Pat Garrett reportedly admitted that the thing he feared most was having his life defined by a single moment: the killing of William H. Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid.
He said he dreaded meeting new people because they always greeted him with some version of, "Hey, you're Pat Garrett, the guy that shot Billy the Kid."
Unfortunately for the lawman, his worst fear came to pass. Not only in his lifetime, but also in modern times, his legacy is tied to the killing of Bonney.
There was another problem. As the outlaw's reputation grew and he was turned into a legend of the Old West, sympathy for him increased. Garrett slowly but surely was becoming the villain of the tale.
Billy the Kid was a ruthless murderer who killed people in cold blood. Even so, people could not help but feel that Garrett acted somewhat cowardly by gunning him down in the dark.
If the two had met in a duel, the story would probably be remembered very differently. As it stands, Pat Garrett sits in a gray area of Western law. Some admire him as a tough lawman in a lawless land. Others brand him a coward.
His life continued with other thrills and adventures after the death of Bonney, culminating in Garrett's own mysterious murder, which still puzzles people today.
He was born Patrick Floyd Jarvis Garrett on June 5, 1850, in Chambers County, Alabama, to John Lumpkin Garrett and Elizabeth Jarvis.
At a young age he relocated with his family to Louisiana, where his father bought a cotton plantation in Claiborne Parish. At first things went well, and the plantation flourished.
Then things took a drastic turn for the worse when the Civil War broke out. It ruined the family's finances, and both parents died less than a year apart, in 1867 and 1868, leaving behind a plantation full of debt.
Pat's younger siblings were taken in by various relatives. When Garrett turned 18, he saw no reason to stick around, and in 1869 he rode alone into the sunset.
Very few details are known about the next years of Garrett's life. He settled in Texas for a while near the Dallas area, where he worked as a farmhand.
A few years later he became a buffalo hunter on the Staked Plains and started a business selling hides. It was not a sustainable career. Hunters like Garrett nearly drove the American buffalo, actually a bison, into extinction.
Tens of millions were killed during the 19th century, at one point reducing their numbers to only a few hundred in the entire country. Once the supply started running out, Garrett left Texas and drifted toward Fort Sumner, New Mexico.
Before that, there was another important event in Pat Garrett's life: the first time he killed a man. It happened around 1876, and the victim was a friend of Garrett's and a fellow buffalo hunter named Joe Briscoe.
The two got into an argument over who knows what, and it escalated to violence. An enraged Briscoe charged Garrett with an axe, prompting the latter to grab a pistol and shoot his attacker at point-blank range.
Allegedly, as he lay dying, Briscoe asked forgiveness of his shooter, reducing Garrett to tears. Wracked with guilt, the killer tried to turn himself in, but the authorities had no interest in prosecuting him. Garrett simply got on with his life.
In New Mexico, Garrett found work as a cowboy at Pedro "Pete" Maxwell's ranch. This is the same house where he would kill Billy the Kid a few years later.
During this time he married a woman named Juanita Gutierrez, who died less than a year into their marriage during childbirth. Garrett did not stay single long. In 1880 he remarried Apolinaria Gutierrez, the 17-year-old younger sister of his first wife. They would go on to have eight children together.
That same year, Garrett was elected sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory, and immediately set his sights on Billy the Kid and the other gunslingers he rode with.
By this point, Billy the Kid had already earned his fame thanks to his involvement in the Lincoln County War. That conflict was a violent feud that started in 1878 between two factions that both wanted a monopoly over the dry goods business.
On one side was the older, established group led by James Dolan and Lawrence Murphy, who already operated the largest general goods store in Lincoln County, known simply as "The House." On the other was a new partnership between businessman John Tunstall and Alexander McSween, who opened a rival store.
Both groups also had serious backup in the form of gangs willing to protect their interests with violence. Dolan's faction had the Jesse Evans gang, better known as "the Boys," and also had County Sheriff William J. Brady in his pocket.
The newcomers had the Regulators, a group of Lincoln County Cowboys and ranch hands who had a history with each other. This included Billy the Kid and other desperados such as Dick Brewer, Doc Scurlock, Jose Chavez y Chavez, Tom O'Folliard, and Charlie Bowdre.
