To Hell on a Fast Horse (21 page)

Garrett and his men also kept watch that night, but not over Billy the Kid. The sheriff was concerned that some of Billy’s distraught friends might attempt to exact revenge. Local sheepherder Francisco Lobato said later that if they had had a leader, they would have done just that. But Sumner’s natural-born leader, the one who specialized in revenge, was dead. The rest of the night passed without incident.

Garrett had ordered Alcalde Alejandro Seguro to hold an inquest on the killing, and the following morning, the alcalde named six men to what was essentially a coroner’s jury. Among the members of the jury were Garrett’s brother-in-law, Saval Gutiérrez, and Garrett’s friend from Sunnyside, Milnor Rudolph, who served as foreman. No inquest had been held at Fort Sumner for Billy’s pals Charlie Bowdre and Tom Folliard, but then again, there had been no reward for either of those men. With $500 cash at stake, Garrett was very particular that there be a legal paper trail to document his success. He had gone through hell collecting the last reward from the Territory, so he was determined to give Santa Fe’s bureaucrats as little to doubt as possible.

The jury viewed the body in the carpenter’s shop to confirm the cause and manner of death, after which they visited Maxwell’s bedroom and took testimony from Don Pedro, the only eyewitness to the shooting other than Sheriff Garrett. The men promptly came up with a verdict: “We of the jury unanimously find that William Bonney came to his death from a bullet wound in the left breast near the region of the heart fired by a pistol in the hand of Pat F. Garrett and our judgment is that the action of said Garrett was justifiable homicide and we are united in opinion that the gratitude of all the commu
nity is due to said Garrett for his action and whom is worthy of being compensated.”

The reference here to compensation suggests that Garrett must have been involved in the verdict’s wording, and the jury may not have been united in this expression of gratitude. Gutiérrez and two other jury members, for example, never read the verdict in its finished form—they were illiterate. In any case, Garrett now had the documentation he needed to present his claim to the Territory.

The Kid’s funeral took place that afternoon. Garrett had arranged with Maxwell to make sure the body was “neatly and properly dressed.” Jesus Silva constructed a crude coffin, after which he and Fort Sumner resident Vicente Otero dug a grave in the old post cemetery. The coffin was transported to the burying ground in Otero’s wood wagon and was followed by a procession of nearly every resident of Fort Sumner. The words spoken over the grave came from Job, chapter 14: “Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.” The next day, a marker made out of a stave from the fort’s picket fence was placed at the head of the grave. Stenciled on the board’s eroded surface were the words “Billy the Kid.” No last name. No date. No quaint Victorian sentiment.

Garrett got himself ready to leave for Las Vegas and Santa Fe, and Pete Maxwell would ride with him for part of the trip. The sheriff dismissed his two deputies, who set off down the Pecos, McKinney for his home near Roswell and Poe for White Oaks. John W. Poe was never able to come to understand why Billy had hesitated and had not killed him that night when he came upon Poe and McKinney outside of Maxwell’s residence. If anything, Billy had an uncanny knack for staying alive. Poe puzzled over the strange events of that night on his long ride back to White Oaks—and for years to come. Toward the end of his life, he came to a single conclusion: Billy Bonney’s demise had been foreordained.

T
HOSE WERE THE HEADLINES
in the
Santa Fe New Mexican
. News of the Kid’s death had reached Las Vegas on Monday morning, July 18, brought there direct from Fort Sumner by the mail contractor. The
Las Vegas Gazette
scooped its rival, the
Daily Optic
, getting a brief report to the Western Union office by 8:00
A.M
., which gave several newspapers across the country the chance to feature the news in their afternoon editions. In Santa Fe, the intelligence had first
been communicated in a telegram sent from Las Vegas to Billy’s old antagonist, John S. Chisum, who was then in the capital and no doubt euphoric at the news. Sent by military contractor Marcus Brunswick, a friend of Chisum’s, the telegram was only one sentence: “Pat Garrett killed Billy Kid near Sumner Friday night.”

