assaulted by Mexican bandits. He then appealed directly to President Roosevelt, asking for the American government’s assistance in the case. But despite Garrett’s efforts, which were substantial, the Mexican court convicted Finstad in early March and sentenced the rancher to twelve years in the penitentiary. It was Garrett’s one and only Mexican legal case.
Garrett was always looking for the big “trade,” the deal that would make him thousands of dollars all at once. The Finstad case had simply represented some quick cash, but while Garrett was in Mexico, he thought he found the next moneymaker: a silver mine in Chihuahua. Garrett wrote Emerson Hough in Chicago that the property could be acquired for $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in stocks. If Hough could interest some of his friends, Garrett believed they would all make a handsome profit. But Garrett had not had the best of luck with earlier mining speculations in New Mexico, and it is unlikely that he was able to convince Hough or his Chicago associates. And like most of Garrett’s friends, Hough knew the ex-lawman was in debt—to just about everyone.
Some of Garrett’s debts had been outstanding for years, and instead of using the income from his El Paso collectorship to pay down his creditors, he had used it to speculate, gamble, and, incredibly enough, help out any friends who were a little short. When Thomas B. Catron sent an outstanding Garrett note to El Paso for collection, three banks refused it. They had plenty of their own notes against him.
“He might pay for politics or for some other reason of that kind,” Catron was advised, “but he pays no one down here. He figures in lots of deals, but do not think he puts up a cent in any of them.”
Just a few days after Garrett wrote to Hough about the Chihuahua mining scheme, the Doña Ana County sheriff seized all of Garrett’s property, including the family home on his Black Mountain ranch (near San Augustin Pass), so that it could be offered at public auction. This was the result of a long-running legal tussle with an Albuquerque bank over a debt Garrett had incurred sixteen years earlier when he cosigned a $1,000 promissory note for George Curry. In the end, Garrett retained some control of his land, not because he paid up, but because he had already mortgaged most of it, and his “homestead” was protected by New Mexico statute. The livestock he had not mortgaged or snuck off his property was sold to pay his back taxes.
Louis B. Bentley, who owned a store in Organ, kept a small, leather-bound book upon which he had scratched the words Dead Beats. The book contained the names Pat Garrett and two of his children, Poe and Annie; Garrett owed Bentley $35.30. In Las Cruces, Garrett had also stopped paying his bill at the May Brothers Grocery, although he continued to buy his foodstuffs there. When Albert Fall learned about the situation and asked the grocers why they did not demand payment, they said they did not want any trouble and were afraid to cut Garrett off. In a remarkable gesture, Fall decided it was not right for the grocers to suffer this debt, and he and another man shared the cost of Garrett’s groceries. Fall truly felt sorry for Garrett, an extremely proud man who was fast becoming a penniless has-been.
“I don’t know how you are fixed,” Fall wrote to Garrett in December 1906, “but suppose you are broke as usual, so I enclose a check for fifty dollars which amount you can return to me if your stock, which I have turned over to the Bank, goes to par or above.”
A couple of weeks later, Garrett wrote Fall: “I have got into a fix where it seems impossible for me to get along without using the $50 I was to send to you…. Be patient with me and I will try and never do wrong again.”
But things suddenly looked up for Garrett when Roosevelt announced in April 1907 that he was appointing George Curry the next governor of New Mexico Territory. Rumors floated about Las Cruces that Curry would make Garrett the superintendent of the territorial penitentiary at Santa Fe. An excited Garrett wrote to Polinaria from El Paso, asking her to send him his dress suit and Prince Albert coat. Not only was Garrett going to attend Curry’s inauguration in Santa Fe, but Curry had invited Garrett to go to Washington with him. “He will do anything he can for me,” Garrett wrote about Curry. “I am going to try hard to do something and feel very much encouraged.” But Garrett was doomed for another disappointment. Curry did not come through with the prison appointment, nor did he really do anything to assist Garrett in a substantial way—odd considering that Curry was partly, if not entirely, responsible for Garrett’s trouble with the Albuquerque bank.
