To Hell on a Fast Horse Read online

  Garrett next turned to his prisoners, telling them that he and his deputies were going to fight back if anyone tried to enter the car. More important, he told the prisoners he would arm them if a gun battle broke out. He would need their help to defend the car.

  The Kid’s eyes glistened at that. “All right, Pat,” he said. “All I want is a six-shooter. There is no danger, though. Those fellows won’t fight.”

  Miguel Otero then addressed the mob. A stocky fellow, he was a forwarding and commission merchant and prominent political figure in the Territory. He urged the men to let Garrett carry out his official duty. Otero also cautioned them about the consequences of delaying the U.S. mail, but it is hard to imagine that a matter as small as that had much effect on those bent on seeing “Dirty Dave” hang.

  The standoff on the tracks had now stretched to about forty-five minutes when postal inspector J. Fred Morley approached Garrett.

  “I have been an engineer,” he told the lawman, “and if you will let me, I’ll slip down through the mob, get in the cab, pull the throttle open, and we’ll get out of here.”

  “Good, go do it,” Garrett said.

  Morley made his way to the locomotive, but he did more than simply pull the throttle open—he hit it wide open. The heavy wheels spun, grabbed hold, and the cars lurched ahead. The mob was stunned and did not move. Realizing there was nothing they could do to stop the train now, the men who were holding the locomotive’s engineer and fireman released their prisoners, who quickly jumped aboard the moving train.

  “By the time we got to the end of the siding,” remembered Jim East, “it seemed like we were going a mile a minute, and the Mexicans stood there with their mouths open.”

  The Gazette reporter watched as Billy, still leaning out his window, waved his hat, grandly inviting the reporter to call on him in Santa Fe. He then shouted “Adios” and disappeared.

  In an instant, all the tension inside the smoking car vanished. “There was plenty of whisky in the car,” Miller remembered, “and a deal of it was drank.”

  The train stalled at the top of Glorieta Pass, just twenty-one miles from Santa Fe, where Garrett got lunch for his prisoners, and Billy amused his fellow passengers by demonstrating just how far he could bite into a piece of pie.

  Miller studied the Kid intently: “His costume was quite on the Mexican order, his language much the same. His curly brown locks and handsome face would have attracted attention anywhere, and, while looking at him and listening to his conversation, it was difficult to believe that I was in the presence of such a red-handed murderer.”

  Before the train reached the territorial capital, Billy casually remarked to Garrett, “Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.”

  The train finally pulled up to the Santa Fe depot that evening, where Garrett turned over his prisoners to Deputy U.S. Marshal Charles Conklin. It had been just eight short weeks since Garrett had won the sheriff ’s election in Lincoln County (his term would not officially begin until January 1, 1881). In that time, despite a great expanse of territory and bitterly cold temperatures and heavy snow, his posse had tracked down the Kid and his cohorts, killing Tom Folliard and Charlie Bowdre in the process. It was a remarkable feat, accomplished by someone with absolutely no prior training as an officer of the law. But Garrett’s great triumph was not capturing the Kid and his gang.

  His moment had come when he faced down that lynch mob led by the San Miguel County sheriff. Garrett had grit and the power to intimidate, that was clear, and he had a sense of duty. Of utmost importance to Garrett was keeping one’s word—he detested liars. That he put his life—and the lives of his men—at risk to keep the promise made to his prisoners says a lot about the man’s character. There are other times in Pat Garrett’s life when his sense of right and wrong can be questioned, his actions faulted, but on that tense December day in Las Vegas, Garrett’s moral compass held steady on true north.

  IF BILLY HAD DIFFICULTY taking in his sudden celebrity, he would have been stunned to learn that not only was he making national headlines, but his talents as a bona fide outlaw had grown to truly impressive proportions. Thanks to the telegraph, news of his capture appeared from Chicago to Boston with a delay of just twenty-four hours. The report on the front page of the Chicago Daily Tribune of December 29 was typical: “The notorious gang of outlaws composed of about 25 men who, under the leadership of ‘Billy the Kid,’ have for the past six months overrun Eastern New Mexico, murdering and committing other deeds of outlawry, was broken up last Saturday morning by the killing of two and the capturing of four others, including the leader.” The Tribune article then recounted the thrilling details of the Las Vegas standoff.