Garrett and Pete Maxwell arrived in Las Vegas later that same Monday, which allowed the
Daily Optic
to get the first interview with the lawman. The
Optic
fawned over Garrett while demonizing the Kid, a pattern repeated in newspapers throughout the Territory, and, to a lesser extent, the nation. Garrett was the “terror of all evil-doers” who deserved to be well rewarded for his “cool, brave conduct.” Billy Bonney, on the other hand, was “a bold thief, a cold-blooded murderer, having perhaps killed more men than any man of his age in the world…. All mankind rejoices and the newspapers will now have something else to talk about.” The Kid’s death was covered in the
New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Rocky Mountain News, Salt Lake Herald, Minneapolis Tribune, Tombstone Daily Nugget
(which used as its headline, “A Corner in Hell Filled”),
Indianapolis News,
and scores of others, even the venerable
Times
of London, England.

The
Albuquerque Daily Journal
wanted Garrett appointed the U.S. marshal for the Territory. The
Kansas City Journal
opined that Garrett was just the man to solve Missouri’s outlaw problem: “He who will follow the James boys and their companions in crime to their den, and shoot them down without mercy, will be crowned with honors by the good people of this commonwealth, and be richly rewarded in money besides.” When a Colorado newspaper suggested that Garrett be sent to Washington to serve as a guard for Charles J. Guiteau, President James A. Garfield’s assassin, the
Daily New Mexican
commented that a better idea would be to let Guiteau loose and then offer Garrett a reward for him. Garrett had “achieved a fame which will be undying,” the
Rio Grande Republican
observed, which was all too true. Pat Garrett was now, and forevermore, the man who shot Billy the Kid.

Garrett arrived in Santa Fe by rail on July 19, and one of the first things he did was to defend Pete Maxwell. The buzz around the capital was that Maxwell had somehow been in cahoots with the Kid, that he had been knowingly harboring the desperado. This was fueled by rumors about Billy’s relationship with Pete’s sister. In a long interview with the
Daily New Mexican,
Garrett denied that Maxwell had been hiding the outlaw and said that fear alone had prevented Pete from letting anyone know where the Kid was. Maxwell had assured Garrett that if there had been a safe way of letting the sheriff know, he would have done so. Although Garrett’s explanation satisfied the reporter, it makes little sense because others at Fort Sumner found that informing on Billy was as easy as licking a postage stamp and sticking it on an envelope. Did Pete Maxwell fail to inform on the Kid because he did not want to hurt his sister? Garrett was most likely protecting Paulita’s reputation. Like Billy, Fort Sumner had been the sheriff’s home; he still had friends and relatives there.

Garrett’s main business in Santa Fe was to see about the reward money. Unfortunately, he had to deal with William G. Ritch, secretary of the Territory and acting governor (the new governor, Lionel Sheldon, had rushed to Washington, D.C., upon hearing that his friend President Garfield had been shot). Ritch had made it difficult for Garrett to collect the first reward, after Garrett’s capture of Billy at Stinking Spring. The lawman had already forwarded his report to the Palace of the Governors, where it had been received Monday evening. The next Wednesday afternoon, Garrett called on the acting governor, and he brought reinforcements: Thomas B. Catron and Marcus Brunswick. Catron was one of the most powerful men in the Territory and an extremely skilled attorney. Undoubtedly having received legal advice from Catron, Garrett presented Ritch with a bill for $500 for the “capture” of William Bonney. He also submitted as evidence for his claim an affidavit from the editor and manager of the
Daily New Mexican
confirming that the reward offer had been published, the Fort
Sumner coroner’s jury verdict, and his own statement summing up how he killed the Kid.

