To Hell on a Fast Horse (13 page)

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 accom
plished 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.

F
RANK PAGE HAD COME
from Arkansas to New Mexico Territory for his health—he was a consumptive—and got a job working as a bookkeeper for Alexander Grzelachowski, a merchant in Puerto de Luna. Grzelachowski was a former Catholic priest known to the locals as Padre Polaco. About the second week of November 1880, the Kid and Billy Wilson stepped into Grzelachowski’s large mercantile. The store clerk had seen these outlaws approaching and abruptly left the store without saying anything to Page. The puny bookkeeper, whose affliction had whittled his body weight down to about a hundred pounds, went out to meet the two men. After making some minor purchases, the outlaws suddenly spotted three shiny Colt double-action “Lightning” revolvers the store had gotten in just recently. Unlike a single-action revolver, which required the shooter to manually cock the gun’s hammer, a double-action revolver cocked the hammer and fired the pistol with a single pull of the trigger. It was
quick and deadly. The Lightning was also fairly light, weighing in at about one and a half pounds. Page handed over the .38-caliber six-shooters to the Kid and Wilson to examine.

As the two outlaws dry fired the pistols and spun their cylinders, the bookkeeper left them to wait on a woman who had just come into the store. The Kid and Wilson promptly shoved the pistols into their belts and quietly slipped outside. When Page returned to the counter, he was outraged to see that the pistols were gone. He quickly figured out where the two men were staying, and he barged into their room. He saw the pistols lying on the bed and began scolding the two as he gathered up the handguns. He told them they “were fine men to take advantage of a poor invalid,” and that he would not stand for it. Page watched the Kid’s face turn red—he was not used to being spoken to this way—and he observed the Kid’s hand move toward the .45 six-shooter in his belt. Suddenly, Wilson said something to the Kid in Spanish. Page later learned that Wilson said, “Don’t kill him.” Billy’s dark mood instantly disappeared, and he and Wilson walked with the bookkeeper back to the store, all the while telling him that they had been playing a prank on him when they took the pistols.

But Billy was still intent on getting one of the Lightnings and he told Page that one of the local saloon owners owed him $50 and that he would sign an order on the man for the amount of the pistol and a box of cartridges. This was a common way of doing business at the time when cash was not readily accessible—if the parties trusted each other. By now, Page should have known better, but he went along with this. He had the Kid sign the order, which came to $34.90, and Billy took one of the pistols with him. A day or two later news arrived that some horses had been stolen from Grzelachowski’s ranch, twenty miles east of town, and people were saying that the Kid and Wilson were the thieves. Page apparently never laid eyes on the Kid again, but every time he opened the store’s books, he was reminded of his
encounter with Billy the Kid because the order on the saloon owner was never paid: the man said Billy owed
him
the $50.

NOT ONLY WERE BILLY
and the gang stealing cattle and horses, but they had also been robbing the U.S. mail, a handy source of cash money. Because there was no money order office at Fort Stanton, the soldiers there sent cash back home in registered letters. All the gang had to do, then, was hold up a stagecoach and dig through the mail to find the registered envelopes. Near Fort Sumner on the night of October 16, the gang stopped the outbound stagecoach and relieved it of its mail sacks. A female passenger recognized Billy Bonney as one of the thieves—they robbed her, too.

On the night of November 20, Billy and the gang rode into White Oaks. Billy needed to fence some of Padre Polaco’s horses, and he also wanted to see lawyer Ira Leonard, who was then living there. The Kid knew that Leonard was a conduit to Governor Wallace, and he had written Leonard the previous month offering his services, saying he was tired of “dodging the officers.” In other words, Billy was willing to squeal—again. But Leonard was not there, and there would be no more deals with the outlaw. Instead, the gang went on a robbing spree in White Oaks, stealing rifles, blankets, overcoats, and some mules. They galloped out of town before most people knew what had happened.

Although the Kid and his cohorts usually had Lincoln County’s residents quaking in their boots, some of White Oaks’s citizens were not about to put up with the gang’s thievery. When Deputy Sheriff Bill Hudgens learned that the gang was hanging out at Blake’s Sawmill, a few miles outside of White Oaks, he quickly put together a posse to go after them. Hudgens, a twenty-nine-year-old saloon operator, had grown up in the same Louisiana parish as Pat Garrett, and he had built the first house in the mining camp just the year previous. The
posse that left White Oaks on November 22 was made up of nine determined citizens and included former Texas Ranger James W. Bell. After hunting for just a few hours, they found a deserted camp and a trail left in the snow that they believed was from Billy and his cohorts. As Hudgens’s posse followed the trail, they came upon two men who were connected with the gang. The men were on their way back to White Oaks after delivering news and provisions to the outlaw camp. Hudgens arrested the men and then continued the search.