By the end of August, Garrett had begun another business scheme. The Rio Grande Republican announced that he had become a partner in an El Paso real estate firm. How Garrett insinuated himself into this partnership is unknown, but it gave him yet another reason to make frequent visits to the border town. During Garrett’s entire term as collector of customs, he had kept his family in New Mexico, and they remained there still, either at a house in Las Cruces or at the Black Mountain ranch. For extended periods, Polinaria was left alone to take care of their children, of whom the youngest, Jarvis, was just two years old. Garrett’s favorite El Paso hangout was Powers’s Coney Island saloon, where he was known to frequently buy a round of drinks for the house. Just as well known, it seems, was that Garrett spent his nights with a prostitute while in El Paso, a woman remembered only as Mrs. Brown. Emerson Hough may have been referring to this relationship when he wrote to President Roosevelt in December 1905, and said he knew of “only one sort of indiscretion of which Garrett has been guilty. This has nothing to do with his integrity. Would rather not state this but can do so if necessary.”
There is no question that Pat Garrett deeply loved his wife, Polinaria, and his children—his numerous letters to his family reveal a man who was devoted, doting, and, more often than not, worried—but Garrett also led another life away from his family, and that other life drained his already shattered finances and compounded his rapidly deteriorating mental state.
AS WINTER SET IN and, little by little, the days became shorter and cooler, Garrett became more bitter, angry, desperate, and depressed. Earlier in the year, he had written Hough that “Everything seems to go wrong with me.” By February 1908, the thing most wrong in Garrett’s mind involved a young cowpoke named Wayne Brazel. Born Jesse Wayne Brazel in December 1876, Brazel had gone to work at Cox’s San Augustin Spring ranch at age fourteen, and it was said that Bill Cox treated the boy like a son. He grew up to be a big, good-natured, albeit slow, cowhand, who did not have an enemy in the world. He did not even carry a gun. Albert B. Fall employed Brazel to take care of his horses at his ranch, just east of the Garrett place. More often than not, though, Brazel was looking after Fall’s children, who adored the young man. On days when the weather forced everyone inside, they sat at his knee while he spun some wild tale to their immense delight. He taught one of the little Fall girls to say, “By-golly-gosh-darn-double-duce-damn,” explaining that that simple line of cussing was all one needed to get through life. Remembering back years later, Fall’s daughter, Alexina, thought Brazel was a little feebleminded.
Brazel generally wore a black, broad-brimmed Stetson with a high crown that he pulled down close to his ears. His ruddy face was invariably clean shaven, and he kept his sandy hair cropped short. A scar ran down from the right corner of his mouth and over his chin. It came from either a knife cut, boyhood horseplay with his brother, or from being thrown by a bronc—take your pick. He got crossways with Pat Garrett after leasing the Bear Canyon ranch from Garrett’s twenty-five-year-old son, Poe, in March 1907. The Bear Canyon ranch was situated in the San Andres Mountains a few miles north of Garrett’s Black Mountain ranch, and although the lease agreement between Poe and Brazel clearly states that the ranch belonged to Poe, most contemporary accounts agree that it was Pat Garrett’s property, and Garrett certainly acted as if the ranch belonged to him. Garrett no longer had any stock to put on the place, and as he was intent on building his herds back up, he came up with a deal that said each year Brazel would give him ten heifer calves and one mare colt in exchange for the five-year lease. Garrett later claimed that Brazel said he was going to put three hundred to four hundred cattle on the place, but instead of cattle, Brazel moved in a herd of more than twelve hundred goats. Garrett was furious; five years with that many goats nibbling the sparse grass to bare nubs would spoil the place for all other livestock. Garrett was also upset to learn that his neighbor, Bill Cox, had fronted the money for the operation. Worse still, though—Print Rhode was Brazel’s partner in the goat herd.