  Just days later, the Illustrated Police News, a weekly published in Boston, ran a genuine portrait of the “Boy Chief of New Mexico Outlaws and Cattle Thieves.” The engraving was based on a tintype the Kid had made at Fort Sumner some months before. The Police News’s depiction of a smirking Billy in rumpled frontier garb, posed with Winchester and six-gun, was much more than a journalistic coup; it was the first appearance of what would become one of America’s most iconic images.

  Billy’s capture and confinement became the talk of the territorial capital. On December 30, the Santa Fe New Mexican carried no less than four news items pertaining in some way to the Kid. Their focus that day was the Santa Fe jail, a dismal, one-story adobe building on Water Street, two blocks’ distance southwest of the plaza. Well aware of Billy’s reputation as an escape artist, the jail’s custodians were paying careful attention to their noted prisoner. “He is shut up in a stone cell to which even the light of day is denied admittance,” the New Mexican reported, “and only when some of the jailers or officers enter can he be seen at all.” Yet Billy remained cheerful and, according to the newspaper, still hoped to pull off an escape.

  The Kid received a steady stream of visitors. The Otero brothers, Page and Miguel Antonio, brought him chewing gum, candy, pies, nuts, tobacco, and cigarette papers. The Oteros had ridden on the train with Garrett and the prisoners to Santa Fe, and like many others, they had become fascinated by the outlaw. Nearly the same age as Billy, Miguel was destined to become the first Hispanic territorial governor of New Mexico and would one day publish his own book on the outlaw. Other visitors came on official business, such as the postal inspector who interviewed Billy and his fellow prisoners in early January 1881, about several stagecoach holdups. “William Bonney (alias ‘The Kid’) is held for murder,” the inspector wrote his supervisor. “He is supposed to have killed some 11 men, but that is an exaggeration, four or five would be quite enough. He is about 21 or 23 years of age born in New York City, and a graduate of the streets.”

  Engraving of Billy the Kid from the Illustrated Police News, Boston, January 8,1881.

  Robert G. McCubbin Collection

  Between entertaining his guests and the numerous gawkers, Billy devoted his energies to getting out of jail, in more ways than one. “I would like to see you for a few moments if you can spare [the] time,” the Kid wrote Governor Lew Wallace. No one bothered to tell Billy that Wallace was not then in Santa Fe. No matter, when Wallace returned to the capital in early February, he made no effort to visit the jail’s celebrity prisoner.

  Billy had no money to pay for legal help, so he agreed to sell his renowned bay mare to lawyer Edgar Caypless. Taking possession of the horse was another matter entirely. Posse member Frank Stewart had made a big show of the Kid’s mare when he came into Las Vegas with the captured outlaws in December, telling everyone how Billy had given the animal to him. At that time, Stewart and Garrett were the toast of the town, and when hotel proprietor W. Scott Moore presented Stewart with a beautiful factory-engraved Colt pistol valued at $60, Stewart gave the Kid’s mare to Moore’s wife, Mary. The mare and its transfer to Mrs. Moore made for a cheery piece in the Las Vegas Gazette, which said that Mary Moore “now has the satisfaction of owning one of the best, if not the best animal in the territory.” Caypless f
iled a suit of replevin against W. Scott Moore, but the judgment he eventually won did not come until July—far too late to do Billy any good.

  Billy was still hoping he could pull off an escape—that is, until the surprise jail visit of Sheriff Romulo Martínez and Deputy U.S. Marshal Tony Neis. The officers, it turns out, had offered some easy money to one of the jail’s inmates to keep an eye on the other prisoners. Having been tipped off by this informant, Martínez and Neis arrived at the jail that day around suppertime. The Kid and his cohorts, Rudabaugh, Billy Wilson, and Edward Kelly, watched as the lawmen went straight to one of the beds, found it packed full with dirt and rocks, and then dragged the ticking aside to discover an impressively large hole in the floor. Had it not been for the snitch, Billy would have been a free man in one or two nights more. Instead, he got extra shackles and closer scrutiny from his guards.