At a place known as Coyote Springs, the posse was suddenly hit by a spray of gunfire by the outlaws who had heard them approaching their camp, the bark of Billy’s new Colt Lightning undoubtedly adding to the chaos. But the posse recovered quickly, and as men cursed and bullets flew through the air, several horses on both sides were killed. Billy’s mount was shot out from under him. When it became a little too hot for the outlaws, they fled in different directions. Hudgens’s men inspected the camp and found Billy’s dead horse, along with his fine saddle, and a number of provisions strewn about the ground. Hudgens apparently decided they had done enough for one day and led the posse back to White Oaks. The Kid and Billy Wilson, both on foot, headed for a stage stop and store north of White Oaks on the Las Cruces–Las Vegas stage route. Somewhere along the way, they reunited with Dave Rudabaugh.

Jim Greathouse, a former Texas buffalo hunter, and Fred W. Kuch ran the store, as well as a ranch at the same location. In addition to peddling a few dry goods and providing grub to stagecoach passengers, they were eager buyers of stolen stock, and their reputations were at about the same level as the Kid’s. They were also well known to be chummy with the outlaw band. When some freighters arrived in White Oaks with the news that they had spotted the Kid at the Greathouse-Kuch roadhouse, another posse immediately left town to hunt down the outlaws.

This hastily organized second posse consisted of thirteen men
under the leadership of Constable Thomas B. Longworth. Several of them were veterans of the first posse, such as Hudgens and James W. Bell. Blacksmith Jimmy Carlyle, twenty-six years old and a popular fellow in White Oaks, had been in the first posse but was eager to be in the second because the gang had his mules. And he wanted the personal satisfaction of helping to make the arrests or, if need be, shooting the rustlers dead.

The posse arrived at the Greathouse-Kuch establishment early on the morning of November 27, a Saturday. Sleeping soundly inside were Greathouse, Kuch, the Kid, Wilson, Rudabaugh, and a German cook named Joe Steck. The posse quietly surrounded the house, created makeshift breastworks, and waited in the snow for the sun to come up. Steck was the first to come outside (the Kid was not an early riser—long nights of women, dancing, and gambling will do that), and quickly he was staring into the wrong ends of two rifles. Strangely enough, Steck did not know the identities of the men staying there that night. The cook had apparently acquired the healthy habit of not asking too many questions. When the posse members prodded him about Billy the Kid and the others, Steck confidently said he did not know anything. At first, the lawmen thought Steck was playing dumb, but after they described the characters they were after, Steck confirmed that three men in the house matched those descriptions. Hudgens scribbled a note to the Kid demanding that he and his two companions surrender—escape was impossible, Hudgens wrote. Steck was sent inside to deliver the note.

The Kid read Hudgens’s letter out loud to the gang, and they burst out laughing. They sent Steck back with a note of their own. “You can only take me a corpse,” the Kid had written—which would have been perfectly acceptable to the posse. The negotiations continued back and forth until Hudgens proposed a face-to-face talk with Billy Wilson. He swore that if Wilson declined to surrender, he would let Wilson go back in the house. Wilson declined, of course, but he, the
Kid, and Rudabaugh requested that Jimmy Carlyle be sent inside the house to talk about the situation—Wilson is said to have known Carlyle when they were youths in Ohio.

Hudgens thought this a very bad idea, but Greathouse, who had come outside with Steck, offered himself as a hostage to guarantee Carlyle’s safety. The deputy sheriff still objected, but Carlyle was determined to talk to the outlaws. He took off his gun belt and walked across the open ground to the house and was let in.

