Biographies & Memoirs

4

A New Sheriff

Advise persons never to engage in killing.

—BILLY THE KID

AS THE LINCOLN COUNTY WAR raged, Pat Garrett stayed over a hundred miles away at Fort Sumner. Garrett knew some of the Lincoln County warriors from the buffalo range, but he had no history with Dolan, McSween, John Chisum, or any of them. The fight did not involve him, nor was it any of his business. Within a year of the Big Killing, the shrill whistle of a locomotive had been heard at Las Vegas for the first time, and more and more Anglos were flooding into New Mexico. Garrett was part of that change, and he would play a prominent role in even bigger changes to come, yet he respected the old ways of his adopted home, and Fort Sumner’s native New Mexicans respected him. A few did more than just respect him.

The girls of Fort Sumner thought the rawboned former buffalo hunter was quite a romantic devil. Sallie Chisum, the Pecos cattle king’s niece, remembered that Garrett walked “with a certain swinging grace that suggested power and sureness. Despite his crooked mouth and crooked smile, which made his whole face seem crooked, he was a remarkably handsome man.” Juanita Martínez may have missed his crooked smile, but she certainly noticed his towering height. Juanita was a sparkling young woman, remembered Paulita Maxwell, “who had the charm of gaiety and light-heartedness.” Everyone adored her, and at the frequent Fort Sumner bailes, she had a great many admirers. The admirer she fell in love with, though, was Garrett.

Sometime in the fall of 1879, Pat and Juanita exchanged wedding vows. Their wedding was a huge affair, as were all weddings in the small community of Fort Sumner. It was traditional for the musicos to play La Marcha de los Novios (“The March of the Newlyweds”) after the nuptials. Oddly enough, a favorite melody for this march was “Marching Through Georgia.” If the musicos did play this tune, Pat Garrett, a born and raised southerner, must have gritted his teeth as he joined the new Mrs. Garrett in the grand march. As more dances followed, one after the other, the single girls of Fort Sumner, some carefully chaperoned by their mothers, sat around the edge of the long room on benches or chairs, their brightly colored dresses especially selected for this gala evening. When a girl accepted an invitation to dance, her partner would place his hat in her seat, thus holding her place. And when that particular waltz or polka was finished, the gentleman escorted his partner back to her seat and retrieved his hat, and so on throughout the evening.

Among the folks at the Garrett wedding were some young men who, during the last year, had become regular fixtures around Fort Sumner. Garrett knew them because they were customers at his off-and-on saloon and store operations. And their informal leader went by the name of William H. Bonney, although most knew him as the Kid, or Billito. The Kid spent a lot of time gambling—especially three-card monte—and he loved dancing.

Billy was “a lady’s Man,” recalled his friend Frank Coe, “the Mex girls were crazy about him…. He was a fine dancer, could go all their gates [gaits] and was one of them.” The Kid had a favorite dance tune, and without fail, at some point during the evening, he would tell the fiddlers, “Don’t forget the gallina.” By gallina, the musicos knew he wanted to hear “Turkey in the Straw.” They knew this because even though gallina means “hen” or “chicken,” native New Mexicans used gallina for the wild turkey. Like Garrett, Billy had mastered New Mexican Spanish.

Hanging close to Billy that evening were his pals, and former Regulators, Tom Folliard and Charlie Bowdre. Born in Uvalde County, Texas, in about 1861, Folliard lost both of his parents to smallpox when he was very young, and as a teenager, he stood over six feet and weighed close to two hundred pounds. He had worked for a short time for a Seven Rivers cattleman before stumbling upon the Frank Coe place on the Ruidoso. When Coe decided to try the lad out as a farmhand, Folliard hitched Coe’s draft team to a right-handed plow and proceeded to plow around the field left-handed. The Kid took an immediate liking to Folliard and decided he could make a passable gun hand out of him. With practice, Folliard got as fancy with a six-shooter as the Kid. He was very close to Billy in personality, good-natured and fun-loving, always singing or humming a song to himself.

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Tom Folliard.