The Lincoln County War kicked off properly on February 18, 1878, when the Boys killed John Tunstall. This is when the Regulators formed into a more cohesive gang, and at the start they even had the law on their side, receiving warrants from Justice of the Peace John Wilson to bring Tunstall's killers to justice.
The feud was marked by multiple shootouts and revenge killings. Billy the Kid and a few other Regulators killed Sheriff Brady. Although dozens of other people died, this was the murder that would send Bonney on the run with Pat Garrett on his tail.
It culminated with a five-day shootout known as the Battle of Lincoln, where Alexander McSween was also killed. With both businessmen dead, the Regulators had nobody to work for anymore, so they scattered.
By the time Garrett started chasing Billy the Kid, the outlaw was already a notorious gunman known throughout the country. He and a few other Regulators, like Bowdre and Jose Chavez y Chavez, decided to stick together after the Lincoln County War and engage in additional acts of mayhem, violence, and murder.
They also joined up with Dirty Dave Rudabaugh, another infamous outlaw of the Old West. Billy the Kid's gang first crossed guns with Garrett's in late 1880.
On December 19, the gang rode into Fort Sumner, New Mexico, where Garrett was already waiting for them. Assisted by another lawman named Lon Chambers, he confronted Tom O'Folliard and another former Regulator named Tom Pickens.
When O'Folliard went for his gun, Garrett shot him in the chest. He died less than an hour later, aged 22. The other outlaws managed to make a run for it.
Just a few days later, on December 23, Garrett tracked the whole gang to an abandoned farmhouse near Stinking Springs, New Mexico, and this time he had a large posse with him.
It seemed like Garrett had the situation completely in control, but the gang still preferred a shootout over surrender. Former Regulator Charlie Bowdre was killed during this encounter. The rest eventually came to their senses and gave up after a two-day siege.
If this had been the end of the road for Billy the Kid, Garrett might have been unanimously remembered as a hero. He was brave and diligent in his pursuit of the outlaws, only killed when absolutely necessary, and managed to bring all the other criminals to justice.
Unsurprisingly, Bonney was convicted for the murder of Sheriff Brady and sentenced to hang until he was "dead, dead, dead," as the judge told him.
According to legend, however, on April 28, while awaiting execution, Bonney managed to outmaneuver his guards. When only one deputy named James Bell was watching him, he asked to be taken out to the outhouse, where he attacked his sentry. The Kid shot and killed Bell with his own gun.
Afterward he armed himself with a shotgun, waited for Bob Ollinger, the other guard, to return, and killed him too. Bonney then jumped onto a horse and rode out of town.
Garrett was not in town when Billy the Kid escaped, but he soon returned and started chasing him again. A few months later, the lawman learned that his fugitive had returned to Fort Sumner.
He went to visit Pete Maxwell's ranch because he suspected that Bonney might be hiding there. The exact sequence of events is up for some debate, but according to the most common version, on the night of July 14, Garrett was sitting in the dark in Maxwell's bedroom.
Bonney entered the room and asked who was there. Upon recognizing his voice, the sheriff shot him twice without saying anything. The Kid was dead before he even hit the ground.
Word of the outlaw's demise traveled fast, as the story of Billy the Kid was plastered on every newspaper in the country. Bonney was slowly being turned into a folk hero rather than a lifelong criminal who was on the run and had often mercilessly killed.
Moreover, Garrett was the one the media chose to portray as the cold-blooded assassin. He could understand this, so in 1882 he wrote his own account with the help of a ghostwriter to set the record straight.
It was titled "The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid," and for a while it became the definitive version of events that went down at Pete Maxwell's ranch. However, it was later found to contain many inaccuracies, and historians dismissed it as an embellished narrative with the occasional truth thrown in.
While the newspapers went way overboard with their sympathetic portrayal of Billy the Kid because it made a better story, Garrett's account veered too much in the opposite direction. Its main goal was to clear his own name rather than give a factual description of events.
