Fame is a food that dead men eat.
—AUSTIN DOBSON
IN OCTOBER 1905, PAT Garrett visited old Fort Sumner with Emerson Hough. Garrett had agreed to help Hough with a book to be titled The Story of the Outlaw, and they had an understanding that Garrett would receive a share of the royalties. Sumner was no longer the place Garrett had known in 1881. Its adobe buildings had been torn down some years back, and the large parade ground was a mess of weeds and sagebrush. After some searching, Garrett located the ruins of Pete Maxwell’s residence, and he started taking Hough through the events of July 14—twenty-four years earlier.
“It was a glorious moonlight night,” Garrett began. “I can remember it perfectly well.”
As Garrett told the story of how he killed Billy the Kid, Hough listened in awe, keenly aware of his great fortune in being in the famed lawman’s presence at the very place where justice had finally caught up with the Kid, where a snap shot in the dark had given birth to a legend.
The friends next drove their buckboard to the barbed-wire-enclosed cemetery, which also seemed to be falling down. The Kid’s crude wooden marker had disappeared long ago, and Garrett spent some time kicking around the greasewood and cactus, trying to figure out where the grave was. He finally found it, and he stared down at the ground for a few moments in silence. Garrett then walked to the buckboard, dug out a canteen, and opened it.
“Well, here’s to the boys, anyway,” Garrett said, quietly. “If there is any other life, I hope they’ll make better use of it than they did of the one I put them out of.”
There was another life, of course, a robust mythic afterlife. By the 1930s, Billy the Kid had become a gold mine. Over the previous fifty years, his story had been revisited in the occasional newspaper article and magazine feature, but he officially achieved pop culture status with the 1926 publication of Walter Noble Burns’s The Saga of Billy the Kid. Burns’s book was just that, an enthralling, if not entirely accurate, full-blooded tale partially told by the participants themselves—Burns had interviewed several key Lincoln County old-timers about the Kid, the Lincoln County War, and Pat Garrett. Somewhat surprisingly, Burns saw Garrett as a heroic figure, the “last great sheriff of the old frontier,” a characterization that drew criticism from the book reviewer for the New York Times. Like the typical Kid lover and Garrett hater—one always equals the other, it seems—the reviewer criticized the sheriff for shooting Billy in the dark “without giving him a chance to fight for his life.” Be that as it may, Burns’s book was a tremendous bestseller. Its success prompted New York trade publisher Macmillan to issue a new edition of Garrett’s rare The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid (Uncle Ash would have been pleased). And in 1930, Burns’s book was the basis of the film Billy the Kid, directed by King Vidor and starring Johnny Mack Brown as the title character.
As the Great Depression wore on, the American public embraced Billy the Kid, the young outlaw-hero who defied authority, just as they embraced the thrilling exploits of modern-day bank robbers John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie and Clyde. Some of those 1930s “public enemies” found Billy’s story irresistible as well, perhaps even inspirational. After Bonnie and Clyde were shot to death in a horrific ambush on May 23, 1934, a book was found, among other things, resting in the backseat of their blood-spattered car—The Saga of Billy the Kid. Everyone fell in love with the myth, the legend, and that myth got another boost in October 1938, with the premiere of composer Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid, which featured a dancing, dudish Billy with iconic black-and-white-striped trousers. The ballet, its score overflowing with traditional cowboy songs, received glowing reviews, including one from Copland’s proud mother, who told the composer that his piano lessons as a child had finally paid off.
By 1938, Billy’s grave at old Fort Sumner (which had received a large tombstone six years previous) was getting hundreds of visitors annually, an impressive figure considering that Fort Sumner was not the easiest place to get to via automobile in Depression-era America. This prompted the cemetery’s owner to consider building a museum and charging admission, until a grandson of Lucien Maxwell (Lucien and Pete Maxwell are buried in the cemetery) sued and won a permanent injunction that kept the cemetery free of charge. Also in 1938, the Works Progress Administration granted $8,657 to restore the old Lincoln County courthouse. The New Mexico legislature subsequently asked the federal government to designate the courthouse as a national monument. There were a few who viewed the creation of such a monument as immortalizing a cold-blooded killer, but their criticisms were ignored. Billy had become too much of a juggernaut. Although the courthouse failed to receive the federal designation, it was dedicated a state monument in a special ceremony featuring Governor John E. Miles on July 30, 1939. Also speaking that day were Billy’s old friend George Coe and former territorial governor Miguel Antonio Otero. A crowd of approximately a thousand stood in the rain and watched the proceedings.
