To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West

295 Pages·2010·2.5 MB·English

by  Mark Lee Gardner

To Hell on a Fast Horse
Mark Lee Gardner
HarperLuxe (2010)
Rating: ☆
★★★★
Tags: General, Biography Autobiography, Biography, United States,
Historical, History, Large type books, 19th Century, Southwest; New,
Outlaws, Criminals Outlaws, Southwest (AZ; NM; OK; TX), Sheriffs -
Southwest; New, Lincoln County (N.M.), Sheriffs, State Local, Frontier
and pioneer life, Law Enforcement, Billy, Southwest; New - History -
1848, Lincoln County (N.M.) - History - 19th century, Outlaws -
Southwest; New, Frontier and pioneer life - Southwest; New, Garrett;
Pat F
Generalttt Biography Autobiographyttt Biographyttt United Statesttt
Historicalttt Historyttt Large type booksttt 19th Centuryttt Southwest;
Newttt Outlawsttt Criminals Outlawsttt Southwest (AZ; NM; OK;
TX)ttt Sheriffs - Southwest; Newttt Lincoln County (N.M.)ttt Sheriffsttt
State Localttt Frontier and pioneer lifettt Law Enforcementttt Billyttt
Southwest; New - History - 1848ttt Lincoln County (N.M.) - History -
19th centuryttt Outlaws - Southwest; Newttt Frontier and pioneer life -
Southwest; Newttt Garrett; Pat Fttt
From Publishers Weekly
Western historian Gardner (_Wagons for the Santa Fe Trade_) delivers a dual
biography documenting Sheriff Pat Garrett's hunt for the iconic outlaw William
Bonney, aka Billy the Kid. As Gardner sees it, the battle between the wily Kid
and the determined Garrett is perhaps the greatest of our Old West legends.
Digging beneath the myths and melodrama, he begins in Las Vegas during
Christmas week, 1880, when the capture and confinement of Billy the Kid made
national headlines. Gardner then details the Kid's daring daylight courthouse
escape on April 28, 1881, in a hail of gunfire, leaving bloodied bodies behind. I
am not going to leave the country, said the Kid, and I am not going to reform,
neither am I going to be taken alive again. The chase began, with Garrett finally
gunning down the Kid on July 14, 1881. Gardner concludes with a survey of the
Kid's robust mythic afterlife in books and films. Gardner's extensive research
and authoritative approach ground this compelling historical recreation. Bw
photos. (Feb. 9)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All
rights reserved.
From
The saga of Billy the Kid and his nemesis, Pat Garrett, has been the subject of
numerous fanciful books and several very bad movies. So it is both useful and
interesting to read this well-researched and, one hopes, relatively accurate
account of the Lincoln County War and the two most famous participants in it.
The center of the account is Garrett’s pursuit and execution of the Kid after he
escaped from the Lincoln County courthouse jail. Fortunately, Gardner precedes
that account with an engrossing examination of the lives of both men and the
political and economic milieu of nineteenth-century New Mexico. He effectively
uses primary sources, although those sources are often contradictory and reflect
the views of competing Lincoln County factions. The portrait of the Kid,
surprisingly, conforms to his popular image as a ruthless killer who could also be
charming. Garrett is seen as ambitious, laconic, and coldly efficient. This is a
fine effort to de-mystify a legendary episode in the history of the American
West. --Jay Freeman
To Hell on a Fast Horse
Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and The Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West
Mark Lee Gardner
For my daughter and son,
Christiana and Vance
Some men find an unaccountable fascination in the danger and outlawry of
the frontier far beyond my understanding.
— ,
SUSAN E. WALLACE
wife of Governor Lew Wallace,
New Mexico Territory
I don’t think history possibly can be true.
—
ORSON WELLES
Contents
Epigraph
Ghost Stories
1. Facing Justice
2. Trails West
3. War in Lincoln County
4. A New Sheriff
5. Outlaws and Lawmen
6. The Kid Hunted
7. Facing Death Boldly
8. The Darkened Room
9. Both Hero and Villain
10. Another Manhunt
11. Unwanted Star
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Resources
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Ghost stories
Y
ghosts as you speed down the long, lonely roads of eastern New
OU CAN FEEL THE
Mexico. The land is little changed, except for endless strands of wire fence and
an occasional traffic sign. Out in the distance, they are there: Billy the Kid and
the Regulators, Charlie Bowdre, Tom Folliard, and Pat Garrett. The days may be
gone when blood flowed freely along the Pecos and Rio Bonito, but the music of
the fandango, and Billy’s dancing, and the lovers’ kisses—all difficult to conjure
—are all still there. They are in the wind, the moonlight, in the cacophony of
coyotes, and in the silence before the first rays of sunlight spill over the horizon.
And there are the stories, because New Mexico is full of stories. It is through
these stories that the ghosts come to haunt us. In the stories, we think we see
them, understand them, even somehow know them. But they are still ghosts, and
they can conceal the truth like a pirate hides his plunder.
Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett were perhaps the greatest of our Old West
legends. By building on the output of previous scholars, and conducting
extensive original research in archival and private collections from Texas to
Arizona to Utah to Colorado, I have made the ghosts give up a few more of their
secrets.
All of the dialogue in quotes on the following pages came from primary
sources: contemporary newspapers, letters, oral histories, autobiographies, and
the like. Nothing has been made up. Granted, some recollections were written or
dictated decades after the fact, and one can legitimately question how accurately
someone might remember what somebody else said forty years previous, but
even so they are the recollections of eyewitnesses. And in some cases, they are
all we have.
I personally explored most of the places that figure in this story: Las Vegas,
Anton Chico, Fort Sumner, Puerto de Luna, Roswell, Lincoln, White Sands,
White Oaks, Alameda Arroyo, Mesilla, Silver City, and on and on. In some
places, crowded Santa Fe, for example, the ghosts had been obliterated by
asphalt, noise, and phony adobe facades. In others, such as the stairway of the
old Lincoln courthouse, Billy, Pat, Bob Olinger, and James Bell seemed to walk
side by side up its creaking wooden steps.
Many of the people connected with this story did not deserve their fate, Billy
and Garrett most of all. “They were like lovers, in a way—doomed,” said
Rudolph Wurlitzer, the screenwriter for Sam Peckinpah’s classic film, Pat
Garrett and Billy the Kid. They lived in a harsh land and time, a time that saw
tremendous change while still retaining, in some instances, the cutthroat ways of
its recent past. In the end, it was not as much about right versus wrong, lawman
versus outlaw as it was about survival. For others to survive, Billy could not,
Garrett could not.
These two men perished long ago, and that is the cold truth of history, but
their ghosts are still there. Billy forever calls out to us from the darkness of the
past: “¿Quién es?” Who is it? And like Garrett, sitting, waiting, we are unable
to answer, unable to stop what happens next.
1
Facing Justice
Come and take him!
—
PAT F. GARRETT
I
after Christmas, 1880, at approximately 4:00 ., when a mule-drawn
T WAS THE DAY P.M
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 man’s 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 river’s broad grassy valley: las vegas—“the 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 city’s numerous hell-raisers, mostly Anglos,
resided in New Town, where saloons, dance halls, and gambling establishments
ran day and night.
The Las Vegas Daily Optic reported: “Yesterday afternoon the town was
thrown into a fever of excitement by an announcement that the ‘Kid’ and other