Mark Lee Gardner - To Hell on a Fast Horse: The True Story of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett

Come and take him!

PAT F. GARRETT

I T WAS THE DAY after Christmas, 1880, at approximately 4:00 P.M. , when a mule-drawn wagon accompanied by five armed horsemen rapidly approached the outskirts of Las Vegas in the Territory of New Mexico. The leader of the men on horseback rode stoop shouldered, a natural consequence of his six-foot-four-inch frame. He was as thin as a rail, and even as bundled up as he was, he seemed to be all arms and legs. He had a dark mustache, light gray eyes, and a swarthy face that showed the years he had spent on the open range of Texas and New Mexico.

Seated in the wagon were four dirty, trail-worn men in handcuffs and shackles. They were the lanky mans prisoners, and one of them was hardly out of his teens. As the wagon bounced along, the young outlaw, his blue eyes dancing about, broke into an occasional smile or burst out in a hearty laugh, exposing two buckteeth, a feature that was unattractive in most people, but for this young man seemed to add to his charm. The boyish prisoner and the tall lawman, although complete opposites, shared a common destiny. Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett had no way of knowing it, but they were fated to be forever linked in both life and death.

The Las Vegas that spread out before them was really two towns, one old and the other new. The old town had been established on the Santa Fe Trail in 1835 along the Gallinas River (what easterners would call a creek). The settlement got its name from the rivers broad grassy valley: las vegasthe meadows. The new town sprang up forty-four years later when the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad came through a mile away on the east side of the Gallinas. In 1880, Las Vegas, the county seat of San Miguel County, numbered six thousand people, mostly Hispanos. The citys numerous hell-raisers, mostly Anglos, resided in New Town, where saloons, dance halls, and gambling establishments ran day and night.

The Las VegasDaily Optic reported: Yesterday afternoon the town was thrown into a fever of excitement by an announcement that the Kid and other members of his gang of outlaws had been captured, and were nearing the city. Sheriff Garretts party had come up the old Santa Fe Trail. Their route to the stone jailhouse on Valencia Street took them across one end of Old Towns plaza, where most people got their first glimpse of the prisoners.

Billy beamed at the crowd and spotted Dr. John H. Sutfin, owner of the Grand View Hotel. Hello, Doc! he called out. Thought I jes drop in an see how you fellers in Vegas air behavin yerselves.

The throng of gawkers, growing by the minute, followed the wagon down the muddy street to the jail, where the prisoners and guards promptly disappeared inside. A reporter for the Las VegasGazette cornered the thirty-year-old Garrett for a few minutes, hoping he could get the thrilling narrative of the gangs capture. Garrett almost immediately passed off the excited journalist to a posse member named Manuel Brazil, saying Brazil knew all the particulars.

Monday mornings frigid air did not stop the curious townspeople from gathering around the jail, hoping to glimpse the desperadoes: Billy the Kid, Billy Wilson, Dave Rudabaugh, and Tom Pickett, the latter being a former Las Vegas policeman. Nearly everyone knew something about Billyeven if it was only that the twenty-one-year-old had sent far too many men to their graves. His most infamous crime was the killing of Sheriff William Brady and his deputy, George Hindman, in an ambush in Lincoln during the Lincoln County War. The Kid was not the only one who fired on the sheriff and his deputies that day, but he had walked away with a murder indictment. And this murder charge was the one he feared most. In the spring of 1879, Governor Lew Wallace met with Billy in order to draw out his eyewitness testimony in another highly charged Lincoln County murder case. In exchange for this testimony, Billy was to be offered amnesty. The Kid did his part, but the amnesty never came. Now Billy knew it was only a matter of time before he would face a hangmans noose.

Michael Cosgrove, the Las Vegas mail contractor, pushed through the crowd carrying four bundles under his arms. They contained new suits of clothes for the prisoners, and the Irish-born Cosgrove remarked that he wanted to see the boys go away in style. The towns two competing newspapers, the