Ritch put the men off. But, having been roundly criticized for delaying the first reward, Ritch made sure it did not appear that he was refusing to honor the Territory’s offer. He assured Garrett and his supporters that he was willing to pay the reward and was glad to do so. But he needed some time to go over the Territory’s records and confirm the reward offer. Garrett could not have heard this as good news. The sheriff possessed the published reward notice and proof of Bonney’s death. How much more confirmation did Ritch need? A lot more, it turns out. The attorney general advised Ritch that the reward notice appeared to be a
personal offer
of the former governor, as there was no record in either the governor’s office or the secretary’s office that Wallace had offered the reward as an executive act. Consequently, if the reward was to be paid with territorial funds, it would have to be approved by the legislature. On July 21, Ritch suspended any action on Garrett’s claim until it could be brought before the next Legislative Assembly.

Fortunately, Garrett would have cash to hold him over in the meantime. The day after the sheriff’s arrival in the capital, Jimmy Dolan pounded the streets of Santa Fe, asking for cash donations for Garrett to reward him for slaying “the worst man the Territory has known.” Dolan had collected $560 by the end of the day; he would eventually give Garrett $1,150. The same thing was going on in other New Mexico communities, from Las Vegas to Las Cruces. Las Vegas had a similar collection, contributing nearly $1,000 in a few hours’ time. John Chisum was reportedly prepared to hand the sheriff $1,000 of his own money, and it was expected that another $1,000 would come from the citizens of Lincoln County (the ones who were not Kid sympathizers). Even without the reward, the many donations represented a small fortune for someone of little means such as Garrett.

On Thursday, July 28, Pat Garrett purchased a horse and rode
out of Santa Fe, alone, for Las Vegas. It was much quicker to go by train, of course, but lately things had been moving pretty fast for the lawman, and if he was on a train ride, he might have to talk and be sociable with the other passengers. Better to sit astride a good horse, enjoy the smell of sage, feel the warm sun from a turquoise sky, and just let the mind wander.

EVEN WITH ALL THE
adulation Garrett received for ridding the Territory of young Billy, there were the whispers—and they started when the Kid was hardly in his grave. Within a matter of days, some people were saying that Garrett had not fought fair—Billy did not have a gun that night—and the way Bonney was killed was murder. These things were openly spoken, and even printed in newspapers far beyond the Territory. A good example of this line of thinking appeared in the
Globe
of Atchison, Kansas, which called Garrett’s act “more or less cowardly. The Kid was stopping at the house of a supposed friend, who betrayed him, and allowed Garrett to hide in the house. In the darkness of the night Garrett crawled upon him, and shot him dead.”

These stinging slanders were one thing, but Garrett was also upset by some outrageous reports that the Kid’s body had been exhumed and mutilated. In its July 25 issue, the
Las Vegas Daily Optic
said it had received the Kid’s “fatal finger,” the one that had “snapped many a man’s life into eternity.” The trigger finger was preserved in a jar of alcohol, and so many visitors wanted a peek at it that the paper considered purchasing a small tent so it could operate a kind of sideshow. A month and a half later, the
Optic
ran an elaborate piece claiming that five days after the Kid’s funeral, his body had been exhumed by a local “skelologist.” The body was then taken to a Las Vegas doctor, who boiled and scraped the head to get the skull. This was when the
Optic
was supposedly given Billy’s trigger finger. The rest of the corpse
had been buried in a corral so the flesh could decompose, leaving the bones that would be retrieved and pieced together with wires into a skeleton.

A follow-up article in the September 19 issue reported that a Miss Kate Tenney of Oakland, California, had read about the Kid’s preserved finger and had written the paper to request the appendage, as well as a photograph of the outlaw. Tenney, the
Optic
said, was the Kid’s sweetheart. The newspaper sent Tenney a letter of condolence that also told her that her beau’s finger had been sold and shipped east for the cash price of $150. The
Atchison Globe
jokingly suggested that the Tenney letter was a scheme of the
Las Vegas Gazette
to get the notorious finger, which had apparently led to a nice increase in subscriptions and advertising for the
Optic
. Several newspapers accepted the
Optic
’s stories at face value. After all, stranger things had happened to the bodies of dead outlaws. After “Big Nose George” Parrott was lynched in Wyoming in March 1881, a local physician took the body and had a medicine bag and a pair of shoes made from Parrott’s skin.