Robert G. McCubbin Collection

University of Texas at El Paso Library, Special Collections Department

“He was the Kid’s inseparable companion,” recalled Frank Coe, “and always went along and held his horses. He held his horses when the Kid would pay his attentions to some Mexican girl. It mattered not whether he was gone thirty minutes or half the night, Tom was there when he came out.”

Charlie Bowdre had a ranch on the Ruidoso not far from the Coes and Doc Scurlock, another prominent Regulator. He was born in Georgia, but he had been raised in DeSoto County, Mississippi, the son of a wealthy plantation owner. Bowdre had been in trouble with the law well before the Lincoln County War. One of his worst episodes occurred in August 1877, when he and two companions terrorized the town of Lincoln in a drunken rampage. One resident referred to Bowdre as a “would be desperado.” On the other hand, George Coe thought that Bowdre and Bonney were the Regulators’ best fighters.

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Charlie and Manuela Bowdre, 1880.

“They were both cool and cautious,” Coe recalled, “and did not know what fear was.”

Bowdre was eleven years older than Billy and had another distinction: he was the best dressed of the lot, having a fondness for fancy vests.

The fourteen months since the Big Killing in Lincoln had been mostly hell for the Kid and his compadres. On August 5, 1878, Billy, Folliard, and Bowdre, along with seventeen other Regulators, swooped down on the Mescalero Apache Indian Agency. Their sole purpose was to steal a few of the Indians’ horses. When someone saw what they were doing and the shooting broke out, agency clerk Morris Bernstein was killed. Even though Billy did not have anything to do with ending the clerk’s life, he was one of four men indicted for Bernstein’s murder. George Coe had also been indicted for the killing, and later that same month, he and cousin Frank decided it was time to get away from Lincoln County. Billy pleaded with the Coes to stay, but the cousins were tired of living like outlaws, and they wanted out.

“Well, boys, you may all do exactly as you please,” the Kid told them. “As for me, I propose to stay right here in this country, steal myself a living, and plant every one of the mob who murdered Tunstall if they don’t get the drop on me first.”

In September 1878, after numerous complaints from the Territory’s citizens, and a highly critical report from a Department of Justice special investigator, Governor Samuel B. Axtell was finally removed from office. He was replaced by Major General Lew Wallace, an aspiring novelist who had been a member of the military commission that tried the conspirators in President Lincoln’s assassination. In November, Governor Wallace granted amnesty for those who participated in the Lincoln County War. Unfortunately, this amnesty did not include any who had already been indicted on criminal charges, and that included Billy and some other Regulators. But Wallace was no friend of the Dolan crowd, either, and he quickly decided that Gold Lace Dudley was one of Lincoln County’s biggest problems.

In mid-February 1879, Billy tried to make peace with Jesse Evans and the rest of the Dolan faction, and the two sides met in Lincoln on the eighteenth. Billy brought along Folliard, Doc Scurlock, George Bowers, and José Salazar. Facing them were Jesse Evans, Jimmy Dolan, Billy Mathews, Edgar Waltz, and Billy Campbell. After a tense and shaky start, the two sides came up with several conditions for a truce—one of them being that neither side would testify against the other in court. The penalty for breaking any of the conditions was death. Once everything was settled and agreed upon, the drinking commenced. About 10:00 P.M., the men spilled out onto Lincoln’s main street, singing and shooting their guns into the air. It was then that lawyer Huston I. Chapman, who had just arrived from Las Vegas, made the mistake of thinking he could walk through the rowdy bunch. The one-armed Chapman had been hired by Susan McSween to bring Dudley to justice for his role in the killing of her husband, which made Chapman an enemy of the Dolan crowd.

A drunken Billy Campbell accosted Chapman and asked where he was going. Chapman, his face bandaged due to an attack of neuralgia, told the boys to mind their own affairs. It was the wrong answer; Campbell ordered the lawyer to talk differently—or else.

“You cannot scare me, boys,” the feisty Chapman said while lifting a bandage from his face to get a better look at the ruffians. “I know you and it’s no use. You have tried that before.”

“Then,” Campbell replied, “I’ll settle you.”