Most notably, Garrett's version changes the part where he gunned down Bonney in the dark without giving him a chance to surrender. The sheriff alleged that the Kid raised his cocked pistol a foot away from Garrett, leaving him no choice but to pull the trigger.
Garrett did not seek reelection as sheriff and instead had a brief stint with the Texas Rangers. After that was over, he left law enforcement for about a decade, a time during which he tried to enter the irrigation industry.
Garrett lived on a large ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. He soon realized that in many arid, undeveloped regions of the Southwest, irrigation was a necessity for any kind of successful agriculture.
In his area, that irrigation would have come courtesy of the Pecos River, which Garrett thought could be dammed and used to construct a large-scale canal. One anecdote, which definitely isn't true, even stated that he originally got the idea from Billy the Kid.
During the mid-1880s, Garrett met businessman Charles Eddy, who was in the process of buying as much land as possible with his own plans to invest in an irrigation system. Eventually the two decided to combine their ventures into one large reclamation project.
They were also joined by a third entrepreneur named Charles Green, and in 1888 the Pecos Irrigation and Investment Company was born. As the project grew and more businessmen joined, Garrett was slowly relegated to an increasingly smaller role.
Although this could have been because others were simply more experienced than him, one Garrett biographer asserts that it was a deliberate effort to push him out of the company.
The lawman wasn't quite ready to leave the business completely, so instead he purchased a one-third interest in the Texas Irrigation Ditch Company and formed another business called the Holloman and Garrett Ditch Company with entrepreneur William Holloman. Both companies failed, and eventually Garrett abandoned this field completely and relocated to Texas.
After almost a decade and a half of relative obscurity, Pat Garrett was once again in the headlines in 1896 due to his involvement in the disappearance case of Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain and his eight-year-old son Henry.
Fountain was an attorney with the Texas Senate who made a lot of dangerous enemies when he went after powerful men involved in cattle rustling in the New Mexico Territory.
In late January 1896, he and his son were traveling by wagon back to their home in New Mexico. They disappeared and were presumed murdered on February 1 near White Sands.
Suspicion fell on two wealthy ranchers and rivals of Fountain: Oliver Lee and Albert Fall. The scandal was front-page news across the country.
Governor William Thornton wanted the matter resolved, so he coaxed Pat Garrett out of retirement by making him sheriff of the county. Garrett located the spot where the presumed murders took place. The ground was soaked in blood, and there was a smaller pool of blood a few feet away.
Searching the area, the sheriff and his posse also found empty cartridge casings, Fountain's tie, some of his papers, and his buckboard wagon stained with blood. It was clear something very violent took place there, but investigators were never able to find the bodies.
To make matters more difficult, tracks that led away from the area had been accidentally erased by a passing herd of cattle, which by complete coincidence belonged to Oliver Lee.
Garrett's priority was the corporal alongside Lee, along with two of the ranch's employees, Jim Gilliland and William McNew. The sheriff obtained arrest warrants for all three.
He placed McNew in custody, but the other two made a run for it. Garrett pursued the murder suspects and on July 12, 1898, he caught up to them at the Wildy Well ranch near the Organ Mountains.
A shootout ensued, but it did not go in Garrett's favor. One of his deputies, Ken Kearney, was hit twice. As the situation deteriorated, the sheriff was forced to back down and call a truce so that he could get medical attention to his deputy. Kearney died shortly thereafter.
Lee and Gilliland stayed on the run for another eight months before finally surrendering. At trial, they were represented by Albert Fall, the powerful landowner who hated Fountain and, according to some, might have even orchestrated the whole assassination plot.
Fall was not just a wealthy rancher. He was also a good lawyer and an influential politician. In fact, he would later serve as Secretary of the Interior under President Warren G. Harding. Thanks to his involvement in the Teapot Dome scandal, Fall has the dubious distinction of being the first U.S. cabinet member in history to be convicted and serve prison time for a felony.
During the trial, Garrett's reputation worked against him. The defense argued that the shootout at Wildy Well was self-defense because Pat Garrett had no intention of taking Lee and Gilliland alive if they surrendered. The story went that the sheriff would have gunned them down in cold blood.