  On March 2, Billy again wrote to Governor Wallace. “I wish you would come down to the jail and see me. [I]t will be to your interest to come and see me. I have some letters which date back two years, and there are Parties who are very anxious to get them but I shall not dispose of them until I see you. [T]hat is if you will come imediately [sic].” The Kid’s baiting of Wallace was met with continued silence from the Governor’s Palace. “I knew what he meant,” Wallace related years later. “He referred to the note he received from me [at Lincoln in 1879]…. He was threatening to publish it, if I refused to see him.”

  Two days later, Billy sent yet another letter to the governor: “I Expect you have forgotten what you promised me, this month two years ago, but I have not and I think you had ought to have come and seen me as I requested you to. I have done everything that I promised you I would, and you have done nothing that you promised me….[I]t looks to me like I am getting left in the cold. I am not treated right by [U.S. Marshal] Sherman, he lets Every Stranger that comes to see me through Curiosity in to see me, but will not let a single one of my friends in, Not even an Attorney. I guess they mean to send me up without giving me any show, but they will have a nice time doing it. I am not intirely without friends.”

  Billy was to be transported nearly three hundred miles south to Mesilla, where he would be put on trial in a change of venue to Doña Ana County. On March 27, Billy wrote Wallace one last frantic note from the Santa Fe jail: “for the last time I ask, Will you keep your promise. I start below tomorrow send awnser [sic] by bearer.” No answer came from the governor, except for the implied one the following day when the Kid and Billy Wilson were escorted onto a southbound train under armed guard. Accompanying the prisoners were the Kid’s sometime-attorney, Ira Leonard, twenty-nine-year-old U.S. Deputy Marshal Neis, and the Santa Fe chief of police, Francisco “Frank” Chavez. Fearing trouble from the Territory’s considerable lynch-happy element, officials tried to keep the two Billys’ impending departure quiet, but word got out anyway. Upon reaching Rincon, the last station on the line, some six or seven troublemakers were waiting for them. Neis, armed with a shotgun and a six-shooter, and Chavez, cradling a rifle, hurried the Kid and Wilson off the train and toward the shelter of a nearby saloon.

  “Let’s take them fellows anyhow,” barked one of the roughs.

  “You don’t get them without somebody being killed,” Neis shouted back.

  Once inside the saloon, Neis secured a back room where his party could wait it out until their stage was leaving the next morning for Las Cruces and Mesilla. But just outside, and making no effort to conceal their conversation, the roughs were doing their best to talk themselves into making a grab for the prisoners.

  Billy became visibly shaken; Neis was clearly not as stable as Garrett in this kind of situation. Imagining that the mob’s goal might actually be to free the Kid and Wilson, Neis yelled that he would shoot the two prisoners before allowing them to be taken from his custody. Finally, some levelheaded bystanders talked sense into the crowd, convincing them that the guards could not be overpowered short of bloodshed. The mob dispersed and their grumblings faded away. After a calm but restless night, the officers and prisoners boarded the stage the next morning unmolested.

  At Las Cruces, thirty-three miles southeast of Rincon, Billy again attracted a crowd, but these townspeople were more curious than anything else. It was not every day that the Territory’s most notorious criminal made an appearance on Main Street, and the certainty that he would hang before long made the Kid even more of a not-to-be-missed spectacle. One of the gawkers asked, “Which is Billy the Kid?” Before anyone in the party could answer, Billy placed his hand on Ira Leonard’s shoulder, and with a straight face exclaimed, “This is the man.”

  Mesilla, the county seat, just three miles farther, was reached that evening, and the two Billys were shown to their new quarters. The Kid would later describe the Mesilla jail as “the worst place he had ever struck.” By the time the Kid arrived, the weather had turned god-awful hot, and the flies and mosquitoes were out in full force.

  THE KID WOULD NOT have to endure the Mesilla jail for long. Judge Warren Bristol would see to that. Billy was certainly familiar with Bristol, the fifty-eight-year-old judge for New Mexico’s Third Judicial District, and, most important, a Jimmy Dolan sympathizer, the man whose forces Billy fought in the Lincoln County War. Bristol, a New York native, was known to occasionally bend or ignore the law, and, naturally, controversy seemed to follow him throughout his career. He could rightly be called “New Mexico’s hanging judge,” because by 1882, his courtroom had a record of more convictions for first-degree murder than all the other districts in the Territory combined.

