To Hell on a Fast Horse (4 page)

T
HE CAPTURE OF THE
in gold. Yet for all the public attention, hardly anyone really knew the lawman, and Garrett was not much of a talker, at least when asked to talk about himself. He seemed to have blown in off the plains and was just suddenly there, the right man at the right place. And that was pretty much how it happened.

Garrett was born in another place and time, in Chambers County, Alabama, on June 5, 1850. And although he would come to sign his name P. F. Garrett, the name given to him at birth was Patrick Floyd Jarvis Garrett, a name that had belonged to his maternal grandfather. Grandfather Jarvis died two years after the birth of his grandson, but
not before willing his young namesake a rifle, a saddle, and a bridle. As young Pat would eventually learn, such basic items were crucial for a man to survive on his own. Garrett’s father, John Lumpkin Garrett, a native of Georgia, was an ambitious Southern planter. Just three years later, though, perhaps prompted by the death of wife Elizabeth Ann’s father, the Garretts pulled up stakes and moved to Claiborne Parish, Louisiana. The Garrett caravan that rattled over the rough roads to their new home included a long column of human chattel. Pat Garrett’s father was a slave owner.

In Louisiana, John Garrett purchased the cotton plantation of John Greer, consisting of eighteen hundred acres eight miles northeast of the parish seat of Homer. Pat Garrett earned his first dollar working in his father’s plantation store. And as he got bigger, so did the Garrett family; Pat would have seven brothers and sisters (Pat was the second oldest and the first son).

The Garrett plantation prospered as well. The 1860 census records the value of John Garrett’s real estate at $15,000, but his personal property was estimated at a whopping $40,000, which is not so surprising considering that it included thirty-four slaves. Pat Garrett grew up, then, in a relatively privileged world. With slaves to tend to the household and cooking, and to cultivate and harvest the vast fields of cotton, the Garretts probably never wanted for anything. The Civil War changed all that.

As a large slave owner, John Garrett was exempt from Confederate military service, but he lost his overseer to the Twenty-seventh Regiment, Louisiana Infantry. The fall of the port of New Orleans to Union forces in April 1862 brought additional hardships, forcing Louisiana cotton planters to transport their crops overland through Texas to Mexico. At the close of the war, not only did Garrett lose his slave labor force, but a portion of his cotton crop was reportedly confiscated by the occupying Federals. The debts piled up as the senior Garrett went into a spiral, his health failing and his drinking rising in
proportion. He lost Elizabeth on March 23, 1867; she was only thirty-seven. He held on for almost a year longer, struggling to maintain both his livelihood and his large family. John Garrett died on February 5, 1868.

Pat, not yet eighteen, could only watch as court-appointed estate executors dealt with the financially ruined plantation; his father had left debts of more than $30,000. Pat’s brother-in-law, Larkin R. Lay, the final estate executor, sold the lands and possessions to satisfy the creditors, and the Garrett children moved into the Lay home to be raised by their sister Margaret. Furious with Larkin, Pat struck out for Texas on January 25, 1869. He had little more than a rifle, a saddle, a bridle, and a horse.

There are a number of stories about Pat Garrett’s Texas years—that he killed a black man, started and then abandoned a family, helped drive a herd of Texas cattle to Dodge City. But they remain just that, stories. Garrett first went to Dallas but soon located in Lancaster (twelve miles from Dallas), which was also the home of some old Claiborne Parish neighbors. There the strapping young fellow tried his hand at what he knew best—farming.

“I went into partnership with the owner of the land,” Garrett recalled, “my share was to be one fourth of what we made and my first work was to grub the ground and clear the land. I got mighty homesick before the crop was made, but I stayed with it.”