People like George and Frank Coe, Yginio Salazar, Jesus Silva, and Almer Blazer suddenly became minor celebrities, and tourists and newspaper reporters wanted to talk to them. George Coe was quick to catch on and published his own book, Frontier Fighter,in 1934. In addition to the people and places associated with the Kid, tourists and aficionados also wanted to see Billy artifacts, pieces of the True Cross, so to speak. The Kid had few personal possessions at the time of his death, yet certain individuals later claimed to have the Kid’s gun, spurs, knife, the broken shackles from his courthouse escape, even a wad of hair from one of Billy’s haircuts. Maybe some of these items were the Kid’s, maybe none of them. One artifact that could not be disputed, one that would command a high price on the open market, had hung behind the bar in Tom Powers’s Coney Island saloon since 1906. It was the gun that killed Billy the Kid.
Over the years, Powers had amassed an amazing collection of fire-arms that once belonged to famous westerners, including outlaw Sam Bass, Apache chief Victorio, El Paso marshal Dallas Stoudenmire, Texas gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, and Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. In 1906, Powers had talked his friend Garrett into letting him display the Colt pistol used to kill Billy the Kid and also Garrett’s favorite Winchester rifle, both originally captured from Billy Wilson at Stinking Spring. Part of what made the saloon keeper’s collection so valuable was that he had written documentation for each weapon. Garrett gave Powers a signed affidavit giving the history of the weapons (along with their serial numbers).
“These guns are my prize souvenirs,” Garrett wrote, “because of their association with the Lincoln days and because I carried them through many trying times. During my life, I have owned many guns of all types and calabres [sic], but these two have been my favorites and the ones that I relied upon to protect and defend the people whom I have served.”
According to the affidavit, Garrett gave Powers permission to display the weapons until he requested their return.
Polinaria Garrett with the gun that killed Billy the Kid.
Robert G. McCubbin Collection
In October 1930, Powers, who apparently suffered from depression, took a pistol, pointed it at his chest, and shot himself just above his heart; he died three months later. Polinaria Garrett sued the Powers estate for the return of her husband’s six-shooter, and the case received national publicity. The pistol that killed Billy the Kid was said to be worth more than $500. The Powers estate claimed that a financially desperate Garrett had finally sold the gun to Powers in 1907, and that may very well have been true. Even if Garrett had not sold the gun to Powers, he certainly owed Powers money when he died. However, Polinaria testified that Pat had given her the weapon in 1904, and two years later he had asked her permission to let Powers display it in his saloon. Polinaria also claimed that Powers had promised that the gun would be returned to her after his death. Garrett’s widow was a small thing, but she could be just as feisty, if not more so, than her husband. The Garrett children loved to tell the story of how Pat once teased Polinaria about her English, and from that day forward, she never spoke to her husband in English again! She was not about to give up that pistol.
The El Paso County Court awarded the pistol to Polinaria, but the Powers estate appealed the decision to the Texas State Supreme Court. More than a year later, the appeals court affirmed the earlier ruling, that Pat Garrett had no right to sell the pistol without his wife’s consent. The pistol belonged to Polinaria. On October 7, 1934, as a newspaper photographer snapped pictures, Mrs. Pat Garrett stood on the front porch of her Las Cruces home and received the prized weapon from her attorney, a man with the intriguing name U. S. Goen. It was a rare triumph for the Garrett family, which had struggled mightily after Pat Garrett’s death. In early October 1936, Polinaria traveled to Roswell (the home of her daughter Elizabeth) where she was crowned Queen of the Old-Timers and rode in the annual Old-Timers parade. Two weeks later, she died from a heart attack. It seems strange that of all the surviving accounts and interviews from those who knew the Kid and Garrett, there is not one from Polinaria.
Fortunately, Polinaria was not around to see what film producer and director Howard Hughes did to her husband’s memory. In 1939, after success with such movies as Hell’s Angels and Scarface, Hughes chose Billy the Kid for his next big film. Hughes signed a contract with Garrett’s surviving children, Oscar, Jarvis, Pauline, and Elizabeth, presumably for the rights to their father’s story. Filming began in Arizona late in 1940. The finished movie, titled The Outlaw, had a limited release in 1943 and then a wide re-release three years later. Panned by critics and condemned by religious groups, The Outlaw became a true blockbuster, primarily because of the film’s curvaceous new starlet, Jane Russell.
