To Hell on a Fast Horse (24 page)

“Pat, you’ll have no trouble serving a warrant on me,” Lee said. “I have no reason or desire to resist the law.”

To the surprise of many, perhaps to Garrett most of all, the grand jury met and adjourned without issuing a single indictment on the Fountain case. On April 3, an angry sheriff marched down to Judge Frank W. Parker’s courtroom and petitioned the judge for bench warrants for the arrest of Lee, McNew, Gililland, and William Carr for the murder of Albert and Henry Fountain. Carr was accused of trailing the Fountains for Lee and the others. In support of his petition, Garrett filed affidavits—sworn to by himself and two members of the posse that had discovered Fountain’s buckboard—that outlined the sheriff’s evidence. With the warrants in hand, Garrett promptly collared McNew and Carr. The news of the warrants rapidly spread through Las Cruces, accompanied by a number of wild rumors. George Curry heard that Fall had been arrested as well, and he rushed down to the sheriff’s office to see the attorney. When Curry saw Garrett, he asked if Fall was in the county jail. “No, but he ought to be,” was Garrett’s terse reply.

Lee and Gililland were another matter. Garrett sent a posse out to arrest them, but they could not be found. Lee was soon spotted on the streets of El Paso, where he was overheard to say that if the court would promise him a reasonable bond, he would go to Las Cruces and turn himself in, but he would not be arrested if it meant he would languish in the county jail indefinitely.

Tall and good-looking with coal-black hair and mustache and burning dark-brown eyes, Lee was also intelligent—he was said to have one of the best libraries in New Mexico. Widely recognized as a crack shot with both pistol and rifle, the thirty-two-year-old was just as dangerous as Garrett, and like Garrett, he had done his fair share of killing. He had been on the winning side in a vicious range war, eventually carving out a small cattle empire in the southern portion of the Tularosa Basin, his headquarters being his well-known ranch at the mouth of Dog Canyon. According to some, Albert Jennings Fountain being one, he built that empire at the expense of others.
Susan E. Barber, the most successful female rancher in New Mexico history, was convinced that Lee had conspired with her foreman to rob her Three Rivers ranch of a substantial number of cattle—Lee had a brand that conveniently covered Barber’s. (Susan Barber was formerly Susan McSween, the widow of Lincoln County War victim Alexander McSween. She had achieved alone the fortune Scotsman McSween had dreamed of.)

On July 11, 1898, Deputy Sheriff José Espalín stopped at W. W. Cox’s San Augustin Spring ranch on the east face of the Organ Mountains. He said he was looking for horses, but he had left Las Cruces that morning with Garrett and three other deputies on a mission to track down and arrest Oliver Lee and Jim Gililland. Garrett had sent Espalín to the ranch to see if he could pick up anything on the fugitives—Lee was known to be sweet on Cox’s sister-in-law. Espalín got more than he bargained for when Oliver Lee, James Gililland, and A. P. “Print” Rhode, Lee’s future brother-in-law, rode up. Wisely, Espalín did not try to arrest the fugitives, and Lee and Gililland did not say anything about surrendering. They exchanged pleasantries, and after a few minutes, Lee and Gililland headed off toward the low-lying Jarilla Mountains. Beyond the mountains, Lee owned a satellite ranch known as Wildy Well. Espalín left San Augustin shortly after the fugitives and hurried to Garrett’s ranch, about ten miles to the north. Garrett guessed that Lee and Gililland would stop for the night at Wildy Well and ordered his deputies to mount up. Riding with Garrett, in addition to Espalín, were Clint Llewellyn, Ben Williams, and H. K. Kearney, Garrett’s chief deputy.

Garrett’s posse set out after sundown and did not stop once across the thirty-eight dry, hard miles to Wildy Well, arriving at about 4:30
A.M
. the next day. Clustered together on an open, treeless plain were a flat-roofed adobe dwelling, a nearby frame building with an attached wooden shed, a windmill, a pumphouse, a metal water tank about
eight feet in diameter, and a corral. Lee’s and Gililland’s horses were in the corral, as were their saddles. Garrett, who had lost none of his bravado in the years since riding down Billy the Kid, opted to go in through the front door and surprise the fugitives.

