Biographies of Bad Men--_Desperadoes of the Deserts_--_Billy the Kid,
Jesse Evans, Joel Fowler, and Others Skilled in the Art of Gun
Fighting_.
The desert regions of the West seemed always to breed truculence and
touchiness. Some of the most desperate outlaws have been those of
western Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. These have sometimes been
Mexicans, sometimes half-breed Indians, very rarely full-blood or
half-blood negroes. The latter race breeds criminals, but lacks in the
initiative required in the character of the desperado. Texas and the
great arid regions west of Texas produced rather more than their full
quota of bad white men who took naturally to the gun.
By all means the most prominent figure in the general fighting along the
Southwestern border, which found climax in the Lincoln County War, was
that historic and somewhat romantic character known as Billy the Kid,
who had more than a score of killings to his credit at the time of his
death at the age of twenty-one. His character may not be chosen as an
exemplar for youth, but he affords an instance hardly to be surpassed of
the typical bad man.
The true name of Billy the Kid was William H. Bonney, and he was born in
New York City, November 23, 1859. His father removed to Coffeyville, on
the border of the Indian Nations, in 1862, where soon after he died,
leaving a widow and two sons. Mrs. Bonney again moved, this time to
Colorado, where she married again, her second husband being named
Antrim. All the time clinging to what was the wild border, these two now
moved down to Santa Fé, New Mexico, where they remained until Billy was
eight years of age. In 1868, the family made their home at Silver City,
New Mexico, where they lived until 1871, when Billy was twelve years of
age. His life until then had been one of shifting about, in poverty or
at best rude comfort. His mother seems to have been a wholesome
Irishwoman, of no great education, but of good instincts. Of the boy's
father nothing is known; and of his stepfather little more, except that
he was abusive to the stepchildren. Antrim survived his wife, who died
about 1870. The Kid always said that his stepfather was the cause of his
"getting off wrong."
The Kid was only twelve years old when, in a saloon row in which a
friend of his was being beaten, he killed with a pocket-knife a man who
had previously insulted him. Some say that this was an insult offered to
his mother; others deny it and say that the man had attempted to
horsewhip Billy. The boy turned up with a companion at Fort Bowie, Pima
county, Arizona, and was around the reservation for a while. At last he
and his associate, who appears to have been as well saturated with
border doctrine as himself at tender years, stole some horses from a
band of Apaches, and incidentally killed three of the latter in a night
attack. They made their first step at easy living in this enterprise,
and, young as they were, got means in this way to travel about over
Arizona. They presently turned up at Tucson, where Billy began to employ
his precocious skill at cards; and where, presently, in the
inevitable gambler's quarrel, he killed another man. He fled across
the line now into old Mexico, where, in the state of Sonora, he set up
as a youthful gambler. Here he killed a gambler, José Martinez, over a
monte game, on an "even break," being the fraction of a second the
quicker on the draw. He was already beginning to show his natural
fitness as a handler of weapons. He kept up his record by appearing next
at Chihuahua and robbing a few monte dealers there, killing one whom he
waylaid with a new companion by the name of Segura.
[Illustration: BILLY THE KID
Said to have slain twenty-two men in his short career. Killed when
twenty-one years old by Sheriff Pat F. Garrett]
The Kid was now old enough to be dangerous, and his life had been one of
irresponsibility and lawlessness. He was nearly at his physical growth
at this time, possibly five feet seven and a half inches in height, and
weighing a hundred and thirty-five pounds. He was always slight and
lean, a hard rider all his life, and never old enough to begin to take
on flesh. His hair was light or light brown, and his eyes blue or
blue-gray, with curious red hazel spots in them. His face was rather
long, his chin narrow but long, and his front teeth were a trifle
prominent. He was always a pleasant mannered youth, hopeful and buoyant,
never glum or grim, and he nearly always smiled when talking.
The Southwestern border at this time offered but few opportunities for
making an honest living. There were the mines and there were the cow
ranches. It was natural that the half-wild life of the cow punchers
would sooner or later appeal to the Kid. He and Jesse Evans met
somewhere along the lower border a party of punchers, among whom were
Billy Morton and Frank Baker, as well as James McDaniels; the last named
being the man who gave Billy his name of "The Kid," which hung to him
all his life.