While most Americans were staring at Russell’s breasts, Pat Garrett’s children were looking at the disturbing portrayal of their father by character actor Thomas Mitchell. Mitchell’s Garrett was a dumpy, conniving, vengeful weasel of a man, and the Garretts were furious and humiliated. In March 1947, they sued the Hughes Tool Company of Houston, Texas, of which Howard Hughes was head, for $250,000 for breach of contract. The memory of their father, they claimed in the suit, was “cruelly and unjustifiably besmirched.” The result of their lawsuit is unknown. The family’s goal, a rather naive one, was to correct the false impression of their father created by the film. But truly, no one cared much about Pat Garrett anymore but them.
Just three years later, in 1950, the Garrett family was angered once again over a perceived threat to their father’s legacy. An old man living in the small town of Hico, Texas, was claiming to be Billy the Kid. A popular myth, one that existed even in Garrett’s time, was that Billy had not been shot down that summer night in Fort Sumner but had somehow survived. One version of the story had Garrett killing another man and claiming it was the Kid so he could get the reward. Another version had Garrett in cahoots with the Kid to fake the outlaw’s death. The myth played perfectly to the romantics, who hated the story about young, charismatic Billy, the Robin Hood of the Southwest, dying so tragically. But a living Billy meant that Garrett’s greatest claim to fame was all a lie. It was as if the Garrett family could not win. Their father was either the villain for killing Billy, or he was unworthy of his dedicated-lawman reputation because he had not really killed the Kid and perhaps committed fraud in the process.
The Texas man’s name was Ollie L. “Brushy Bill” Roberts, and he had petitioned New Mexico’s governor Thomas J. Mabry for a pardon. Brushy, according to his El Paso lawyer, was old and tired of running, although exactly who or what he was running from at that late date is unclear. The governor agreed to meet with Brushy Bill in Santa Fe on November 30 to either verify Brushy’s claim or dismiss it. The meeting took place in the governor’s executive mansion in front of newspaper reporters, historians, Cliff McKinney (son of Garrett’s deputy, Kip), and Oscar and Jarvis Garrett.
When Oscar Garrett’s turn came to grill Brushy, he declined, saying he chose not to “dignify the occasion.” Turns out, Oscar did not have to. Brushy seemed confused and had trouble answering several pointed questions. He did not know who the Kid fought with in the Lincoln County War, he denied killing James Bell and Bob Olinger, and he had to be prompted before he could come up with Pat Garrett’s name. Perhaps Brushy was nervous in front of all those stern faces. The likely explanation is that Brushy Bill was a pathetic phony. The only thing he shared in common with Billy the Kid was a wild imagination. Mabry announced he would not consider a pardon, then or ever.
“Billy the Kid’s Dead All Right” was the title of an editorial in the next day’s Santa Fe New Mexican. “We’re glad it was so bad,” commented the paper on Brushy’s performance. “It didn’t fool anybody. Had the old boy been better versed and had he given a few right answers there would be confusion from now on as to whether the outlaw was killed in 1881 or whether he lived 70 years longer to apply for a pardon.”
Brushy Bill Roberts, whoever he was, died in Hico, Texas, just short of a month after his interview with the New Mexico governor, but his story refused to go away. Billy the Kid and Brushy Bill returned to the spotlight in April 2003, when Sheriff Tom Sullivan of Lincoln County opened an official investigation (Case No. 2003–274)) to examine the deaths of deputies Bell and Olinger in Lincoln and Pat Garrett’s killing of Billy at Fort Sumner. Sullivan pointed out as his motivation a recent visit to Hico, Texas, where today a museum touts Brushy Bill as the real Billy the Kid, thus contradicting what Sullivan knew of Lincoln County history. Assisted by his friend Deputy Steve Sederwall and the sheriff of DeBaca County, Gary Graves, Sullivan planned to collect DNA from the bodies of Billy the Kid, his mother, Catherine Antrim, Brushy Bill, and other Kid pretenders (Brushy was not alone) and make comparisons. Ultimately, the investigation was just as much about whether or not Pat Garrett had lied as it was about whether the Kid had survived. Sullivan vowed to remove Garrett’s image from the Sheriff’s Department’s shoulder patch if he determined that Billy had not perished at Garrett’s hands.