Then there were the cheap nickel novels (known today as dime novels) that purported to tell the story of the outlaw William Bonney. Five showed up on newsstands in 1881, three in early September, just seven weeks after Billy’s death. Two of these novels bore the title
The True Life of Billy the Kid,
even though they were anything but. One of the authors, a Don Jenardo (otherwise known as John Woodruff Lewis), wrote that Billy’s first devilish deed occurred in Arizona when he shot a friend in the back of the head. The friend, a young miner, was to be married the next day to a beautiful senorita Billy had feelings for. Jenardo’s version of Billy’s death is just as imaginative. He describes Garrett receiving a tip that the Kid is sleeping at Maxwell’s house and that the outlaw will arrive at midnight. Garrett gets to the house just before midnight and, finding it deserted, hides behind Maxwell’s bed with his rifle. When Billy walks in, he immediately senses that someone is there and draws his
pistols
(what kind of a gunslinger
would he be with just one pistol?), but Garrett steadies his rifle faster. “Thus died,” wrote Jenardo, “the youngest and greatest desperado ever known in the world’s history.”

Garrett’s answer to the insinuations and lies was to produce his own book. And if he made a little money on the venture, that would be okay, too. He partnered with the boozing but fun-loving journalist, postmaster, and justice of the peace Ash Upson, who did much of the writing for the book. Upson and Garrett became friends after Garrett relocated to Roswell; Upson actually moved into the Garrett household in August 1881. And Upson had known Billy as a youth in Silver City and later as a Lincoln County Regulator, which seemed to make him the perfect choice for a ghostwriter. Upson may have proposed the idea to Garrett in the first place.

Upson wanted to try a book publisher back east, but Garrett insisted on shopping it in Santa Fe. He knew the editor and publisher of the
Daily New Mexican,
Charles W. Greene, who immediately drew up a contract between Garrett and his New Mexican Printing and Publishing Company for a 128-page book. They agreed the printed copies would sell for 50 cents each. When the book appeared the following March—at 137 pages—it carried a title that put the cheap novels to shame:
The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid, The Noted Desperado of the Southwest, Whose Deeds of Daring and Blood Made His Name a Terror in New Mexico, Arizona and Northern Mexico
. Garrett was identified as the Lincoln County sheriff who “Finally Hunted Down and Captured” the Kid “By Killing Him.” The title page made the final claim that the book was “A Faithful and Interesting Narrative.”

Although Garrett stated in the book’s introduction that his volume was a response to the innumerable inaccuracies contained in the yellow-covered cheap novels about the Kid, the first half of his book is little different from the nickel novels he criticized. The meat of the book begins slightly past the middle, when Garrett enters the story. Significantly, this is when the narrative changes to the first person.
Straightforward and matter-of-fact, Garrett’s account of the hunt for the gang and their capture at Stinking Spring, and the fatal encounter with the Kid in Pete Maxwell’s room, makes for a gripping tale, a true classic of western Americana. Not surprisingly, Garrett does not mention that the Kid had been staying with his in-laws at Fort Sumner. Nor does he bring up Paulita Maxwell, the Kid’s sweetheart. It would not do to associate the respectable young woman with an outlaw, even though some newspapers had already published stories about her affair with Billy.

Garrett saved the last few pages to answer his critics and to address the obnoxious rumors about Billy’s remains. He did not shoot the Kid from behind a bed or from underneath a bed. There was no way to get behind the bed, as it was crowded against the wall. And he had not been under the bed because he was not expecting the Kid to burst into the room; he was taken completely by surprise. If Garrett had had fair warning, then hell yes, he would have been under the bed or behind anything else that might have provided a little protection.