This story, alongside Fall's adept defense and the lack of bodies, ensured that the suspects walked away free, not even being charged in Deputy Kearney's death. Not only that, but Oliver Lee went on to have a successful political career, and today there is a state park named after him.
No one else was ever charged in the murder and disappearance of Albert and Henry Fountain, and it remains one of New Mexico's biggest unsolved mysteries.
The last highlight of Garrett's law-enforcement career happened in 1899, when he was pursuing a fugitive wanted for murder named Norman Newman. The chase ended in a gunfight where the sheriff shot the criminal, making Norman Newman the last man killed by Pat Garrett.
Garrett had a stroke of luck in 1901 when Teddy Roosevelt became president of the United States. Roosevelt had a deep fondness for famed frontier lawmen, who he said corresponded to those Vikings like Hastings and Rollo who finally served the course of civilization.
He gave jobs to several of them over the course of his two terms as president, including Seth Bullock of Deadwood fame and Bat Masterson. Consequently, in 1901, Pat Garrett became collector of customs in El Paso.
Garrett's appointment was not well received. Despite numerous complaints, Roosevelt seemed determined to stick by his man. Allegedly, the last straw came when Garrett attended a presidential party and brought along a guest named Tom Powers.
He introduced him to the president as a successful cattleman, and the two took several photos together. It was only later that Roosevelt found out Powers was actually the owner of a notorious saloon in El Paso. After that, the president refused to renew Garrett's appointment in 1905.
Most of the popular icons of the Wild West met violent ends, and Pat Garrett was no exception. On February 29, 1908, he was shot on the way to Las Cruces, New Mexico, and died aged 57.
Ostensibly his killer was a man named Jesse Wayne Brazel, who acted in self-defense. He turned himself in and confessed. At his trial he was defended by none other than Albert Fall, and he was acquitted.
It would appear to be a case closed, except that none of Garrett's relatives, and indeed most historians, believe that Brazel was actually the one who pulled the trigger. There are a lot of conspiracy theories floating around regarding Garrett's murder.
Garrett was in a dispute with Brazel over some lands that the former had leased to the latter for five years. Garrett wanted to break the lease when he discovered that Brazel was going to use the property for goat grazing.
Also involved was a man named Print Rhodes, a friend of Brazel's and an enemy of Garrett's who had run-ins with him while he was still sheriff. There was also W.W. Cox, a wealthy rancher from the area who also hated Garrett and possibly wanted his land.
Eventually the two sides reached an agreement where Brazel would terminate his lease if he had a buyer for his goat herd. This is where another man enters the picture, named Carl Adamson.
The exact details of the agreements are a bit murky, but they are beside the point. What matters is that on the morning of February 29, Pat Garrett, Adamson, and Rhodes were traveling together to Las Cruces.
This is when Brazel shot Garrett twice and then turned himself in to the county sheriff's office, exclaiming, "Lock me up, I've just killed Pat Garrett." Adamson acted as a witness and corroborated Brazel's story that an argument caused Garrett to reach for his shotgun, but Brazel was quicker.
Maybe this is indeed what happened. There were a few things suspicious about Garrett's death, such as the fact that allegedly the former sheriff was shot in the back of the head, and this was never brought up at the trial.
And speaking of the trial, how come of all people Albert Fall was the one who defended Brazel? Fall had close ties to the judge and the prosecutor in the case, and also to rancher W.W. Cox, who some see as the mastermind of the whole plot.
Garrett's son believed Adamson was the killer, and some agree. Others think it was Print Rhodes who caught up to the trio and got his revenge.
There is another major suspect: an outlaw named Jim Miller, better known as "Killing Jim" or "Killer Miller," who sometimes acted as a gun for hire and just happened to be in the area. One popular theory says that Miller was paid by Cox to do the deed.
We probably won't agree on what happened, since none of us can know for certain. What we can agree on is that getting shot in the back of the head and being dumped on the side of the road is a disgraceful, undeserving end for a man once called by Billy the Kid historian Walter Noble Burns "the last great sheriff of the old frontier."