Garrett tried to get the lease voided in court. He went to see the justice of the peace in Organ and swore out arrest warrants for both Brazel and Rhode based on an antiquated New Mexico statute that made it illegal to herd livestock closer than a mile and a half to a house or settlement. The hearing took place in an Organ butcher shop in January 1908 and drew a large crowd; some of the onlookers, relatives and friends of the accused, were armed and tempers ran high. Rhode tried to pick a fight with Garrett, but as Print’s brother, Sterling, remembered, “Pat was too smart for it.” In a rather anticlimactic move, the justice dismissed the case—just one more thing that went wrong for Garrett. Soon there was talk that Garrett, Brazel, and Rhode were making threats against one another. Someone even overheard Garrett say that “they” would get him unless he got them first.
Wayne Brazel (seated) with Jim Lee and Will Cravens. Brazel had shaved his head as a joke.
University of Texas at El Paso Library, Special Collections Department
Garrett became more brutish and quarrelsome than ever. He got into three or four fistfights in Las Cruces, and at fifty-seven years of age, the ex-sheriff came out of each one in worse shape than the one before. One day he wrote the governor in desperation: “Dear Curry: I am in a hell of a fix. I have been trying to sell my ranch, but no luck. For God’s sake, send me fifty dollars.”
But then something happened to offer the perfect solution to Garrett’s headache with the Bear Canyon outfit. Garrett was approached by James B. Miller in El Paso with an offer to buy the ranch. Miller told Garrett he had purchased a thousand head of Mexican cattle and they were to be delivered to El Paso on March 15. Although he had a ranch in Oklahoma, Miller preferred not to ship the cattle there until the fall and needed a place not far from El Paso to graze them. Garrett was not about to let this opportunity slip by because of a cussed herd of goats. He went to Brazel and talked the cowpoke into going to El Paso to see what might be worked out with Miller. After a short meeting, Brazel agreed to give up his lease as long as a buyer could be found for his goats. Miller found a buyer, his partner Carl Adamson, who also happened to be related to Miller by marriage. Adamson would take all twelve hundred goats at $3.50 apiece. Brazel returned to Bear Canyon and carefully counted his herd—instead of twelve hundred, he had eighteen hundred. Adamson was unwilling to buy that many, and Brazel was unwilling to give up the lease unless he did. Nevertheless, Adamson agreed to meet with Garrett and Brazel in Las Cruces to see if they could all come to some kind of agreement to save the deal.
Adamson traveled to Garrett’s ranch on February 28 and spent the night, and Garrett sent a note to Brazel that the meeting was still on for the next day. The next morning, a Saturday, Garrett got up early and took what was said to be “unusual care” dressing himself. At about 8:30 A.M., Garrett said good-bye to Polinaria and the children and stepped into the two-horse top buggy with Adamson. He placed beside him a rather unusual folding shotgun manufactured by the Burgess Gun Company of Buffalo, New York. Specifically designed for law officers, the 12 gauge, when folded, fit into a custom leather holster that allowed the wearer to quickly draw the gun and flip up its barrel into a locked position, ready to fire. This particular Burgess bore an inscription that identified the weapon as having belonged to Robert G. Ross of the El Paso Police Department. Ross had died of complications from appendicitis in 1899, and Garrett apparently bought the gun from the man’s widow.
Garrett grabbed the leather reins and slapped them against the rumps of the team, and they scooted off down the dirt track leading away from his ranch. At the Walter livery stable, about a half mile west of the Organ store and post office, Garrett drove the buggy right into the corral and up to the water trough so the horses could drink. The day had begun to warm up, but Garrett was still wearing his signature Prince Albert coat. Garrett spotted the fifteen-year-old Walter boy, Willis, hitching some horses to a box wagon and asked if the young man had seen Brazel. Willis pointed down the road at the wisp of dust still hanging in the air and said he had just left. Garrett waited for his horses to finish their drink and then backed the team up and started them down the road to Las Cruces. Willis watched them for a moment as they drove out of sight and then returned to hitching his horses.