Governor Bill Richardson, seeing an excellent opportunity to bring media attention and more tourists to New Mexico, quickly joined the cause, offering state aid and the possibility that he might give Billy the pardon Lew Wallace had promised nearly 125 years earlier. The first news of the investigation generated a media frenzy. The story appeared on the front page of the New York Times and ran in some two thousand newspapers worldwide, and documentary filmmakers soon descended on Lincoln County to explore the “mystery” of Billy the Kid. In 2004, the investigation made the news again when forensic expert Henry Lee, made famous from his role in the O. J. Simpson murder trial, agreed to help with collecting blood samples and doing the DNA analysis.
The investigation also generated incredible controversy, with some critics arguing that the effort was a waste of time and money and others afraid of the consequences for New Mexico tourism if Billy’s body was not found at Fort Sumner (a good possibility considering a major flood of the Pecos in 1904 and genuine confusion as to Billy’s exact resting place within the cemetery). Sullivan and Sederwall were eventually thwarted in their attempts to exhume Billy, Catherine Antrim, and Brushy Bill, and Sheriff Graves was recalled from office. The investigation did uncover some very intriguing, long-forgotten evidence connected with Billy the Kid, including the original carpenter’s workbench where Billy’s dead body had been placed, complete with human bloodstains. Considerable blood evidence was also revealed at the top of the Lincoln County courthouse stairs through a test using luminol, the same chemical employed in modern police forensic investigations. Unfortunately, the results of the DNA analysis of these blood samples, the DNA extracted from the remains of a Billy pretender, and any other findings of the investigation are currently in limbo. Sullivan and Sederwall, no longer associated with the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department, say their work was conducted on their own time and at private expense. “We left our badges, and we’ll take our knowledge,” Sederwall explained to the Albuquerque Journal in 2007. The two are currently being sued, along with the present Lincoln County sheriff, to force the release of their investigation’s records. It seems that what started out as a “quest for the truth,” to “set the record straight,” has turned into a fight over just who gets to know that “truth.”
The irony of all this is that Billy Bonney’s fate is already known. It was known when Brushy Bill appeared in Santa Fe in 1950, just as it was known at Fort Sumner in 1881. Paulita knew. Pete Maxwell knew. Celsa, Deluvina, John Poe, Kip McKinney—they all knew. “He is dead, my friend Billy,” said Florencio Chavez, who rode with the Kid as a Regulator. “Old Silva knows. And I am sure. These stories of another being killed, of the Kid slipping away, they have come with late years. My friend Bill he is dead.”
NO LESS THAN SIXTY films have been made about Billy the Kid. He has been portrayed by Paul Newman, Kris Kristofferson, Val Kilmer, Emilio Estevez (who has the singular distinction of playing both the Kid and Brushy Bill Roberts), Roy Rogers, and a host of lesser B actors. Hundreds of books have been written about the outlaw, from comics and pulp westerns to works by novelists the likes of Michael Ondaatje, N. Scott Momaday, and Larry McMurtry. Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, and Jon Bon Jovi have written songs about him. Every year, countless tourists from around the world visit his grave at Fort Sumner and navigate Lincoln County’s Billy the Kid National Scenic Byway. Nearly every spot Billy once touched is commemorated with a historic marker.
No one ever pretended to be Pat Garrett, to have survived the shooting in Alameda Arroyo. There are no Pat Garrett museums, no ballads about the Lincoln County lawman. By 1948, his grave in the Odd Fellows cemetery was neglected and covered with weeds; the family transferred his remains across the street to the Masonic cemetery in 1957. There are no signs on the highway pointing to Garrett’s grave site, and it receives few visitors. Yet while Billy continues to get the glory and the empathy, Pat Garrett will never be forgotten. He remains, for better or worse, what he was at his death in 1908: the man who shot Billy the Kid.
The Kid and Pat Garrett are forever linked, and rightly so; today, in legend, but historically, in the memories of their friends and enemies. “I knew both these men intimately,” Sallie Chisum told Walter Noble Burns in 1924, “and each made history in his own way. There was good mixed with the bad in Billy the Kid and bad mixed with the good in Pat Garrett. Both were distinctly human, both remarkable personalities. No matter what they did in the world or what the world thought of them, they were my friends. Both were real men. Both were worth knowing.”
They need no finer epitaph.