Carlyle may have been well liked, but he was also a fool. His presence in the house did little more than entertain the outlaws. There was plenty of whiskey in the store, and Carlyle joined in far too many rounds. Eventually, an inebriated Carlyle insisted on leaving, while the outlaws demanded that he stay. At the same time, the posse was getting impatient; Carlyle had been in the house for hours. They sent in another note that said if Carlyle was not released within five minutes, they would kill Greathouse. This surely sobered the blacksmith. But what happened next sent Carlyle into a panic. One of the men in the posse fired a single shot, and Carlyle immediately assumed that Greathouse was dead. This frightened him so much that he jumped up and ran for a window, crashing through the panes and tumbling onto the ground outside. Carlyle was bleeding, but he got up and scrambled for the breastworks. Billy let loose with his Colt Lightning, firing two shots at the fleeing man. Rudabaugh and Wilson each fired once. Carlyle collapsed just ten feet from the window. He was dead.

The lawmen opened up with everything they had. Kuch and Steck, who were caught outside the house when Carlyle was killed, ran for the breastworks—until they realized the posse was shooting at
them
. It was only after several dozen shots that they realized their mistake and stopped firing. The murder of Carlyle demoralized everyone. And the posse had not been whiling away their time in a warm dwelling with plenty of whiskey to take the edge off. It was damn cold, and there was no food or water. Hudgens called his men back from their positions
around the house; they would go find shelter and wait for reinforcements. The posse saddled up and rode off, leaving Carlyle’s crumpled body on the ground.

Billy must have grinned smugly as he watched them leave. Once it was dark outside, he, Wilson, and Rudabaugh trudged through the snow to a friend’s ranch before setting out for Anton Chico, where they were met by Jim Greathouse, who had been released by the posse shortly after Carlyle was killed. Greathouse gave the outlaws horses to ride, and they headed to the Yerby ranch (northeast of Fort Sumner) and met up with Tom Folliard, Charlie Bowdre, and Tom Pickett. The Kid may have had an entertaining tale to tell his pals, but Carlyle’s cold-blooded murder was met with public outrage. Many of those who had remained sympathetic to Billy, who thought he had gotten a raw deal in the Lincoln County War, now were disgusted, if not horrified, by his actions. Maybe the Kid was just a heinous killer after all.

AS A HARSH WINTER
settled in over New Mexico Territory, Special Operative Azariah Wild methodically planned for a surprise raid on Fort Sumner. He had a long list of the outlaws he wanted to capture, and the Kid and Billy Wilson were at the top. At the same time, the cattlemen of the large ranches in the Texas Panhandle organized a force of cowpunchers to ride into the Territory and help root out Billy and the gang of rustlers and recover what stolen stock they could find. And even though Pat Garrett would not begin his term until January 1, 1881, he was not going to wait two months or even two days to fulfill his promise to bring law and order to southeast New Mexico. Sheriff Kimbrell appointed Garrett a deputy sheriff and then politely got out of the way. Garrett was also invested with the powers of a deputy U.S. marshal. Wild had recommended Garrett to U.S. Marshal John Sherman in Santa Fe, but Sherman ignored the request. However, when Wild received by mail two commissions for another man he had
recommended, he simply scratched out the name on one of the commissions and wrote in: Patrick F. Garrett.

Wild noted triumphantly that, “I have now had men commissioned as Deputy U.S. Marshals who will execute warrants of arrests or die in the attempt.”

On November 20, 1880, Garrett arrived in Lincoln to meet with Wild about their plans for the Sumner raid. Garrett had his friend Barney Mason with him. Twenty-six years old and a native Virginian, Bernard “Barney” Mason had spent some time in Texas before settling in New Mexico, where, like Garrett, he had worked for Pete Maxwell. Mason did not have much of a reputation as a gunman, but he had been in a strange sort of gunfight in a Fort Sumner store. On December 29, 1879, with no apparent warning, a thirty-four-year-old drifter named John Farris fired three errant shots at an unarmed and very surprised Mason, who quickly ran out of the building. Mason was not gone long, though. He went to get his revolver and returned to shoot Farris twice in the chest. He was never charged in the killing and the episode was quickly forgotten.

Mason knew the Kid, Billy Wilson, and the rest of Fort Sumner’s outlaw element and got on with them well. Wilson even boarded with Mason and his wife, Juana, when the gang was in Fort Sumner. Yet Mason had come to offer Garrett his help in bringing in the rustlers. The Kid, as well as some of Fort Sumner’s residents, later viewed Mason as a turncoat. Mason, however, had to make a choice: either his friend Garrett or the gang. He chose Garrett. Wild hired Mason as an “informer” at two dollars a day plus expenses.