And with that, Campbell fired his pistol into Chapman’s breast. As the attorney fell, Jimmy Dolan decided that he would double the deed, aimed his Winchester and fired a round into the poor man’s body. As Chapman’s clothing smoldered from a small fire ignited by the pistol’s powder flash, a joyous Campbell let slip that he had promised Dudley he would kill the troublesome attorney. The Kid and the others did not know what to do. John Henry Tunstall had been shot down exactly one year earlier, and ever since that horrible day, many people in Lincoln County had been killed, and now another man was dead.

Chapman’s murder outraged Wallace, who realized that he had to take serious action. In early March 1879, the governor traveled to Lincoln and got Dudley removed from command at Fort Stanton. He then set about going after Chapman’s murderers, and he believed the guilty parties included the Kid and Folliard, as well as Dolan and his cronies. During these efforts, the governor received a curious letter from W. H. Bonney:

Dear Sir: I have heard that You will give one thousand $ dollars for my body which as I can understand it means alive as a Witness. I know it is as a witness against those that Murdered Mr. Chapman. if it was so that I could appear at Court I could give the desired information, but I have indictments against me for things that happened in the late Lincoln County War and am afraid to give up because my Enemies would Kill me…. I was present When Mr. Chapman was Murdered and know who did it and if it were not for those indictments I would have made it clear before now…. I have no Wish to fight any more indeed I have not raised an arm since Your proclamation. as to my Character I refer to any of the Citizens, for the majority of them are my Friends and have been helping me all they could. I am called Kid Antrim but Antrim is my stepfathers name.

Bonney’s letter led to a secret meeting between him and the governor, and the Kid agreed to testify before the grand jury about Chapman’s murder in exchange for a full pardon. The Kid’s cooperation was no easy thing because he knew that Dolan and Jesse Evans, both indicted for Chapman’s murder, would be anxious to put a bullet in his back. Wallace had no such risk. On the contrary, there was the good possibility that the Territory’s newspapers would laud the governor for prosecuting Chapman’s killers. Unfortunately for both the Kid and the governor, it did not work out that way. As Governor Wallace famously wrote some time later, “Every calculation based on experience elsewhere fails in New Mexico.”

Billy held up his part of the bargain. He testified openly at both the grand jury proceedings and the subsequent military court of inquiry for Gold Lace Dudley (Dudley was exonerated of any wrongdoing). But he never got the pardon the governor promised, and District Attorney William Rynerson made it clear that he was not going along with any deal the governor made.

“He is bent on going after the Kid,” Wallace’s confidant, Ira Leonard, wrote the governor on April 20. “He proposes to destroy his evidence and influence and is bent on pushing him to the wall.” Fed up with waiting on Wallace to make good on his pledge, the Kid and Folliard, who had also submitted to arrest, quietly slipped out of town on June 17 and headed for Fort Sumner. Billy’s chance to go straight—if such a thing was truly possible—was gone.

Sumner became the Kid’s safe haven and base of operations. Charlie Bowdre found part-time employment as foreman of the Thomas Yerby ranch in an isolated area known as Las Cañaditas (Little Canyons), ten or so miles northeast of Sumner. Tom Folliard signed on with Yerby as well. Doc Scurlock followed the lead of the Coes and abandoned New Mexico for Texas, and never saw the Kid again. No matter, Billy never lacked for friends, and Fort Sumner offered plenty of girls, lots of dancing, some gambling and horse racing, and a whole lot of other people’s cattle and horses out on the open range that could be sold to more than a few unquestioning buyers. Even better, there was not a lawman in the Territory who was brave enough to go after the Kid and his confederates—not just yet.

PAT GARRETT KNEW THAT some of the men at his wedding baile were wanted by the law—everyone did. Most men in New Mexico Territory had a past—and some of them were hardened killers. That, too, was not unusual for the time and place, nor was it any cause for alarm. It was a time for celebration, and the attention was on Garrett and his bride. But as the guests watched the newlyweds dance, Juanita suddenly collapsed in what was described as some kind of fit or attack. She was quickly carried to a bed in a nearby room, where she died the next day. No one knew what happened to her. Her final resting place remains undiscovered, and she left no photographs, and no children. All that survived was a scar on Pat Garrett’s psyche and a faint memory in the minds of a few Fort Sumner old-timers.

