To Hell on a Fast Horse (23 page)

Garrett’s farm was one of the most valuable in the valley. Four hundred acres of his twelve-hundred-acre place were being cultivated, he
had started a nursery with seven hundred apple trees, and he also operated a dairy. But he was also spending a lot of money. He partnered in livery stables in Roswell and Eddy and in a blacksmith shop in Roswell, and he was a large investor in a Roswell hotel. There was also the stage line that Garrett and friend James Brent, who had succeeded John W. Poe as Lincoln County sheriff, operated between Eddy and Roswell. With everything he had going on, Garrett and his fellow investors were forced to travel in order to secure more capital for the irrigation company, and that ultimately led to Garrett’s downfall. When the big capitalists stepped in, Garrett could not match their contributions and purchases of company stock. The man who had originated the visionary idea to green the Pecos Valley was forced out.

Garrett ran for sheriff of Chaves County in 1890, one of two new counties carved out of the insanely large Lincoln County. Because of his hard work and many investments in the Pecos Valley, Garrett was a front-runner in the election. But Garrett’s fame and popularity spawned something of a backlash. Another problem—a big problem, actually—was Garrett’s onetime friend John W. Poe. Garrett and Poe had had a falling-out over some money Garrett had borrowed, and the relationship had gone south from there. Poe publicly announced his support for another candidate, and Garrett lost the election. If the loss of control of his dream to irrigate the Pecos Valley had been a bitter pill, his failure to become the first sheriff of Chaves County was absolutely intolerable. Garrett wanted nothing more to do with New Mexico and its people.

The year before, Garrett had made a trade in Uvalde, Texas (eighty miles west of San Antonio), that involved an irrigation ditch project. Ever the optimist when it came to speculating (in other words, gambling), he had sent Polinaria a letter at the time that said he would make $20,000 off the deal. Garrett now told his wife and kids to start packing; they were moving to Uvalde.

At this time, Garrett and Polinaria had four children, Ida, Eliza
beth, Dudley Poe, and Annie. Dudley Poe had been named for John W. Poe, when the former deputy was still a close friend. Elizabeth, called Lizzie by family and friends, had lost her eyesight in early childhood. According to one story, her eyes had troubled her from birth, and when a supposed “eye specialist” in Roswell told Garrett he could cure Lizzie’s problem, Garrett was eager to try, regardless of the cost. So Garrett paid the money and Lizzie received the treatment, but it only accelerated her blindness, and the specialist accelerated his exit from town. Lizzie, who loved her father dearly, as did her brothers and sisters, remembered his insistence that she grow up like any normal kid, and also his extreme patience. “Think your way out, daughter,” he would tell her, “and keep your head clear, above your heart” (as an adult, Elizabeth Garrett would compose the New Mexico state song, “O, Fair New Mexico”).

Pat and Polinaria eventually had four more children—Patrick, Pauline, Oscar, and Jarvis—making a total of eight. There was a gap of several years between the first four and the second four, and Garrett jokingly referred to his offspring as his first and second crops.

On Monday, April 13, 1891, the Garrett clan, and also James Brent and family, pulled out of Roswell for their new homes in Texas. Ash Upson, known to the Garrett kids as “Uncle Ash,” stayed behind in Roswell for another year settling his and Garrett’s interests before moving to Texas. Nine-year-old Ida Garrett wrote to her uncle Ash three months after the family’s arrival and told him that she and her mama “like Roswell better than we do here. It is so hot and dry.” Ida’s letter also revealed that her papa’s time was now mostly occupied by horse racing. The fairgrounds at Uvalde included horse stables and a racetrack. Garrett favored trotters, the sleek animals being hitched to low two-wheeled carts, or sulkies, for racing. Ida told Uncle Ash that her papa had gone to Eagle Pass, Texas, on July 4, where he raced a trotter named George Selden and outran seven other horses. Her papa had set up another race in San Antonio, but his opponent
abruptly backed out after Garrett arrived. Papa made the man pay his expenses to San Antonio.

Six months after Garrett relocated to Uvalde, the
Uvalde Herald
wrote about the increasing number of blooded horses in west Texas. Garrett had much to do with that. He raced his horses at fairgrounds in New Mexico and Texas and as far away as New Orleans. In a San Antonio newspaper, he was the “horseman from Uvalde,” with no mention of Billy the Kid. Yet Garrett’s Uvalde years were filled with growing frustration and growing losses, both personal and financial. He dropped $1,500 on a single steam engine for his Uvalde irrigation project, and that did not include transportation costs from St. Louis. On March 21, 1894, an obviously depressed and tired Garrett wrote Polinaria from an unknown race venue:

S
INCE HIS BRIEF STINT
as Billy the Kid’s attorney in 1881, Albert Jennings Fountain had solidified his power and influence in southern New Mexico Territory. The fiery Republican had served in the territorial legislature as Speaker of the House. He had chased raiding Apache warriors, rustlers, and thieves, as the leader of a mounted militia unit he had organized himself, and he served ably as assistant U.S. district attorney in the county seat of Las Cruces. In 1894, when a group of prominent cattlemen formed the Southeastern New Mexico Stock Growers’ Association, they hired Fountain as a special investigator and prosecutor. In less than a year’s time, Fountain’s dogged efforts resulted in fifteen men finding new lodgings in the territorial prison—and that was only the beginning. In January 1896, in the same Lincoln County courthouse from which Billy Bonney had escaped nearly fifteen years before, Fountain obtained
thirty-two indictments against twenty-three men for cattle theft and the defacing of brands.