The Kid arrived in the Seven Rivers country on foot. In his course east
over the mountains from Mesilla to the Pecos valley he had been mixed up
with a companion, Tom O'Keefe, in a fight with some more Apaches, of
whom the Kid is reported to have killed one or more. There is no doubt
that the Guadalupe mountains, which he crossed, were at that time a
dangerous Indian country. That the Kid worked for a time for John
Chisum, on his ranch near Roswell, is well known, as is the fact that he
cherished a grudge against Chisum for years, and was more than once upon
the point of killing him for a real or fancied grievance. He left
Chisum and took service with J. H. Tunstall on his Feliz ranch late in
the winter of 1877, animated by what reason we may not know. In doing
this, he may have acted from pique or spite or hatred. There was some
quarrel between him and his late associates. Tunstall was killed by the
Murphy faction on February 18, 1878. From that time, the path of the Kid
is very plain and his acts well known and authenticated. He had by this
time killed several men, certainly at least two white men; and how many
Mexicans and Indians he had killed by fair means or foul will never be
really known. His reputation as a gun fighter was well established.
Dick Brewer, Tunstall's foreman, was now sworn in as a "special deputy"
by McSween, and a war of reprisal was now on. The Kid was soon in the
saddle with Brewer and after his former friends, all Murphy allies.
There were about a dozen in this posse. On March 6, 1878, these men
discovered and captured a band of five men, including Frank Baker and
Billy Morton, both old friends of the Kid, at the lower crossing of the
Rio Peñasco, some six miles from the Pecos. The prisoners were kept
over night at Chisum's ranch, and then the posse started with them for
Lincoln, not taking the Hondo-Bonito trail, but one _via_ the Agua
Negra, on the east side of the Capitans; proof enough that something
bloody was in contemplation, for that was far from any settlements.
Apologists of the Kid say that Morton and Baker "tried to escape," and
that the Kid followed and killed them. The truth in all probability is
that the party, sullen and bloody-minded, rode on, waiting until wrath
or whiskey should inflame them so as to give resolution for the act they
all along intended. The Kid, youngest but most determined of the band,
no doubt did the killing of Billy Morton and Frank Baker; and in all
likelihood there is truth in the assertion that they were on their knees
and begging for their lives when he shot them. McClosky was killed by
McNab, on the principle that dead men tell no tales. This killing was on
March 9, 1878. The murder of Sheriff William Brady and George Hindman by
the Kid and his half-dozen companions occurred April 1, 1878, and it is
another act which can have no palliation whatever.
The Kid was now assuming prominence as a gun fighter and leader, young
as he was. After the big fight in Lincoln was over, and the McSween
house in flames, the Kid was leader of the sortie which took him and a
few of his companions to safety. The list of killings back of him was
now steadily lengthening, and, indeed, one murder followed another so
fast all over that country that it was hard to keep track of them all.
The killing of the Indian agency clerk, Bernstein, August 5, 1878, on a
horse-stealing expedition, was the next act of the Kid and his men, who
thereafter fled northeast, out through the Capitan Gap, to certain old
haunts around Fort Sumner, some ninety miles north of Roswell, up the
Pecos valley. Here a little band of outlaws, led by the Kid, lived for a
time as they could by stealing horses along the Bonito and around the
Capitans, and running them off north and east. There were in this band
at the time the Kid, Charlie Bowdre, Doc Skurlock, Wayt, Tom O'Folliard,
Hendry Brown and Jack Middleton. Some or all of these were in the march
with stolen horses which the Kid engineered that fall, going as far east
as Atacosa, on the Canadian, before the stock was all gotten rid of.
Middleton, Wayt, and Hendry Brown there left the Kid's gang, telling him
that he would get killed before long; but the latter laughed at them
and returned to his old grounds, alternating between Lincoln and Fort
Sumner, and now and then stealing some cows from the Chisum herd.