More than most, it seems, Garrett and the Kid had experienced the tragic loss of loved ones. There was a good deal that the two had in common, actually: certain leadership qualities, for one, and their well-known fondness for the baile, horse racing, and gambling. Both were men you would want on your side in a fight. Garrett and the Kid were not good friends at Fort Sumner—but they were not enemies either. They saw each other frequently enough, and they had a healthy respect for each other, certainly each other’s ability to take care of himself. Garrett was usually serious and the Kid was usually boisterous, and they each had a reputation as a better-than-average shot with a six-gun; they were considered the two best shooters at Fort Sumner. On a slow day, and there were more than a few of those there on the Pecos, the Kid and Garrett might take part in an impromptu shooting match. Billy was ambidextrous, and people said he could shoot a pistol with one hand just as well as the other, although he favored the right hand whenever he got into a “jackpot.” According to Paulita Maxwell, Billy was better than Garrett with the revolver. She remembered a time when a terror-stricken jackrabbit on a Fort Sumner lane somehow managed to dodge every bullet Garrett fired at him. The Kid whipped out his revolver and pancaked the rabbit with his first shot. Maybe this happened, maybe not.

Others considered Garrett the better shot, possibly even the best man with a revolver in the entire Southwest. And Garrett did not rate Billy’s shooting nearly as high as many who were acquainted with the Kid. When asked if Billy was a good shot, Garrett admitted that he was, but he added that the Kid was “no better than the majority of men who are constantly handling and using six-shooters. He shot well, though, and he shot well under all circumstances, whether in danger or not.” That last was the key, of course. As Garrett remarked years later, “A man with nerve behind a gun is worth twenty-five who are after him.” There is no question that Billy Bonney had nerve; Joe Grant discovered that in January 1880.

Grant had shown up at Fort Sumner, presumably from Texas, with no job and apparently no interest in finding one—never a good sign. But somehow he had enough means to keep himself in liquor for several days. He had immediately buddied up with the Kid and his associates, who were also hanging around and not working. At some point, Grant got it into his head that he would be quite the hombre if he took out the Kid. Some claim he came to Fort Sumner with that purpose, but Grant’s scheme, which he let slip one day, could also have been the whiskey talking. In any event, Grant’s blustering got back to Billy, who remained friendly with the Texan but kept his eyes on the man.

On January 10, a Saturday, Billy and two friends rode up on a small herd of cattle that James Chisum (brother of John) and three of his cowhands were moving southward. The cattle had been stolen from the Chisum range—almost certainly by the Kid—and Chisum was taking them back. With a straight face, Billy asked to inspect the herd, as if he might actually find an animal that had not been given Chisum’s Jinglebob brand. After Billy had his look, he invited Chisum and his men to have a drink at Bob Hargrove’s saloon in Fort Sumner, less than a mile away.

Joe Grant was in the saloon when Billy, Chisum, and the others got there, and Grant was well inebriated already. As Jack Finan, one of Chisum’s men, walked past the drunken Texan, Grant yanked Finan’s pearl-handled revolver from its holster and replaced it with his own. Billy immediately stepped over to Grant and said, “That’s a beauty, Joe,” and then reached out and took the pistol from Grant. Billy examined the six-shooter’s cylinder and noticed that three of the six chambers were empty. He carefully rotated the cylinder so that when the gun was cocked and the trigger pulled, the gun’s hammer would fall on an empty chamber. The Kid then casually handed the pistol back to Grant.

“Pard, I’ll kill a man quicker’n you will for the whisky,” Grant said to Billy.

“What do you want to kill anybody for?” Billy said. “Put up your pistol and let’s drink.”

Pistol still in hand, Grant stepped behind the bar and used the gun’s barrel to smash the glasses and decanters on the counter. Everyone watched nervously as Grant pointed the pistol wildly around the saloon. Billy pulled his six-shooter. “Let me help you break up housekeeping, pard,” he said, and gleefully joined Grant in finishing off the saloon’s glassware.

Then Grant saw James Chisum across the room and mistook him for John Chisum. And, for some unknown reason, Grant had a strong grudge against the Pecos cattle baron.

“I want to kill John Chisum, anyhow, the damned old son of a bitch,” Grant said.