About two hours later, Deputy Sheriff Felipe Lucero sat at his desk in Las Cruces thinking he needed to get some lunch. Suddenly, the office door burst open and in stepped a visibly distressed Wayne Brazel.
“Lock me up,” Brazel stammered. “I’ve just killed Pat Garrett!”
Deputy Lucero laughed at Brazel and accused him of pulling his leg. But Brazel insisted that he had shot Garrett, and Lucero, after pausing a moment to carefully study the man, decided he was serious. After locking Brazel in a cell, Lucero stepped outside to see Adamson, who was waiting in the buggy just as Brazel said he would be. Adamson confirmed Brazel’s story and Lucero retrieved the revolver that Brazel had surrendered to Adamson. The sheriff then put Brazel’s horse in the stable and saddled up his own. Lucero had Adamson follow him in the buggy as he rounded up a coroner’s jury, which was not hard to do, as there were now several excited people out in the street dumbfounded at the news of Garrett’s death. Within a short time, Lucero led Adamson and the seven-man jury out of town, accompanied by Dr. William C. Field. The group rode in an easterly direction toward the storied Organ Mountains, their jagged, serrated peaks like one great claw reaching up to scratch the sky.
After traveling approximately five miles, they came upon Garrett’s body next to the road in the bottom of the wide Alameda Arroyo. Someone carefully removed the lap robe Adamson had used to partially cover the corpse. Garrett was lying on his back, his arms out-spread and one knee drawn up. About three feet from the body and parallel to it was Garrett’s Burgess shotgun, still folded and in its holster. Dr. Field noticed that there was no sand kicked up around the holstered gun, suggesting that it had been carefully placed there. Field and the jury also noted that Garrett’s trousers were unbuttoned, and although he wore a heavy driving glove on his right hand, his left hand was bare. Two bullet wounds were identified, one in the head and the other in the upper part of the stomach.
After Garrett’s body was taken to H. C. Strong’s undertaking parlors in Las Cruces, Field conducted a careful autopsy and found that the bullet to the head entered from behind—the doctor discovered several of Garrett’s hairs pushed into the entry wound. The bullet exited just over the right eye. Field also determined that the bullet in Garrett’s stomach ranged up through his body, suggesting that the bullet had been fired when Garrett was on the ground or falling down. Field found this bullet behind the shoulder and cut it out. One other item of interest was discovered, probably by undertaker Strong as he undressed the body: a check made out to Patrick F. Garrett in the amount of $50 and signed by Governor George Curry.
News of Garrett’s death flashed across the nation’s telegraph wires, with many newspapers running the story in their Sunday editions. These first published reports repeated what both Brazel and Adamson had told the deputy sheriff and the coroner’s jury: Brazel fired his pistol in self-defense when he saw Garrett go for his shotgun. First thing on Monday, Poe Garrett filed an affidavit against Brazel, charging him with the murder of his father. A preliminary hearing took place the next day, with the Territory’s attorney general, James M. Hervey, handling the questioning for the prosecution. There were high hopes that Carl Adamson’s testimony would provide some answers to exactly what had happened that day in the arroyo, but he was somewhat of a disappointment. Adamson testified that he and Garrett overtook Brazel about three-quarters of a mile from Organ. When they first spotted the cowboy, Brazel had been talking to someone in the road, but by the time they caught up to him, he was alone. The three continued on together, with Brazel sometimes riding alongside the buggy and at other times falling behind by a hundred yards or so. At a certain point, as Brazel was riding alongside, the conversation turned to the goats. The talk began calmly enough, Adamson recalled, but soon became heated as Garrett berated Brazel for somehow underestimating his herd by six hundred goats. Brazel tersely repeated his position that unless he could sell all of the goats, the deal was off.
Adamson, who claimed he was driving the buggy, said that Garrett and Brazel argued for about fifteen minutes as he guided the team along at a walk.
“Well, I don’t care whether you give up possession or not,” he remembered Garrett saying. “I can get you off there anyway.”
“I don’t know whether you can or not,” Brazel replied.