Their Winchester rifles leveled and cocked, the posse burst into a large room where they found several sleeping forms in the darkness. Garrett used the muzzle of his Winchester to poke one body and ordered the man to throw up his hands. At the same time, someone did the same with a man lying next to him. Both of them bolted upright, terrified, their hands in the air. And that is when the confusion began. The first man shouted that the person next to him was a woman, his wife, and for God’s sake not to excite her, because she had some kind of a nervous constitution. The man repeated this two more times before the befuddled posse members stopped pointing their rifles at the trembling woman. Also in the room were the couple’s four children. The man, James Madison, worked for Lee. The posse also discovered another man in the house, Dennis McVeigh. Garrett asked Madison where Lee and Gililland were and Madison said he had no idea, but they were not around there.

Garrett ordered Madison to take him through the cellar, which he did—and there was no Lee and Gililland. The sheriff told his men to keep cool; the fugitives had to be close. Garrett left Llewellyn in the house while he and the others explored the outbuildings. By now, the sky was beginning to fill with morning light. One of the posse saw McVeigh making hand signals to someone up on the roof of the house, and then Garrett spotted a ladder leaning up against the side of the house. Lee and Gililland, it turned out, had not taken any chances after meeting Espalín at the Cox place and had taken their bedrolls to the roof. Garrett ordered Madison to climb the ladder and tell the fugitives to surrender, but Madison had no interest in sacrificing his life for the law. Garrett could not do much with the outlaws from the
ground, so he and his men clambered up on top of the shed, which was less than fifty feet away from where Lee and Gililland were. Ben Williams found a spot behind the water tank.

Kearney stood up on the shed roof, and yelled at the men to surrender—and then a split second later he inexplicably fired his Winchester at them. His shot was answered instantly with rapid gunfire, and Kearney winced in pain as a bullet struck and broke his shoulder. As he crumpled, another bullet pierced his thigh. Inside the house, Mary Madison grabbed her frightened children and raced to the cellar. Garrett fired two or three shots and then ducked down below the roofline of the frame building the shed was attached to. Lee and Gililland had the advantage because they were firing from small openings in the house’s thick adobe parapet, and the possemen were crouched behind the metal roof and thin boards, which were hardly bulletproof. Garrett received several wounds to his face as the fugitives’ slugs cracked and splintered the wood. At one point, Lee thought he killed the sheriff, but Garrett had ducked his head at the last second. Williams did not have it any better behind the water tank, as Lee and Gililland’s well-placed bullets ripped through the tank’s sheet metal, sending a flood of water on top of him.

Kearney was badly wounded, and Garrett helped him down from the roof and got him in the bed of a wagon that was inside the shed. As he comforted Kearney, two more shots plowed into the shed; one of the bullets pierced the roof and lodged in a wagon wheel next to the sheriff.

“You are a hell of a lot of bastards to order a man to throw up his hands and shoot at the same time,” Lee shouted angrily when the gunfire stopped.

Garrett admitted that Kearney had fired “a little too quick.”

“Are any of you hurt?” Garrett asked.

“No,” Lee yelled back.

“You have got yourself in a hell of a close place,” Lee said.

“I know it,” Garrett replied.

Garrett tried to get them to surrender, but Lee said he had heard that Garrett intended to kill him. Garrett assured Lee that any such story was a lie; they would be perfectly safe in his hands. Lee then said that if Garrett and his posse would pull out and give the fugitives a little time to put some distance between them, he and Gililland would not shoot at any of the posse when they left their positions to retrieve their horses.

“You won’t shoot us in the back, will you?” a distrustful Garrett asked.

“You know damn well we won’t!” Gililland shouted back.

Kearney needed help, and even though Garrett still had Lee and Gililland outnumbered, the wanted men’s fortified position made any kind of assault a suicide mission. Humiliating as it was, the best thing to do was to break off the fight for now and hope to catch up to the gunmen at another time. As the posse retreated to their horses, tied to a nearby fence, Lee said he would come to Las Cruces and turn himself in if Garrett would fix a bond for him. Garrett said he had nothing to do with Lee’s bond and then rode off with his men. Sometime later, after determining that Lee and Gililland were gone, the posse came back and took Kearney by wagon to the railroad two miles away. He died from his wounds two days later. Garrett was not at his deputy’s side. He had already started back after Lee and Gililland.

