The Doña Ana County sheriff, James W. Southwick, did just that and more. Throughout the Brady murder trial, the Kid, his wrists kept in handcuffs, was surrounded by several armed guards. It is not hard to imagine what kind of impression these extraordinary security precautions made on the jurors.
The trial began on Wednesday, April 8, 1881, and the spectators were a mix of Hispanic and Anglo folks from around the area. They filled the long wooden seats facing Judge Bristol’s bench, which consisted of a flat-topped desk on a raised platform at one end of the narrow room. The defendant, William H. Bonney, sat to one side of Bristol’s desk. Court Clerk George Bowman remembered Billy as a pleasant-looking young man whose eyes seemed sullen and defiant. “It looked almost ridiculous,” Bowman recalled, “all those armed men sitting around a harmless looking youth with the down still on his chin.”
The Kid silently watched the court proceedings—remarkably, the first time he had ever been tried for any crime—fully aware that his fate was in the hands of the twelve strangers in the jurors’ box. They knew nothing of the injustices of the Lincoln County War, of his close scrapes and firefights, of the bloody deaths of his friends, or of the broken promise of a governor. Yet they were to judge him, to decide whether he would live or die.
Most of what happened in Judge Bristol’s courtroom—witness testimony, objections from counsel, defense and prosecution arguments—is unknown. Strange for a trial that was eagerly anticipated at the time and now ranks as one of the most famed criminal trials in New Mexico history. At least three witnesses testified for the Territory, and there is no indication that Billy took the stand. What is known revolves around the instructions given to the jury at the trial’s conclusion, which came on the second day. In nine long pages, Bristol gave the jury little leeway to return with anything but a “guilty” verdict. If Billy was present and involved in any way in the Brady killing, Bristol instructed the jurors, he should be considered “as much guilty as though he fired the fatal shot.” After deliberating for three hours, the jury found the Kid guilty of murder in the first degree and recommended death as his punishment.
Three days later, at 5:15 P.M., Billy appeared before Judge Bristol to receive his sentence. When asked if he had anything to say, the outlaw, who invariably had something to say, spoke not a word.
Bristol then ordered that the Kid be taken to Lincoln County, where he was to be incarcerated by Sheriff Pat Garrett until Friday, May 13. On that unlucky day, between the hours of 9:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M., the said William Bonney was to be “hanged by the neck until his body be dead.”
Editor Newman happily speculated that the wooden gallows would be erected over the spot where Sheriff Brady fell.
Before Billy was transported to Lincoln, he wrote to Edgar Caypless to ask about the lawsuit over his bay mare. “Mr. A. J. Fountain was appointed to defend me and has done the best he could for me,” he informed Caypless. “He is willing to carry the case further if I can raise the money to bear his expense. The mare is about all I can depend on at present.” Billy closed his letter by asking the attorney to excuse his bad handwriting, as he was wearing his handcuffs—his guards were not about to take any chances with their condemned prisoner.
The Kid also talked to the local newspapers, playing to both the public and Governor Wallace. Simeon Newman promised to publish Billy’s statements following the outcome of his appeal to Wallace for a pardon (or a commutation of his sentence).
“We do not believe that the Governor should or will either pardon him or commute his sentence,” wrote Newman, “but we cannot refuse to a dying man the same fair play we should expect for ourselves.”
When the Mesilla News asked Billy if he expected Wallace to pardon him, Billy said that, “Considering the active part Governor Wallace took on our side and the friendly relations that existed between him and me, and the promise he made me, I think he ought to pardon me. Don’t know that he will do it…. Think it hard I should be the only one to suffer the extreme penalties of the law.” Wallace had a much different take on the Kid’s plight, and he revealed as much to a Las Vegas Gazette reporter later that same month:
“It looks as though he would hang, Governor,” the Gazette man commented to Wallace.
“Yes, the chances seem good that the 13th of May would finish him.”