Albert Jennings Fountain.
Collection of the author

The accused in these latest indictments knew they could be looking at as much as ten years in prison. But on February 1, as Fountain and his eight-year-old son, Henry, were returning from Lincoln to their home in Mesilla, something terrible happened. At Chalk Hill, a low rise just west of the windblown gypsum dunes known as White Sands, a mail carrier noticed that the tracks of Fountain’s buckboard turned off the road. There were additional sets of tracks from horses and sharp-edged cowboy boots, and a pool of dried blood the size of a man’s wide-brimmed hat soaked the sand next to the road. Behind some nearby bushes, three empty brass cartridges glistened in the sunlight.

A hastily organized posse discovered the abandoned buckboard about ten miles away. Fountain’s valise had been rifled, with various papers strewn about upon the ground—and the indictments were missing. Also missing were the prosecutor and his boy, although evidence near the buckboard suggested that their blood-dripping bodies had been wrapped in a blanket and tied to the back of a horse, which was then led away.

This crime was particularly revolting because the killers had also taken the life of the innocent child, thus breaking an unspoken code of decency, even among outlaws. Outrage swept the far reaches of New Mexico, from the governor on down, as one posse after another looked for both the victims’ bodies and for the men behind the murders.

With no progress in the case, New Mexico’s governor, William T. Thornton, urged that Pat Garrett be made a special deputy to investigate the murders. The current Doña Ana County sheriff would hear none of it, however, nor would he resign to allow Garrett to take his place. But Thornton had a backup plan for the famed manhunter. Garrett revealed the high points of his meeting with Thornton and other power brokers in a February 25 letter to Polinaria, who was pregnant with their fifth child:

Four days later, Garrett was in the saddle looking for the bodies. The bitter cold, wind, and blowing sand made the solemn task miserable as well. At Garrett’s side was Sheriff Charles C. Perry of Chaves County who had captured Indian Territory outlaw Bill Cook and his partner Jim Turner, a feat that was widely celebrated in the press, and entitled the sheriff to several thousand dollars in reward money. Now the forty-one-year-old Perry had a reputation for manhunting that nearly rivaled Garrett’s. Perry was related to one of Garrett’s old Roswell neighbors, where the two had first met. The Chaves County sheriff was as brash and loud as he was brave, and Garrett liked that.

Garrett and Perry rode back into Las Cruces after a week of fruitless searching. Garrett wrote Polinaria that he was not about to give up, and that he would start out again in a few days. “It is only a matter of time when I will succeed,” he assured her. “You know when I make up my mind to do something I never quit as long as there is any hope.”
Yes, Polinaria knew. Those words—
when I make up my mind to do something I never quit
—revealed the essence of the lawman. He would see the job through to the end, even if it killed him—or got him killed.

The likely perpetrators had been identified by the posses within a few days of the disappearance. One set of tracks leading from the Fountain buckboard belonged to the horse of Dog Canyon rancher Oliver Lee, and Lee’s bootprints matched those found at the crime scene. Another set of bootprints at the crime scene were linked to William McNew, who was married to Lee’s niece. A third suspect, Jim Gililland, had been heard to say that if the Fountains’ bodies had to be found before someone could be convicted, that conviction would be a long time coming. And when prompted about the Fountain child, whose mother was a native New Mexican, Gililland had chillingly replied that the boy was “nothing but a half-breed and to kill him was like killing a dog.”

All three suspects were allies of Fountain’s rabid political adversary, Albert Bacon Fall, a former legislator, district court judge, and the driving force behind the Democratic Party in southern New Mexico. Fall had been responsible for these men having received appointments as deputy U.S. marshals and, later, deputy sheriffs for Doña Ana County. Lee and McNew were among the twenty-three men named in the indictments obtained by Fountain at the last term of court in Lincoln.

Garrett’s great challenge was securing evidence strong enough to convict the suspects, not the least of which was the Fountain bodies. To assist Garrett, Governor Thornton turned to the world-famous detective agency established by Allen Pinkerton in 1850. Its creepy logo featured a single human eye (with eyebrow) and the compelling motto “We Never Sleep.” Pinkerton operative John C. Fraser traveled from his Denver office to Las Cruces, where he would base himself while conducting an open investigation. Fraser met with Garrett at the Lindell Hotel in El Paso on March 8. Garrett, who
had been on the job less than two weeks, told Fraser what he had concluded about the case. He believed that Lee, McNew, and Gililland had held up Fountain at Chalk Hill, but as many as five men may have been involved in the plot. Garrett did not believe that Albert Fall was there, but Fall may very well have known what was happening. He felt certain the bodies would be found within five miles of the ambush site.