He stayed with it for about two years, until he met a cattleman from Uvalde County who was hiring cowboys, and Garrett’s farming days came to an end. In 1875, Garrett started north with a trail herd bound for Kansas. After about three hundred miles, the cowboys reached the Red River at Denison, where they found thousands of head of cattle, waiting to cross the famed river, then in flood stage. Here Garrett got a close-up look at the dangers of the trail, for some punchers and their horses, as well as a number of cattle, had been lost to the deep, blood-colored waters. A few days’ tough work were required to get the herds
across and straightened out, after which cowboying had lost much of its romance for Garrett.

He and a buddy by the name of Luther Duke quit the herd and traded away their ponies and gear and started farming a small patch of corn and cotton. This was hardly a step up, though, and when Garrett met Willis Skelton Glenn, a twenty-six-year-old Georgia native who was about to embark in the buffalo hide business, Glenn found himself with two eager partners.

“I remember our meeting,” Glenn wrote years later. “Pat was rather young looking for all of his twenty-five or twenty-six years, and he seemed the tallest, most long-legged specimen I ever saw. There was something very attractive and impressive about his personality, even on a first meeting.” Garrett would remain associated with Glenn on the buffalo range for roughly the next three years, first as a business partner and later as Glenn’s salaried hunter. And it is because of Willis Skelton Glenn that the details of what was, for Garrett, his most mortifying deed have been preserved. In fact, Glenn made it a mission of sorts to keep Pat Garrett’s first known killing from ever being forgotten.

In the brief boom years of buffalo hunting, a good man with a rifle, and Garrett fell into this category, could down sixty or more buffalo a day, and there were hundreds of such hunters on the plains. The skinning and transporting of these hides, several hundred at a time, was hard work that required a crew of men. In camp, Garrett and the others broke the tension and monotony with an occasional practical joke, or if they were near one of the trading points, with gambling, drinking, and whoring. Still, it was not unusual for tempers to flare, even between once good friends. Sometimes, trifling disagreements escalated into deadly confrontations, just as they did with Garrett and young Joe Briscoe.

Briscoe would never have ventured onto the buffalo range had it not been for Garrett, or at least that is the story Glenn told. A native of Ireland who had lived in Louisiana before migrating to Texas, Bris
coe joined the Glenn-Garrett party in the fall of 1876. After outfitting at Fort Griffin, the party headed west onto the Staked Plains. Glenn remembered that Garrett and Briscoe appeared the best of chums: “Everybody seemed to be getting on well with everybody else, and I was congratulating myself on having a harmonious outfit.” Early one morning, Glenn rode off to Rath City for a replacement firing pin for one of the buffalo guns, leaving Garrett in charge. Just before breakfast the next day, Briscoe walked to a nearby pool of water with a piece of soap and began scrubbing away at his linen handkerchief. A short time later, he walked back to camp, muttering to himself, “It was no use to wash in that damn water.”

Garrett overheard Briscoe and immediately chimed in.

“Anyone but a damn Irishman,” he said, “would have more sense than to try to wash anything in that water.”

“Yes,” Briscoe replied, “you damn Americans think you are damn smart and know a damn sight.”

Garrett was not about to take any sass from the young man and let fly with his fist, almost knocking Briscoe to the ground. Briscoe righted himself and took a swing at Garrett, missing, and then ran for the axe the cook used to split firewood. Realizing Briscoe’s intent, Garrett lunged for a .45-caliber pistol that was used around the camp to shoot skunks and other varmints. As Briscoe came at him, fire in his eyes, Garrett turned and pulled the trigger. The two were so close together that the exploding powder from the pistol scorched Briscoe’s clothing. The lead bullet punched into his left side at the waistline, then ripped across his body and exited on the opposite side just above the lower pocket of his otter skin vest. The young man collapsed at Garrett’s feet.

A stunned and trembling Garrett helped the cook carry Briscoe to one of the bedrolls. When the lad complained of being cold, they quickly scrounged more blankets for him.

Then Briscoe called out to his killer: “Pat, come here, please.”

Garrett walked over to Briscoe, wishing it was all a bad dream, trying somehow to make sense of what refused to make sense.

“I am dying, Pat. Won’t you forgive me?”