WILDY WELL HAD BEEN
Garrett’s best chance to apprehend Lee and Gililland. It was reported in El Paso that Lee withdrew a large amount of money from a bank there the day after the gunfight, July 13, and then disappeared into the remoteness of New Mexico Territory. Lee was not so remote that he could not plead his and Gililland’s case in several letters to Fall’s
Independent Democrat,
which championed the pair, railing against what the Democratic organ painted as a vendetta
plotted by the large cattlemen and Lee’s political opponents. In late September, a Doña Ana County grand jury did hand down murder indictments for Lee, Gililland, and McNew. By then, Lee had publicly said he would never be taken by Pat Garrett. Lee promised he would come in peaceably if Garrett were removed from office or defeated in the upcoming election. Garrett, running again as an independent, handily won the November contest, and Lee and Gililland continued the life of fugitives. It was a less than ideal time for them to submit to arrest anyway, because their ally, Albert B. Fall, was then serving as the captain of a regiment of New Mexico volunteers enlisted for service in the Spanish-American War. Fall had desperately wanted to see action in the Cuban campaign, but the fighting had ended so quickly that he and his men never made it out of the States. The forty-eight-year-old Garrett had also sought a military commission, but the governor, Miguel Antonio Otero, refused to grant Garrett a commission until after he had arrested Lee and Gililland.

The fugitives spent all of their time constantly looking out for New Mexico’s famed manhunter, the slayer of Billy the Kid. On one occasion, Lee and some cowboys were immersed in a poker game at the Cox ranch and somehow failed to notice that a couple of cowpunchers had arrived until the two young men stepped onto the porch. Surprised, Lee and the others sprang to their feet, scattering cards, knocking chairs back, and tipping the small table over as they reached for their guns—they were that jumpy. When Lee’s staunch friend, George Curry, was appointed sheriff of the newly created Otero County, Lee saw an opportunity to end their ordeal, retain their pride, and defy Pat Garrett—all at the same time. Lee sent Sheriff Curry a letter with his terms for surrender: he would not give himself up to Garrett, nor would he spend one hour in Garrett’s Doña Ana County jail. As Lee expected, Curry traveled to Santa Fe and pleaded Lee and Gililland’s case to Governor Otero, the man who had appointed Curry sheriff. After securing the governor’s acceptance of the terms, Curry next
sought out Judge Frank W. Parker in Las Cruces, who also agreed to the deal.

On the morning of March 13, 1899, Lee and Gililland boarded the southbound Santa Fe at Rincon, thirty-three miles north of Las Cruces, and took seats in the smoking car. They had heavy beards and long hair, the result of their months on the dodge. Lee also wore an uncharacteristic derby hat, one that had seen better days. Gililland concealed his eyes with a pair of wire-framed blue sunglasses. Accompanying the fugitives was their friend, a cowpoke by the name of Eugene Manlove Rhodes. Rhodes later gained fame as a writer of western fiction, his inspiration drawn from New Mexico’s mesas, mountains, and deserts, and its people, larger-than-life characters like Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and Oliver Lee. Before boarding the train, Lee and Gililland handed their weapons over to Rhodes, so that they were essentially traveling in his custody until they surrendered to Judge Parker at Las Cruces. Lee had telegraphed Parker from Rincon that they were on their way.

The one thing Lee, Gililland, and Rhodes did not figure into their plan was Pat Garrett being on the same train. Garrett and Captain John R. Hughes of the Texas Rangers were escorting a prisoner from the territorial prison at Santa Fe to El Paso; their prisoner was chained to a seat in the same car that the fugitives and Rhodes were occupying. Garrett, of course, did not know about the secret negotiations of Sheriff Curry, and he still held warrants for the arrest of Lee and Gililland. After the train pulled out of Rincon, Garrett walked down the aisle of the smoker and stopped beside Lee, who was holding a newspaper in front of his face. Garrett stared out the window at the passing telegraph poles and beyond at the irrigated fields lining the Rio Grande. Lee’s heart raced, as did those of his two companions, expecting any moment to feel Garrett’s pistol sticking him in the belly. Finally, the sheriff continued down the aisle and into the next car.

When the train pulled into the station at Las Cruces, Judge Parker was waiting on the platform. The fugitives stepped off the smoking car and walked straight up to the judge, who immediately accepted their surrender. Garrett, who had stepped off the train at the same time as the fugitives, had no idea as to what had just transpired on the station platform. But when it was revealed to him that he had been riding in the same car as Lee and Gililland, he was, according to one newspaper, “considerably chagrined.” Many later wondered if Garrett had in fact recognized the fugitives—perhaps he had been tipped off to Sheriff Curry’s plan and chose to be on hand simply to make things interesting. Captain Hughes never believed that possible, because he knew that Garrett was so intent on apprehending Lee and Gililland he would have gladly risked death to arrest them. Garrett later told Curry that while he did not recognize the bearded men, he certainly did notice them and considered them suspicious. He had made up his mind to hold them for questioning if they had continued on the train to El Paso.