In January, 1880, the Kid enlarged his list of victims by killing, in a
very justifiable encounter, a bad man from the Panhandle by the name of
Grant, who had been loafing around in his country, and who, no doubt,
intended to kill the Kid for the glory of it. The Kid had, a few moments
before he shot Grant, taken the precaution to set the hammer of the
latter's revolver on an "empty," as he whirled it over in examination.
They were apparently friends, but the Kid knew that Grant was drunk and
bloodthirsty. He shot Grant twice through the throat, as Grant snapped
his pistol in his face. Nothing was done with the Kid for this, of
course.
Birds of a feather now began to appear in the neighborhood of Fort
Sumner, and the Kid's gang was increased by the addition of Tom Pickett,
and later by Billy Wilson, Dave Rudabaugh, Buck Edwards, and one or two
others. These men stole cattle now from ranges as far east as the
Canadian, and sold them to obliging butcher-shops at the new mining
camp of White Oaks, just coming into prominence; or, again, they took
cattle from the lower Pecos herds and sold them north at Las Vegas; or
perhaps they stole horses at the Indian reservation and distributed them
along the Pecos valley. Their operations covered a country more than two
hundred miles across in either direction. They had accomplices and
friends in nearly every little _placita_ of the country. Sometimes they
gave a man a horse as a present. If he took it, it meant that they could
depend upon him to keep silent. Partly by friendliness and partly by
terrorizing, their influence was extended until they became a power in
all that portion of the country; and their self-confidence had now
arisen to the point that they thought none dared to molest them, while
in general they behaved in the high-handed fashion of true border
bandits. This was the heyday of the Kid's career.
It was on November 27, 1880, that the Kid next added to his list of
killings. The men of White Oaks, headed by deputy sheriff William
Hudgens, saloon-keeper of White Oaks, formed a posse, after the fashion
of the day, and started out after the Kid, who had passed all bounds in
impudence of late. In this posse were Hudgens and his brother, Johnny
Hudgens, Jim Watts, John Mosby, Jim Brent, J. P. Langston, Ed. Bonnell,
W. G. Dorsey, J. W. Bell, J. P. Eaker, Charles Kelly, and Jimmy Carlyle.
They bayed up the Kid and his gang in the Greathouse ranch, forty miles
from White Oaks, and laid siege, although the weather was bitterly cold
and the party had not supplies or blankets for a long stay. Hudgens
demanded the surrender of the Kid, and the latter said he could not be
taken alive. Hudgens then sent word for Billy Wilson to come out and
have a talk. The latter refused, but said he would talk with Jimmy
Carlyle, if the latter would come into the house. Carlyle, against the
advice of all, took off his pistol belt and stepped into the house. He
was kept there for hours. About two o'clock in the afternoon they heard
the window glass crash and saw Carlyle break through the window and
start to run. Several shots followed, and Carlyle fell dead, the bullets
that killed him cutting dust in the faces of Hudgens' men, as they lay
across the road from the house.
This murder was a nail in the Kid's coffin, for Carlyle was well liked
at White Oaks. By this time the toils began to tighten in all
directions. The United States Government had a detective, Azariah F.
Wild, in Lincoln county. Pat Garrett had now just been elected sheriff,
and was after the outlaws. Frank Stewart, a cattle detective, with a
party of several men, was also in from the Canadian country looking for
the Kid and his gang for thefts committed over to the east of Lincoln
county, across the lines of Texas and the Neutral Strip. The Kid at this
time wrote to Captain J. C. Lea, at Roswell, that if the officers would
leave him alone for a time, until he could get his stuff together, he
would pull up and leave the country, going to old Mexico, but that if he
was crowded by Garrett or any one else, he surely would start in and do
some more killing. This did not deter Garrett, who, with a posse made up
of Chambers, Barney Mason, Frank Stewart, Juan Roibal, Lee Halls, Jim
East, "Poker Tom," "Tenderfoot Bob," and "The Animal," with others, all
more or less game, or at least game enough to go as far as Fort Sumner,
at length rounded up the Kid, and took him, Billy Wilson, Tom Pickett
and Dave Rudabaugh; Garrett killing O'Folliard and Bowdre.