“You’ve got the wrong pig by the ear, Joe,” Billy said, “that’s not John Chisum.”

“That’s a lie,” Grant screamed. “I know better!”

Quick as a flash, Grant pointed his pistol at Billy and pulled the trigger. There was a click, then the sound of Grant cursing as he again cocked the gun’s hammer. But that was immediately followed by the loud blast of Billy’s six-shooter as he sent a lead ball into Joe Grant’s head. Grant collapsed behind the blood-splattered bar. A moment later, someone asked the Kid if he was sure Grant was dead. Billy nodded his head confidently.

“No fear,” he said. “The corpse is there, sure, ready for the undertaker.”

The following day, Billy, Tom Folliard, Charlie Bowdre, and a Charlie Thomas went to pick up their mail at the post office in Sunnyside, approximately five miles above Fort Sumner. Bowdre casually told the postmaster, Milnor Rudolph, that another man had “turned up his toes” at Sumner. That got Rudolph’s attention, and he asked the name of the deceased. Bowdre said it was Joe Grant, and he had been shot by the Kid. Rudolph then looked at Billy and asked him why he killed Grant.

“His gun wouldn’t fire,” Billy coolly explained, “and mine would.”

Four days after Billy sent the local undertaker a gift of Joe Grant, Pat Garrett stood before the parish priest at Anton Chico, a village ninety miles northwest of Fort Sumner, and married Polinaria Gutiérrez, the daughter of José Dolores and Feliciana Gutiérrez. Garrett’s period of mourning had been brief, but this was not unusual in a land where time was the last thing one could count on. Polinaria’s first name was actually Apolinaria, although her friends and family called her “La Negra” or simply “Negra,” presumably because of her dark complexion. Garrett towered over the petite girl, who may have been as young as sixteen. And although Garrett was basically a nonbeliever, Polinaria was a devout Catholic, and that meant the rites had to be performed by a priest. This may have seemed even more important because Garrett’s first marriage had been performed without a priest, and that had not worked out so well.

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Pat and Apolinaria Garrett, circa 1880.

University of Texas at El Paso Library, Special Collections Department

NEARLY THIRTY YEARS OLD and married, Pat Garrett was tired of struggling to make a living at Fort Sumner—and tired of the criminals who seemed to have the place under their control. He wanted something better. So, too, did Pecos Valley cattleman and entrepreneur Captain Joseph C. Lea. Lea was a former Missouri guerrilla who had fought alongside the likes of Cole Younger and Frank James under Quantrill and Jo Shelby during the Civil War. Pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1865, Lea had tried his hand at farming and livestock trading before coming to New Mexico Territory in 1875. Early in 1878, Lea had moved his family to Roswell, where he soon purchased the town’s two adobe buildings, a store and a hotel. Later that same year, he was elected a Lincoln County commissioner, a good indication of the favorable first impression he had made on the region’s ranchers and settlers. What Lea wanted was to see an end to the thieving and violence in the Pecos Valley so that farming and livestock raising, not to mention little Roswell itself, could prosper. That meant getting rid of Billy the Kid and his cohorts. That meant, ultimately, the end of an era.

For this to happen, he knew that Lincoln County needed a new sheriff, one who understood the risks but was willing to see the job to its conclusion. Lea, who was every bit as tall as Garrett, became convinced that Garrett was the man for this job. He persuaded Garrett to pick up and move to the Roswell area (Fort Sumner was just outside of Lincoln County) and run for election as sheriff that fall. By early June, Garrett and Polinaria were settled into their new home, and the census taker recorded Garrett’s occupation as farmer.

William Bonney was noted in that census. He shared an adobe dwelling at Fort Sumner with his friends Charlie and Manuela Bowdre (it was rumored that he and Charlie shared more than the house). The census taker wrote down that Charlie and Billy both “work in cattle,” which, like most things about Billy, was true yet not true. Sometime that same year, a traveling photographer arrived at Fort Sumner. With tintype portraits going for only a few cents apiece, a professional photographer could draw settlers from miles around. Billy decided to have his picture taken, if only to have a few tintypes to present to the girls he was sweet on. Although Paulita Maxwell insisted that Billy was a neat and tasteful dresser around Fort Sumner, Billy is rather odd-looking in this tintype, wearing rumpled, trail-worn clothes: a loose sweater, unbuttoned vest, a showy bib-front shirt embroidered with a large anchor across the chest, a bandanna knotted clumsily about the neck, and a narrow-brimmed felt hat with a large dent in the crown.