“Yes,” Garrett said, and then he returned to the campfire, tears streaming down his cheeks. Young Joe Briscoe lived only twenty minutes more.

Leaving Briscoe’s body untouched, Garrett mounted a horse and trotted after Glenn in Rath City, but Glenn had taken a different route on his return to camp, and they missed each other. Garrett finally appeared the next day, muddy and wet from having been out on the prairie all night during a horrendous storm. He remorsefully told Glenn what had happened, at the same time second-guessing his actions—maybe he was too quick to fire, maybe Briscoe did not really intend to use the axe. Glenn did not have the heart to censure his partner, saying only, “It’s a pretty hard thing, Pat, for a man to lose his life that way.” Garrett asked what he should do, and Glenn advised him to go to Fort Griffin and turn himself in. This he did, but after a few days Garrett was back in camp. The law at Fort Griffin had little inclination to deal with the guilt-ridden buffalo hunter. There was no witness to corroborate or dispute his story (and claim of self-defense), and Joe Briscoe’s body was buried miles away, marked only by an ordinary clump of mesquite. No charges were pressed and Garrett was never tried.

Winter was the main season for hunting buffalo on the Staked Plains, because the hair on the robes was longer and thicker and thus more valuable. Pat Garrett abandoned the buffalo range in the off-seasons, gambling away his earnings in places like Dodge City and St. Louis. He would, years later, recall meeting Bat Masterson in Dodge, and, also years later, Wyatt Earp would remember Garrett as among the cow town’s legendary cast of gun-toting characters.

By the spring of 1878, reports were coming in from the different trading points that the once endless herds of bison were all but “played out”—approximately two hundred thousand hides had been harvested
that last season alone. There were simply no more buffalo to kill. Very few hunters came away from the business with a great deal of money, especially if they, like Garrett, had developed a fondness for gambling. And the Glenn-Garrett party had experienced the extra misfortune of having lost hundreds of hides, as well as horses and supplies, in two different Comanche raids in 1877. So, early in 1878, Garrett, Glenn, and fellow skinner Nick Ross abandoned their wagons and personal possessions near a place known as Casas Amarillas (Yellow Houses) and headed west. Garrett never explained why the three chose to go to New Mexico Territory. A writer friend of Garrett’s chalked it up to “a love of adventure.”

IT WAS A COLD
February day when Pat Garrett and his two companions first showed up at Fort Sumner on the Pecos River. The military post of Fort Sumner had been established to oversee thousands of Navajos, as well as several hundred Mescalero Apaches, confined on the Bosque Redondo reservation. Once the Navajos were allowed to return to their ancestral lands three hundred miles to the west, there was no need for a reservation or a garrisoned post.

Fort Sumner was abandoned in 1869 and its buildings sold the following year. The buyer was Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell, who paid $5,000. With more than thirty Hispanic and Indian families in tow, Maxwell moved from his old home in Cimarron to Fort Sumner. They dammed the Pecos, planted crops, and tended thousands of cattle and sheep. The fort became an instant small town, its several adobe buildings converted into family residences, a dance hall, a store, even a saloon. Lucien Maxwell died in 1875, leaving his son Peter to maintain the family empire. Instead, “Pete” Maxwell, who made his home in the substantial officers’ quarters overlooking the former parade ground, oversaw its gradual decline.

Pete Maxwell and the residents of Fort Sumner were accustomed
to seeing some rough characters come in off the surrounding nothingness, but the twenty-seven-year-old Garrett must have been among the scariest. When he arrived in February 1878, his hair was long and scraggly, and he had a scruffy beard. It was impossible on the frontier to get store-bought pants for a man six feet, four inches tall, so Pat had sewn nearly two feet of buffalo hide to the bottoms of his duck canvas trousers. His drooping, broad-brimmed hat was grimy from campfire smoke and being handled time and again by its owner’s greasy hands, and his belt bristled with skinning knives and cartridges for his Sharps buffalo gun. Glenn and Ross looked nearly as rough, and all three men were hungry and broke.