Pickett was left at Las Vegas, as there was no United States warrant out
against him. Rudabaugh was tried later for robbing the United States
mails, later tried for killing his jailer, and was convicted and
sentenced to be hung; but once more escaped from the Las Vegas jail and
got away for good. The Kid was not so fortunate. He was tried at
Mesilla, before Judge Warren H. Bristol, the same man whose life he was
charged with attempting in 1879. Judge Bristol appointed Judge Ira E.
Leonard, of Lincoln, to defend the prisoner, and Leonard got him
acquitted of the charge of killing Bernstein on the reservation. He was
next tried, at the same term of court, for the killing of Sheriff
William Brady, and in March, 1881, he was convicted under this charge
and sentenced to be hanged at Lincoln on May 13, 1881. He was first
placed under guard of Deputies Bob Ollinger and Dave Woods, and taken
across the mountains in the custody of Sheriff Garrett, who received his
prisoner at Fort Stanton on April 21.
Lincoln county was just beginning to emerge from savagery. There was no
jail worth the name, and all the county could claim as a place for the
house of law and order was the big store building lately owned by
Murphy, Riley & Dolan. It was necessary to keep the Kid under guard for
the three weeks or so before his execution, and Sheriff Garrett chose as
the best available material Bob Ollinger and J. W. Bell, a good, quiet
man from White Oaks, to act as the death watch over this dangerous man,
who seemed now to be nearly at the end of his day.
Against Bob Ollinger the Kid cherished an undying hatred, and longed to
kill him. Ollinger hated him as much, and wanted nothing so much as to
kill the Kid. He was a friend of Bob Beckwith, whom the Kid had killed,
and the two had always been on the opposite sides of the Lincoln county
fighting. Ollinger taunted the Kid with his deeds, and showed his own
hatred in every way. There are many stories about what now took place in
this old building at the side of bloody little Lincoln street. A common
report is that in the evening of April 28, 1881, the Kid was left alone
in the room with Bell, Ollinger having gone across the street for
supper; that the Kid slipped his hands out of his irons--as he was able
to do when he liked, his hands being very small--struck Bell over the
head with his shackles while Bell was reading or was looking out of the
window, later drawing Bell's revolver from its scabbard and killing him
with it. This story is not correct. The truth is that Bell took the
Kid, at his request, into the yard back of the jail; returning, the Kid
sprang quickly up the stairs to the guard-room door, as Bell turned to
say something to old man Goss, a cook, who was standing in the yard. The
Kid pushed open the door, caught up a revolver from a table, and sprang
to the head of the stairs just as Bell turned the angle and started up.
He fired at Bell and missed him, the ball striking the left-hand side of
the staircase. It glanced, however, and passed through Bell's body,
lodging in the wall at the angle of the stair. Bell staggered out into
the yard and fell dead. This story is borne out by the reports of Goss
and the Kid, and by the bullet marks. The place is very familiar to the
author, who at about that time practiced law in the same building, when
it was used as the Court House, and who has also talked with many men
about the circumstances.
The Kid now sprang into the next room and caught up Ollinger's heavy
shotgun, loaded with the very shells Ollinger had charged for him. He
saw Ollinger coming across the street, and just as he got below the
window at the corner of the building the Kid leaned over and said,
coolly and pleasantly, "Hello, old fellow!" The next instant he fired
and shot Ollinger dead. He then walked around through the room and out
upon the porch, which at that time extended the full length of the
building, and, coming again in view of Ollinger's body, took a second
deliberate shot at it. Then he broke the gun across the railing and
threw the pieces down on Ollinger's body. "Take that to hell with you,"
he said coolly. Then, seeing himself free and once more king of Lincoln
street, he warned away all who would approach, and, with a file which he
compelled Goss to bring to him, started to file off one of his leg
irons. He got one free, ordered a bystander to bring him a horse, and at
length, mounting, rode away for the Capitans, and so to a country with
which he had long been familiar. At Las Tablas he forced a Mexican
blacksmith to free him of his irons. He sent the horse, which belonged
to Billy Burt, back by some unknown friend the following night.