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Billy the Kid, from the tintype made at Fort Sumner.

Collection of the author

Billy was never without a weapon, and in the photograph he is grasping the muzzle of a Model 1873 Winchester carbine, with its butt resting on the floor. Around his waist is a cartridge belt and holster with the curved butt of a six-shooter sticking out. These were the tools of the Kid’s trade—and what he needed to survive. Billy apparently paid for four tintypes, which would have been made simultaneously with a camera that featured four individual lenses mounted on the front. After developing the tin plate with its four identical images, the photographer would simply snip it into four parts and mount the portraits in thin paper mattes. The single surviving photograph of Billy the Kid in all his glory is anything but a flattering portrait—his mouth is partially open, exposing his buckteeth, and his eyelids appear to be drooping, snake-eyed. Nearly everyone remembered Billy as attractive, extremely likable, and full of life. It is as if he was just too big—or too elusive—to be captured in a tintype that would fit in the palm of one’s hand.

At the time that this photograph was taken, Billy had become the most prominent member of a very successful gang of livestock thieves that operated back and forth between the rowdy cow town of Tascosa, Texas, southwest to the mining boomtown of White Oaks, New Mexico, a distance of some three hundred miles. With markets on both sides of the state line, and several large ranches with not nearly enough cowhands to be everywhere at once, it was easy enough to round up a few head of cattle, alter the brands, write up a fake bill of sale, and be gone down the trail before the owner knew what hit him. And with beef bringing between $15 and $25 per head (the gang got $10 for their stolen beef ), a loss of fifty head of cattle was a painful hit to the account books. The cattlemen of this area knew who Billy was and were desperate that he and his cohorts be captured or run out of the country.

Unless a horse or cow was padlocked in a barn stall, not a one of them between Tascosa and White Oaks was safe. The Mescalero Apache reservation south of Fort Stanton was one of the gang’s favorite targets, because the Mescaleros were exceptional horsemen and had fine horse herds. The Mescaleros called Billy and his fellow horse thieves the “broad hat people.”

“At Fort Stanton Billy the Kid was making a raid on the Indians all the time for their horses,” recalled Percy Big Mouth. “We made a big brush corral at Fort Stanton right near the fort…to protect us against Billy the Kid. One night they came over, tore all the brush down and got all our horses. The soldiers would go after Billy.”

But the soldiers never got Billy, no one did. On the evening of August 9, 1879, Sheriff George Kimbrell with a military escort numbering one officer and fifteen men trapped the Kid in a cabin six miles from Lincoln. Even though they greatly outnumbered the outlaw, neither the sheriff nor the soldiers were interested in busting into the cabin and shooting it out with Billy the Kid. Kimbrell chose to wait until daylight and negotiate a surrender. But that was far too much time to give the Kid. Demonstrating that he still retained the slim figure and athleticism of his Silver City days, Billy clawed up the chimney and slipped away in the darkness, leaving his weapons—and the posse—far behind.

By the fall of 1880, the gang of rustlers included several ne’er-do-wells who had not been close to Billy during the Lincoln County War. Among them were Dave Rudabaugh, Tom Pickett, and Billy Wilson. The twenty-six-year-old Dave Rudabaugh had a handsome, though weather-beaten, face and a black mustache. His blue eyes and winning smile made him look like a decent guy, but he was an accomplished train and stage robber, a hired gun, and a murderer. A year earlier, Rudabaugh had killed a Las Vegas jailer while attempting to break a friend out of jail; he had been on the run ever since. Many considered Rudabaugh a far worse character than the Kid, and some people said that even Billy was afraid of him.