  The day after the Kid’s arrival in Mesilla, March 30, he was escorted into Bristol’s court, a cramped room within a narrow, one-story adobe on the southeast corner of Mesilla’s plaza. Billy faced a federal charge first, for the murder of Andrew Roberts during a gun battle at Blazer’s Mill on April 4, 1878. Bristol appointed Ira Leonard as the Kid’s counsel, and the attorney entered a plea of not guilty. Because time was needed to bring defense witnesses from Lincoln County, the judge granted a delay, a holdup that did not sit well with Simeon H. Newman, editor of a fledgling Las Cruces paper that carried the creative title Newman’s Semi-Weekly. Newman urged the court to use the interim to quickly proceed with the territorial indictments against the Kid, the murder charges for the killings of Sheriff Brady and Deputy George Hindman.

  “The prisoner is a notoriously dangerous character,” Newman reminded his readers, “and has on several occasions before escaped justice where escape appeared even more improbable than now, and has made his brags that he only wants to get free in order to kill three more men—one of them being Governor Wallace. Should he break jail now, there is no doubt that he would immediately proceed to execute his threat. Lincoln county, which has suffered so long from his crimes, cannot afford to see him escape; and yet every hour that he is confined in the Mesilla jail is a threat to the peace of that community. There are a hundred good citizens of Lincoln who would not sleep soundly in their beds did they know that he were at large.”

  As for the charges the Kid currently faced, Newman assured his readers that, “Other indictments will be found if these are not sufficient.”

  On April 5, the Kid, through his attorney, withdrew his plea of not guilty and entered a plea of no jurisdiction for the Roberts murder charge. Leonard, with the assistance of Mesilla lawyer Albert J. Fountain, put forward several arguments why the United States had no right to prosecute the case (Blazer’s Mill was situated within the Mescalero Apache Indian reservation). The judge sided with the defense. No one, including U.S. District Attorney Sidney M. Barnes, appeared to be upset with this outcome, which cleared the way for the territorial cases. The general consensus was that Billy had no hope of getting off on that latter charge.

  And Judge Bristol would continue to preside in the courtroom at the Kid’s trial for the murder of Sheriff Brady. District Attorney Simon B. Newcomb would head the prosecution. Newcomb, a pleasant forty-two-year-old native of Nova Scotia and former Tex
as judge, was more popular with the Hispanic population of Mesilla and Las Cruces than any other lawyer in the area. Billy’s jury, interestingly enough, was made up of native New Mexicans (what was called in local parlance a “Mexican jury”), a good thing if his trial was happening in Lincoln, but the Hispanos of Doña Ana County had no special relationship with Billy or any of the other gringo cowboys they saw riding around their part of the Territory.

  Albert J. Fountain and John D. Bail (an attorney from Silver City) replaced Ira Leonard as the Kid’s court-appointed legal representatives. Fountain had been appointed the Kid’s counsel in the Brady murder case two years earlier, just before Billy rode out of Lincoln a fugitive. Although Ira Leonard may have had a closer relationship with the Kid, Fountain was the best man to defend him in Mesilla. He had had some successes there as a defense attorney (Fountain had already helped Leonard get the Kid off on the Roberts murder charge). Fountain was a handsome, respectable-looking man with a broad forehead, blue eyes, and large mustache. He liked hopeless cases and was good at swaying “Mexican juries,” in part because of his Spanish language skills but also because he had married the daughter in a prominent Hispanic family. Additionally, Fountain was well familiar with the events and personalities of the Lincoln County War. In a strange connection to the case, Fountain had been blamed for inciting Brady’s killers with an editorial in the Mesilla Valley Independent that condoned the use of “mob law” in Lincoln County—saying it was better than no law at all.

  Before the trial, someone heard the Kid tell Fountain that he sure “wished somebody would come into his cell with a six-shooter.” Billy may have thought he was being funny, although down deep, he must have thought of such a scenario; he was closer to a death sentence than he had ever been before.

  Simeon Newman took the Kid’s words seriously. “He ought to be most carefully watched,” Newman wrote in his Semi-Weekly, “as he is liable at any time to make a break for liberty. We advise the sheriff to keep an eye on him when he takes him into court.”