He was now again on his native heath, a desperado and an outlaw indeed,
and obliged to fight for his life at every turn; for now he knew the
country would turn against him, and, as he had been captured through
information furnished through supposed friends, he knew that treachery
was what he might expect. He knew also that sheriff Garrett would never
give him up now, and that one or the other of the two must die.
Yet, knowing all these things, the Kid, by means of stolen horses, broke
back once more to his old stamping grounds around Fort Sumner. Garrett
again got on his trail, and as the Kid, with incredible fatuity, still
hung around his old haunts, he was at length able to close with him once
more. With his deputies, John Poe and Thomas P. McKinney, he located the
Kid in Sumner, although no one seemed to be explicit as to his
whereabouts. He went to Pete Maxwell's house himself, and there, as his
two deputies were sitting at the edge of the gallery in the moonlight,
he killed the Kid at Maxwell's bedside.
Billy the Kid had very many actual friends, whom he won by his pleasant
and cheerful manners and his liberality, when he had anything with which
to be liberal, although that was not often. He was very popular among
the Mexicans of the Pecos valley. As to the men the Kid killed in his
short twenty-one years, that is a matter of disagreement. The usual
story is twenty-one, and the Kid is said to have declared he wanted
to kill two more--Bob Ollinger and "Bonnie" Baca--before he died, to
make it twenty-three in all. Pat Garrett says the Kid had killed eleven
men. Others say he had killed nine. A very few say that the Kid never
killed any man without full justification and in self-defense. They
regard the Kid as a scapegoat for the sins of others. Indeed, he was
less fortunate than some others, but his deeds brought him his deserts
at last, even as they left him an enduring reputation as one of the most
desperate desperadoes ever known in the West.
[Illustration: From a painting by John W. Norton
"THE NEXT INSTANT HE FIRED AND SHOT OLLINGER DEAD"]
Central and eastern New Mexico, from 1860 to 1880, probably held more
desperate and dangerous men than any other corner of the West ever did.
It was a region then more remote and less known than Africa is to-day,
and no record exists of more than a small portion of its deeds of blood.
Nowhere in the world was human life ever held cheaper, and never was any
population more lawless. There were no courts and no officers, and most
of the scattered inhabitants of that time had come thither to escape
courts and officers. This environment which produced Billy the Kid
brought out others scarcely less dangerous, and of a few of these there
may be made passing mention.
Joel Fowler was long considered a dangerous man. He was a ranch owner
and cow man, but he came into the settlements often, and nearly always
for the immediate purpose of getting drunk. In the latter condition he
was always bloodthirsty and quarrelsome, and none could tell what or
whom he might make the object of his attack. He was very insulting and
overbearing, very noisy and obnoxious, the sort of desperado who makes
unarmed men beg and compels "tenderfeet" to dance for his amusement. His
birth and earlier life seem hidden by his later career, when, at about
middle life, he lived in central New Mexico. He was accredited with
killing about twenty men, but there may have been the usual exaggeration
regarding this. His end came in 1884, at Socorro. He was arrested for
killing his own ranch foreman, Jack Cale, a man who had befriended him
and taken care of him in many a drunken orgy. He stabbed Cale as they
stood at the bar in a saloon, and while every one thought he was
unarmed. The law against carrying arms while in the settlements was then
just beginning to be enforced; and, although it was recognized as
necessary for men to go armed while journeying across those wild and
little settled plains, the danger of allowing six-shooters and whiskey
to operate at the same time was generally recognized as well. If a man
did not lay aside his guns on reaching a town, he was apt to be invited
to do so by the sheriff or town marshal, as Joel had already been asked
that evening.
Fowler's victim staggered to the door after he was stabbed and fell dead
at the street, the act being seen by many. The law was allowed to take
its course, and Fowler was tried and sentenced to be hanged. His lawyers
took an appeal on a technicality and sent the case to the supreme court,
where a long delay seemed inevitable. The jail was so bad that an
expensive guard had to be maintained. At length, some of the citizens
concluded that to hang Fowler was best for all concerned. They took him,
mounted, to a spot some distance up the railroad, and there hanged him.