At this point, Adamson suddenly felt a need to urinate, so he pulled back on the reins and brought the team to a halt. After handing the reins to Garrett, he stepped out of the buggy on the right side, walked near the front of the team, turned away from Brazel and Garrett, and unbuttoned his trousers. Brazel had stopped his horse a few feet forward of the buggy, reining his horse around a bit so that he was facing Garrett sideways, on the buggy’s left side.
Adamson next heard Garrett say in a high-pitched voice, “God damn you, I will put you off now!”
A second or two later, Adamson was startled by a “racket” followed by a gunshot. He spun around to see Garrett stagger and fall backward. He then saw Brazel, pistol in hand, fire a second shot. The second shot had come, Adamson said, just as quickly as a man can cock a pistol and shoot it.
The team jumped at the sound of the gunfire, but Adamson quickly grabbed the lines and wrapped them around the hub of one of the buggy wheels. Adamson then ran around the vehicle just in time to see Garrett stretch out his body and make a grunting noise. The famed lawman died without saying a word.
“This is hell,” Brazel said. “What must I do?”
Adamson told Brazel he better surrender to him. After covering Garrett’s body and tying Brazel’s horse to the back of the buggy, the two hurried to Las Cruces and the sheriff’s office. Adamson remembered that Brazel “seemed as cool as any man I ever saw as we drove into town.”
In the courtroom, Brazel appeared nervous and uncomfortable. His attorneys chose not to put him on the stand at the hearing, preferring to wait for the grand jury to take up the case. Bail was set at $10,000, which was promptly guaranteed by seven men, among them Bill Cox. Just one hour after the hearing, Brazel was walking the streets of Las Cruces.
Garrett’s body remained in state at Strong’s parlors for six days, where it was “viewed by thousands of people.” The funeral occurred on Thursday, March 6. It had been delayed for twenty-four hours to give two of Garrett’s brothers time to travel to Las Cruces from Louisiana. Governor Curry and Tom Powers were among the six pallbearers. Powers, the El Paso friend Garrett stuck by at great cost to himself, also read the funeral sermon, which was a eulogy originally delivered by Robert J. Ingersoll, the famed orator and agnostic, over the grave of his brother. This choice for a tribute, as well as the speaker (Powers was also an agnostic), only seemed to confirm many people’s suspicion that Garrett was an atheist.
Nevertheless, few of Garrett’s friends and family would argue with the eulogy’s concluding sentence: “There was, there is, no gentler, stronger, manlier man.” Garrett’s body was interred at the Odd Fellows cemetery outside of Las Cruces.
Before and after the funeral, Garrett’s friends and family fumed about what they considered to be not only a murder, but a conspiracy. It was clear to them and others that Garrett’s death had not occurred the way Brazel and Adamson described it. For one thing, it was obvious that Garrett, too, had been urinating when he was killed—he had been found with his trousers unbuttoned and his glove off his left hand. And Garrett’s assassin, whether it was Brazel or someone else, had shot him from behind because the first bullet, they believed, had been to the back of Garrett’s head. They were also suspicious of the several men connected with the affair, and with good reason. James B. “Jim” Miller had an unsavory reputation as a killer—but not just any killer. Dr. J. J. Bush of El Paso, a friend of Garrett’s, wrote Governor Curry with a chilling assessment of Miller, whom he claimed to have known intimately for years.
“[H]e is today the most dangerous man in the whole Southwest. He is deep and burrows beneath the surface like a mole. He is either an open face-to-face gun fighter or a midnight assassin as the case may be. He is a chief of conspirators and a planner of dark deeds.”
Bush told Curry he had recently learned that a half brother of Oliver Lee said that Miller was Garrett’s killer. “I doubt it,” Bush wrote, “but I do not for a moment doubt that he knew Garrett was going to be killed.” Understandably, Bush asked Curry to destroy his letter as soon as it was read. Instead Governor Curry filed it.
