Pat Garrett: Killing Billy the Kid, Then Dying Over a Herd of Goats

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Pat Garrett is remembered for one gunshot in a dark bedroom, but his life ran far longer and stranger than that night. Born in Alabama in 1850 and raised on a Louisiana plantation, he was orphaned as a teenager and left in 1868 with more than $30,000 of debt. He went west as a buffalo hunter, killed a fellow hunter named Joe Briscoe in a dispute, and drifted to Fort Sumner in New Mexico Territory. At his first wedding in 1879 the guests included Billy the Kid, and his bride, Juanita Martinez, died 15 days later. Elected sheriff of Lincoln County in late 1880, he was sent to hunt his former drinking companion.

This episode recounts the ambush at Fort Sumner, the siege at Stinking Springs, and the midnight shooting in Pete Maxwell's house on July 14, 1881, then follows Garrett through decades of failed reinvention. He lost a race for the Texas state Senate, quit the Texas Rangers in under a month, was forced out of his own irrigation ventures near Roswell, and squandered the favor of President Theodore Roosevelt. Broke and bitter, he was shot dead on a desert road during a quarrel over goats grazing his ranch, and no one was ever held to account.

• The press cast Billy as a romantic hero and Garrett as a coward, so he co-wrote The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid with Ash Upson. It flopped commercially yet shaped the historical record into the 1960s.
• Hired to solve the 1896 disappearance of Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain and his eight-year-old son, Garrett lost a deputy in a rooftop shootout at Wildy Well. A jury later found the suspects not guilty.
• Roosevelt made him collector of customs at El Paso in 1901, then dropped him after Garrett introduced saloon owner Tom Powers to the president as a prominent cattleman.
• When the county auctioned his possessions to satisfy judgments, the total came to $650.
• Wayne Brazel confessed and claimed self-defense, the only eyewitness never appeared, and the trial lasted one day. Garrett stood six foot five, so a custom coffin had to be shipped by train from El Paso.