Bill Howard, a negro section hand, was permitted by his section boss to
make a coffin and bury Fowler, a matter which the Committee had
neglected; and he says that he knows Fowler was buried there and left
there for several years, near the railway tracks. The usual story says
that Fowler was hanged to a telegraph pole in town. At any rate, he was
hanged, and a very wise and seemly thing it was.
Jesse Evans was another bad man of this date, a young fellow in his
early twenties when he first came to the Pecos country, but good enough
at gun work to make his services desirable. He was one of the very few
men who did not fear Billy the Kid. He always said that the Kid might
beat him with the Winchester, but that he feared no man living with the
six-shooter. Evans came very near meeting an inglorious death. He and
the notorious Tom Hill once held up an old German in a sheep camp near
what is now Alamagordo, New Mexico. The old man did not know that they
were bad men, and while they were looting his wagon, looking for the
money he had in a box under the wagon seat, he slipped up and killed Tom
Hill with his own gun, which had been left resting against a bush near
by, nearly shooting Hill's spine out. Then he opened fire on Jesse, who
was close by, shooting him twice, through the arm and through the lungs.
The latter managed to get on his horse, bareback, and rode that night,
wounded as he was, and partly trailed by the blood from his lungs,
sixty miles or more to the San Augustine mountains, where he holed up at
a friendly ranch, later to be arrested by Constable Dave Wood, from the
railway settlements. In default of better jurisdiction, he was taken to
Fort Stanton, where he lay in the hospital until he got ready to escape,
when he seems to have walked away. Evans and his brother, who was known
as George Davis--the latter being the true name of both--then went down
toward Pecos City and got into a fight with some rangers, who killed his
brother on the spot and captured Jesse, who was confined in the Texas
penitentiary for twenty years. He escaped and was returned; yet in the
year 1882, when he should have been in the Texas prison, he is said to
have been seen and recognized on the streets of Lincoln. Evans, or
Davis, is said to have been a Texarkana man, and to have returned to his
home soon after this, only to find his wife living with another man, and
supposing her first husband dead. He did not tell the new husband of his
presence, but took away with him his boy, whom he found now well grown.
It was stated that he went to Arizona, and nothing more is known of him.
Tom Hill, the man above mentioned as killed by the sheep man, was a
typical rough, dark, swarthy, low-browed, as loud-mouthed as he was
ignorant. He was a braggart, but none the less a killer.
Charlie Bowdre is supposed to have been a Texas boy, as was Tom Hill.
Bowdre had a little ranch on the Rio Ruidoso, twenty miles or so from
Lincoln; but few of these restless characters did much farming. It was
easier to steal cattle, and to eat beef free if one were hungry. Bowdre
joined Billy the Kid's gang and turned outlaw for a trade. It was all
over with his chances of settling down after that. He was a man who
liked to talk of what he could do, and a very steady practicer with the
six-shooter, with which weapon he was a good shot, or just good enough
to get himself killed by sheriff Pat Garrett.
Frank Baker, murdered by his former friend, Billy the Kid, at Agua
Negra, near the Capitans, was part Cherokee in blood, a well-spoken and
pleasant man and a good cow hand. He was drawn into this fighting
through his work for Chisum as a hired man. Baker was said to be
connected with a good family in Virginia, who looked up the facts of his
death.
Billy Morton, killed with Baker by the Kid, was a similar instance of a
young man loving the saddle and six-shooter and finally getting tangled
up with matters outside his proper sphere as a cow hand. He had often
ridden with the Kid on the cow range. He was said to have been with the
posse that killed Tunstall.
Hendry Brown was a crack gun fighter, whose services were valued in the
posse fighting. He went to Kansas and long served as marshal of
Caldwell. He could not stand it to be good, and was killed after robbing
the bank and killing the cashier.
Johnny Hurley was a brave young man, as brave as a lion. Hurley was
acting as deputy for sheriff John Poe, together with Jim Brent, when the
desperado Arragon was holed up in an adobe and refused to surrender. The
Mexican shot Hurley as he carelessly crossed an open space directly in
front of the door. Hurley was brown-haired and blue-eyed; a very
pleasant fellow.
Andy Boyle, one of the rough and ruthless sort of warriors, was an
ex-British soldier, a drunkard, and a good deal of a ruffian. He drank
himself to death after a decidedly mixed record.