Disturbing as it was, Bush’s description of Miller was actually dead-on. Miller, who had a reputation as an impeccable dresser, was believed to have killed at least seven men, but the number was generally thought to be much higher. At the age of eighteen, he was arrested for the murder of his grandparents in Coryell County, Texas, although he had never gone to trial for the crime. And he was related by marriage to notorious Texas gunfighters John Wesley Hardin and Mannen Clements. Garrett, as a former lawman and a fair judge of men himself, should have known about Miller and his background because Miller was well known to many El Pasoans. If Garrett did know whom he was dealing with, perhaps it was a sign of his desperation that he was willing to do business with such a shady figure. But then again, Garrett had dealt with many bad men and questionable characters during his career. Everyone had a past.
Questions also arose about the man Brazel was talking to on the road before Adamson and Garrett caught up to him. Adamson testified that he did not recognize the man, and there is no evidence that Brazel ever said who this was. There were rumors that it was Print Rhode. An anonymous letter sent to Annie Garrett accused Rhode of having played a role in the murder. Mailed from Las Cruces, the mysterious letter was handwritten using all capital letters:
DEAR FRIEND. WHY DONT YOU OR SOM OF YOUR FRIENDS HAVE PRINCE RODES ARRESTE AND PUT UNDER BOND FOR HELPING TO KILL YOUR FATHER THERE IS NO DOUBT BUT THAT HE WAS WITH BRAZEL AND ADAMSON ON THAT DAY.
HE WAS SEEN COMING FROM THAT PLACE THE SAME DAY HE KNOWS ALL AND SO DO I AND IF I CAN GET HIM UNDER BOND I WILL GET AROUND IN TIME I AM AFRAID TO LET MY SELF BE KNOWN FOR A WHILE YO SURELY KNOW THAT WAS WHY HE WAS IN THAT COUNTRY COME THERE TO HELP DO THE DEED
WHEN THINGS IS RIGHT I WILL MAKE MY SELF KNOWN TO YOU AM YOUR FRIEND. EXPOSE HIM IF POSSIBLE DONT LET HIM SNEAK OUT MORE THAN ONE KNOWS ABOUT HIM BUT FRAID TO SAY SO DONT DOUBT WHAT I SAY AN DO SOMETHING TO LET THE PUBLIC KNOW ALL A PUT UP JOB.
As far as is known, the “friend” never revealed his (or her) identity to the Garrett family.
Bill Cox of the San Augustin Spring ranch was also considered a suspect. The fifty-two-year-old Cox supposedly had a personal friendship with both Garrett and Brazel. Indeed, Cox had forked over the cash for some of Garrett’s substantial debt—at least $3,000—and he had acquired the mortgage on Garrett’s ranch and livestock. The surviving correspondence between Cox and Garrett and, later, Polinaria, is friendly and sympathetic. Yet Garrett’s well-known proclivity to ignore any and all creditors put a heavy strain on their relationship, and the goat deal soured it even more (at least from Garrett’s perspective). Cox was clearly in the Lee-Rhode camp—they were family. Jeff Ake, who had worked at different times for both Garrett and Cox, said years later that Cox was “deadly afraid of Garrett; we all knowed that.” Ake believed that Cox paid Brazel to kill Garrett.
ATTORNEY GENERAL HERVEY HAD real problems with Carl Adamson’s testimony. He wanted to see the spot where Garrett died, so on the day of the funeral, he located Adamson and asked to be taken to the site. Hervey also brought along Captain Fred Fornoff, chief of the New Mexico Mounted Police. The three rode to the site in a buckboard, stopping at the place where Adamson said he had stopped his buggy before Garrett was shot. The arroyo’s steep bank rose up on the south side of the road, and to the north there was quite a bit of black brush. The men stepped out of the buckboard, and while Adamson and Fornoff discussed the killing, Hervey walked off approximately thirty to forty feet and found a new Winchester shell casing on the ground. The place where he found the shell casing was not where Brazel said he had shot from. Back in Las Cruces, the attorney general listened to Brazel’s story and became more suspicious. Hervey had been acquainted with Brazel for some time, and although he had only known him casually, he did not think the young man was the killer type. After returning to Santa Fe, Hervey told Fornoff that there was a lot about Garrett’s death that did not feel right to him. Fornoff agreed, but they did not have the money to pay for a full-blown investigation.