Although Garrett was a man of action—that reputation got him hired by Governor Thornton—he famously reserved that action for the time and place of his choosing, regardless of any outside pressure or criticism. Ever the poker player, he was extremely adept at using psychology and deception to his advantage. He had given Billy the Kid the impression that he was disinterested, and the Kid let down his guard, and that is when Pat got him. Now Garrett was concerned that the Pinkerton’s activities might do more harm than good.

“I saw very plainly that he did not want me to go out and cause a stir by an open investigation,” Fraser wrote in his daily report. “He told me that what he wanted me to do was to try and pull everybody off from the idea that Oliver Lee, Gililland, and McNew are the [suspected] men and to stop them from talking so much.”

Garrett also cautioned Fraser that it would be impossible for a stranger to approach the Lee camp without getting shot full of holes. The outfit was cold-blooded and jumpy, he told the Pinkerton. “[I]t would be nothing for them to kill anyone whom they suspected.”

As Fraser pursued the case, he became increasingly frustrated with Garrett and Perry. Garrett never volunteered anything. Any information Fraser got came from direct questions. Often, Fraser would begin to brief Garrett about having interviewed someone, and Garrett would reveal that he or Perry had already talked to the person. “[H]e is a man who says very little,” Fraser wrote the governor.

Garrett remained cordial with both Fall and Lee, occasionally seeing them on the streets of Las Cruces or El Paso. On Fraser’s
prompting, Garrett arranged a meeting with the two men in Fall’s Las Cruces law office. The attorney was quite chatty with Garrett and Fraser, freely admitting that he did not care for Fountain any more than he did a snake. He then tore into Fountain’s character, something Fountain would have willingly reciprocated if still alive—their animosity toward each other had been that great. At one point, Fall passed along a scandalous rumor from a “reliable citizen who got it from someone else” that Fountain had been caught in a “compromising position” with his daughter before leaving with his young son for Lincoln, which perhaps gave credence to some reports that Fountain had left the country of his own volition (those reports were published in Fall’s
Independent Democrat
). When Fraser tried to question Oliver Lee, Fall interrupted and made sure Lee did not give Fraser anything of any use to the investigation.

Governor Thornton called the Pinkertons off the case in May 1896. In July, Charles Perry, Garrett’s partner in the investigation, absconded with more than $7,000 in Chaves County tax monies and reportedly ended up in Johannesburg, South Africa. Garrett finally received his appointment as Doña Ana County sheriff in August (with the help of, surprisingly enough, Albert Fall). But Garrett’s term of office would expire at the end of the year, so in November, he ran for sheriff as an independent. At a Republican rally held in Las Cruces shortly before the election, Garrett won over the crowd with his “quiet wit and sarcasm,” but the individual who stole the show was Miss Maggie Fountain, the daughter of Albert Fountain and sister of young Henry. Loud cheers greeted Maggie as she stepped up to the podium, but the spectators quickly grew silent when the young woman began to speak. She spoke passionately in support of Pat Garrett. Only at his hands, she told the crowd, would her father’s murderers soon be brought to justice. When she finished, many in the crowd had tears in their eyes. Garrett won the election.

Garrett, now a deputy U.S. marshal as well as the county sheriff,
looked into occasional leads on the Fountain case, but little of significance surfaced to add to the limited findings from the first few weeks or so of the investigation. As month after month rolled by with no progress on the Fountain case, the Territory’s patience with Garrett’s slow, deliberate methods grew extremely thin. Part of Garrett’s hesitation to act revolved around Albert Fall’s influence over the courts. Garrett had observed firsthand how skillfully the attorney could manipulate the system, and he did not look forward to facing Fall in the courtroom with the evidence he then possessed. Yet Fall was not going anywhere, or so it seemed, and when the grand jury met for the March 1898 term of the district court, several indictments in the Fountain murders were expected to be handed down.

A short time before the grand jury convened, Garrett stopped in at Tobe Tipton’s saloon in Tularosa. Seated at a table, deep into a game of poker, were Oliver Lee, Albert Fall, Jeff Sanders, and George Curry. The men asked Garrett to join them, and Garrett sat down directly opposite Lee, who faced the door and windows. As the hours passed, Garrett and Lee remained courteous, but little more. At various times, one or two of the players got up from the table for a bite to eat or to take a short nap, but the game never stopped. On their return to the table, the players often took a different seat. Not Garrett and Lee; they always faced each other. According to Curry, the game lasted for three days and three nights. Garrett was a serious poker player, but it is hard to imagine he neglected his duties as sheriff for that long. Whether it was an afternoon or seventy-two hours, when the game finally broke up, Garrett told Curry, a good friend of Lee’s, that he had something to say to Lee and he wanted Curry to listen in. The three went to Curry’s office, where Garrett asked Lee if the grand jury issued an indictment for him, how the sheriff should serve the warrant.