John McKinney had a certain fame from the fact that in the fight at the
McSween house the Kid shot off half his mustache for him at close range,
when the latter broke out of cover and ran.
The tough buffalo hunter, Bill Campbell, who figured largely in bloody
deeds in New Mexico, was arrested, but escaped from Fort Stanton, and
was never heard from afterward. He came from Texas, but little is known
of him. His name, as earlier stated, is thought to have been Ed.
Richardson.
Captain Joseph C. Lea, the staunch friend of Pat Garrett, and the man
who first brought him forward as a candidate for sheriff of Lincoln
county, died February 8, 1904, at Roswell, where he lived for a long
time. Lea was said to have been a Quantrell man in the Lawrence
massacre. Much of the population of that region had a history that was
never written. Lea was a good man and much respected, peaceable,
courteous and generous.
One more southwestern bad man found Texas congenial after the close of
his active fighting, and his is a striking story. Billy Wilson was a
gentlemanly and good-looking young fellow, who ran with Billy the Kid's
gang. Wilson was arrested on a United States warrant, charged with
passing counterfeit money; but he later escaped and disappeared. Several
years after all these events had happened, and after the country had
settled down into quiet, a certain ex-sheriff of Lincoln county chanced
to be near Uvalde, Texas, for several months. There came to him without
invitation, a former merchant of White Oaks, New Mexico, who told the
officer that Billy Wilson, under another name, was living below Uvalde,
towards the Mexican frontier. He stated that Wilson had been a cow hand,
a ranch foreman and cow man, was now doing well, had resigned all his
bad habits, and was a good citizen. He stated that Wilson had heard of
the officer's presence and asked whether the latter would not forego
following up a reformed man on the old charges of another and different
day. The officer replied at once that if Wilson was indeed leading a
right life, and did not intend to go bad again, he would not only leave
him alone, but would endeavor to secure for him a pardon from the
president of the United States. Less than six months from that time,
this pardon, signed by President Grover Cleveland, was in the possession
of this officer, in his office in a Rio Grande town of New Mexico. A
telegram was sent to Billy Wilson, and he was brave man enough to come
and take his chances. The officer, without much speech, went over to his
safe, took out the signed pardon from the president, and handed it to
Wilson. The latter trembled and broke into tears as he took the paper.
"If you ever need my life," said he, "count on me. And I'll never go
back on this!" as he touched the executive pardon. He went back to
Texas, and is living there to-day, a good citizen. It would be wrong to
mention names in an incident like this.
Tom O'Folliard was another noted character. He was something of a gun
expert, in his own belief, at least. He was a man of medium height and
dark complexion, and of no very great amount of mental capacity. He came
into the lower range from somewhere east, probably from Texas, and
little is known of him except that he was in some fighting, and that he
is buried at Sumner with Bowdre and the Kid. He got away with one or two
bluffs and encounters, and came to think that he was as good as the best
of men, or rather as bad as the worst; for he was one of those who
wanted a reputation as a bad man.
Tom Pickett was another not far from the O'Folliard class, ambitious to
be thought wild and woolly and hard to curry; which he was not, when it
came to the real currying, as events proved. He was a very pretty
handler of a gun, and took pride in his skill with it. He seems to have
behaved well after the arrest of the Kid's gang near Sumner, and is not
known in connection with any further criminal acts, though he still for
a long time wore two guns in the settlements. Once a well-known sheriff
happened, by mere chance, to be in his town, not knowing Pickett was
there. The latter literally took to the woods, thinking something was on
foot in which he was concerned. Being reminded that he had lost an
opportunity to show how bad he was he explained: "I don't want anything
to do with that long-legs." Pickett, no doubt, settled down and became a
useful man. Indeed, although it seems a strange thing to say, it is the
truth that much of the old wildness of that border was a matter of
general custom, one might also say of habit. The surroundings were wild,
and men got to running wild. When times changed, some of them also
changed, and frequently showed that after all they could settle down to
work and lead decent lives. Lawlessness is sometimes less a matter of
temperament than of surroundings.