Garrett had been a friend of Hervey’s father, and the attorney general freely admitted that he had a personal interest in the case. If there had been a murder, he felt strongly that the culprits should be identified and prosecuted. Consequently, he visited El Paso and met with two of Garrett’s old friends, one being Tom Powers. Hervey described his suspicions and asked if they would help finance an undercover detective to pursue the case for a few months. Much to Hervey’s surprise and disappointment, both men were strangely uninterested in contributing. Hervey returned to Santa Fe and told Fornoff to dig into his meager expense account and find some reason to travel to El Paso and see what he could find. In the meantime, the grand jury convened in Las Cruces and indicted Brazel for the murder of Pat Garrett. The prosecution subpoenaed the Western Union Telegraph Company for all telegrams received or sent by Brazel, Adamson, Miller, Cox, Rhode, and Mannen Clements during February and March. They were taking the conspiracy accusations seriously.
Fornoff returned from El Paso with what he believed was a “real discovery.” He heard that a “wealthy rancher” had paid Jim Miller $1,500 to kill Garrett. The money had been handed to Miller in a lawyer’s office in El Paso, and as part of the bargain, the rancher was to supply a man to take the blame, as well as a witness to corroborate a self-defense plea. But while Fornoff’s “discovery” included some interesting details, it was—like the other conspiracy rumors—derived from gossip on the streets. Hervey needed hard proof that would stand up in court, and to get that he needed time and money.
A few months later, Hervey met with Emerson Hough in Chicago. He hit up Hough just like he did Powers, asking if the published author and some of his Chicago friends would contribute $1,000 to allow the Territory to better investigate Garrett’s murder. And like Powers, Hough declined. Garrett owed Hough a substantial amount of money, he explained, and the author was a little short just now himself.
Then Hough looked Hervey in the eye and said something that stunned the attorney general: “Jimmie, I know that outfit around the Organ Mountains, and Garrett got killed trying to find out who killed Fountain, and you will get killed trying to find out who killed Garrett. I would advise you to let it alone.”
The Garrett murder case finally went to trial the first week of May 1909. Brazel’s defense attorney was the biggest legal gun in the Southwest, Albert B. Fall, who was assisted by Las Cruces lawyer Herbert B. Holt. Mark Thompson, the district attorney, prosecuted the case, and Frank Parker, the district judge who had presided at the sensational Fountain murder trial ten years before, sat at the bench. The trial lasted only one day. Thompson, a friend of Fall’s (keeping on Fall’s good side was a prerequisite for any aspiring attorney in southern New Mexico), made only a halfhearted attempt to convict Brazel. The sole eyewitness, Carl Adamson, was not called to testify, and his name was inexplicably scratched off a list of witnesses subpoenaed by the Territory. Dr. Field, who had reported the findings of his autopsy to Thompson, was dumb-founded when he took the stand and the district attorney failed to ask him to explain the entry and exit wounds on Garrett’s body. The case went to the jury at 5:55 P.M., and fifteen minutes later, the jurors were back in the courtroom with their verdict: Not Guilty.
Garrett’s killing of Billy the Kid had made national headlines and so did his own death twenty-seven years later. But the verdict in the Garrett murder trial was mentioned in just a handful of newspapers. It was as if Pat Garrett had already been relegated to a distant past and had ceased to be significant to the present. The Territory, it would seem, had come to feel the same way. Garrett was an anachronism with considerable baggage. Better to get the murder trial over with quickly and not stir things up any more than they needed to be. Even Garrett’s good friends, Tom Powers and Emerson Hough, were resigned to let it go. In later years, Dr. Field often wondered if it would have made a difference had he been allowed to elaborate on the autopsy.
“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