“He appears to look to you to save his neck,” the reporter said.
“Yes,” the governor replied, smiling, “but I can’t see how a fellow like him should expect any clemency from me.”
The time for Billy’s departure for Lincoln—kept secret from the public—was set for Saturday, April 16, at approximately 10:00 P.M. To throw off possible rescue attempts, officials let it slip that Billy was not leaving Mesilla before the middle of the next week. Billy Wilson was not traveling with the Kid on this trip. Wilson was granted a continuance in his counterfeiting trial and would go back to Santa Fe on a change of venue. Several months later, Wilson escaped, never to be brought to trial again. No such luck for the Kid, who was uncharacteristically doubtful about his future.
“I expect to be lynched in going to Lincoln,” he told the Mesilla News. And then, somewhat despairingly, he added, “Advise persons never to engage in killing.”
Seven men, bristling with all manner of weapons, formed Billy’s escort for the 145 miles that stretched between Mesilla and Lincoln: Deputy Sheriff David Wood, Tom Williams, Billy Mathews, John Kinney, D. M. Reade, W. A. Lockhart, and Deputy U.S. Marshal Robert Olinger. These men were being paid $2.00 a day, plus $1.50 per day board and ten cents for each mile traveled. Billy had more than a little history with a few of his guards—they had been on opposite sides in the Lincoln County troubles—but the Kid seemed to get along with most of them all right. However, if there was any trouble, either from a rescue attempt or a lynching party, the guards had made it very clear that the first shots they fired would be directed at the Kid.
Billy, handcuffed and shackled, rode in an ambulance (a covered spring wagon with seats that could be folded down to make a bed). A chain secured him to the ambulance’s backseat. Three guards rode horseback, one on each side of the vehicle and one at the rear. Inside the ambulance, Kinney sat beside the Kid. On the middle bench, facing Kinney was Billy Mathews. And sitting next to Mathews, staring straight into the Kid’s boyish face, was Bob Olinger, the one man with whom the Kid definitely did not get along.
Their route took them through San Augustin Pass, across the Tularosa Basin (famed for its immense, shifting dunes of white sand), over the Sacramento Mountains, and through the Mescalero Apache reservation. On April 20, they spent the night at Blazer’s Mill, an old Regulator stomping ground and the scene of its infamous gun battle with Andrew Roberts. Early the next morning, with Joseph and Almer Blazer, a few idle mill workers, and his guards for an audience, Billy graphically recounted his version of the shoot-out. One of the men asked Billy why he killed Roberts, a simple question that the Kid could not find an answer for. He just shook his head, saying he did not know. Later that day, the prisoner and guards pulled into Fort Stanton. Pat Garrett was waiting there for the man he had famously brought to justice four months earlier. Then, after a short journey of nine more miles down the valley of the Rio Bonito, Garrett, Bob Olinger, and Billy arrived in the county seat of Lincoln.
Garrett now had a dilemma. Lincoln County had never had a jail that, as he later wrote, “would hold a cripple,” yet he was charged with confining the Territory’s slipperiest criminal for the next twenty-two days. Whether it could be done remained to be seen. Garrett was confident that he could, and that the execution would come off at the appointed time as planned. But Billy thought differently. One day, his guards allowed Mrs. Annie E. Lesnett, a friend of Billy’s from Dowlin’s Mill on the Ruidoso, to see their prisoner. In a sick sort of joke, Bob Olinger invited the woman to the hanging. Unfazed, Billy spoke up: “Mrs. Lesnett, they can’t hang me if I’m not there, can they?”
No matter the odds, the shackles, the armed guard
s, Billy the Kid’s old optimism was back. He somehow believed he could escape the gallows, and that belief was a very dangerous thing.
2
Trails West
His voice was as soft as a woman’s, and he rarely used it to talk of himself.
—PAT DONAN
THE 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, Briscoe 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 pu
lled 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.
To Hell on a Fast Horse Page 3