Thomas Pickett was twenty-four years old, the son of a well-to-do Wise County, Texas, rancher who had been a Texas Ranger, a justice of the peace, and a Texas state legislator. Young Tom joined the Texas Rangers in 1876, but his troubles started almost immediately when he was charged with several counts of stealing cattle. He eventually ended up in New Mexico, where in 1879 he worked as a policeman in Old Town Las Vegas. In mid-May 1880, when he found out that someone wanted to send a bullet or two into his brain, Tom hastily resigned from the Las Vegas force and traveled to White Oaks, where he became the assistant city marshal and a bartender in Patterson’s saloon. A close shooting scrape a month later—so close that a bullet creased his cheek—convinced him to move on again. Pickett drifted to Fort Sumner, where he hired on under Charlie Bowdre at the Yerby ranch.

William “Billy” Wilson, two years younger, slightly stouter, and far quieter than the Kid, was born in Ohio. Before coming to New Mexico, he had navigated the hell-raisers and prostitutes of Dodge City, Kansas, where he likely ran into Dave Rudabaugh. He carried the two most popular firearms in the American West, a Winchester Model 1873 carbine and a Colt Single Action Army revolver. Both weapons were chambered in .44 caliber and, thus, fired the same ammunition.

Wilson put the gang on the U.S. Treasury Department’s radar when he began freely passing $100 counterfeit notes in Lincoln. Secret Service “Special Operative” Azariah Wild arrived at Fort Stanton on October 1, direct from New Orleans, determined to have Wilson, and anyone else connected with the counterfeiting ring, arrested. Once in New Mexico, however, the forty-two-year-old Wild got a crash course on Lincoln County and how big a challenge he faced. It did not take Wild long to become a supporter of Pat Garrett.

Joseph C. Lea had started the campaign to elect Garrett to be sheriff, but it only kept rolling with the support of other key power brokers in Lincoln County. These included Fort Stanton post traders Will Dowlin and John C. DeLaney, Lincoln merchant Joseph La Rue, and La Rue’s clerk, the infamous Jimmy Dolan. Garrett’s supporters succeeded in forcing his name on the ballot in place of the incumbent, Sheriff Kimbrell. Kimbrell, who was known to drink and play cards with those for whom he possessed arrest warrants, decided to run anyway.

Among those campaigning for Pat Garrett was nineteen-year-old George Curry, then working on the Block ranch, a sheep operation twenty-five miles from Fort Stanton in the Capitan Mountains. On Monday evening, November 1, 1880, a young stranger appeared at the ranch about suppertime, and, as was customary, Curry invited him to a place at the table. The stranger, slight of build, was dressed as a puncher and spoke fluent Spanish. Curry observed that the Hispanic ranch hands knew the young man, but the stranger never offered his name, and, as was also customary, Curry did not ask. As they continued to talk after supper, Garrett’s name came up.

“Do you know Garrett?” the stranger asked.

“No, I don’t, but from all I hear he is a splendid man,” Curry answered.

“Do you think he will be elected?”

“I don’t know,” Curry said, “but I’m sure he will carry this precinct. I have a gallon of whiskey on hand, and I think that will help carry it.”

“You are a good cook and a good fellow,” the stranger said before riding away, “but if you think Pat Garrett is going to carry this precinct for sheriff, you are a damned poor politician.”

After the stranger was gone, Felipe Miranda, the sheep boss, told Curry that the man he had been talking to was William H. Bonney. And Bonney was right. Las Tablas was the home of Billy’s good friend Yginio Salazar, and the next morning, Kimbrell carried the precinct.

Fortunately for Garrett and his backers, the Las Tablas outcome was not repeated in the other precincts. Garrett, who generally spoke in a low tone and rarely talked of himself, had not been the best campaigner for public office, but the people who supported him were interested in action, not words. Garrett handily won the election, receiving 320 votes to Kimbrell’s 179. The day after the election, Acting Governor W. G. Ritch (Wallace was away from Santa Fe at the time) penned a proclamation calling for the people of the Territory to recognize November 25 as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise.

“Peace now prevails within our borders,” Ritch proclaimed. “On every hand, among the humble and weak, as well as among the bold and powerful and wealthy, are found causes to remember with thankfulness the goodness which crowns the year.”

This was easy to say from the Governor’s Palace in Santa Fe, but there was still a whole lot of hell going on in Lincoln County.

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