R.I.P. PAT GARRETT

February 29, 2008 -- the 100th anniversary of the death of Pat Garrett.

Among Billy aficionados, Pat Garrett’s name is mud. He’s the guy who shot his best friend, the former pard who sold out, who waited in a dark room and blasted the Boy Bandit into kingdom come for a reward. He got his thirty pieces of silver… or maybe he didn’t – some say Pat Garrett never received the $500 reward for killing Billy the Kid.

Pat was an instant hero for shooting the famous outlaw… with headlines in London and New York trumpeting Garrett’s fame as a lawman. But within months it seemed that popular opinion had turned against him. Billy the Kid was a beloved anti-hero, and without knowing it, Pat had killed a legend. Oscar Wilde put it best a few months later, when talking about the death of that other great outlaw Jesse James: “Americans are certainly great hero worshippers and always take their heroes from the criminal classes.”

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to have a sneaking admiration for the Kid-killer. Pat was a guy with a job, a guy looking to make his name and make his fortune, just like everyone else in the West, just like everyone else in America. He was older than Billy, he had a family to support. He needed the money. Unlike the legend, he may not have been Billy’s best friend – or known him very well at all. But I prefer the poetic justice of the legend – an older guy given an unpleasant task, who does his best at it… and gets shafted by history for it.

Sam Peckinpah told the legend best in PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID. The title really sums it up, because the real hero of the legend is Pat, not Billy. Billy the Kid is a force of nature, a god-like young man with nearly supernatural powers and charm. And just as the Greek legends tell us, when you get involved with a God, you get involved with tragedy. So Peckinpah places Garrett at the center of the tale – he has the biggest goal, he has the greatest challenges, he has the most to lose. And lose he does, with that wonderful image at the end, a twist on SHANE, where a young boy runs after the tall lonesome stranger as he rides out of town… only this boy spits and throws a rock. Pat Garrett is our Judas-goat, taking on the sins of the American West.

Well, that’s the legend anyway.

The legend ends there… Pat’s real story continues for decades. Pat goes on to have a fairly long and successful (though controversial) career as a lawman and public servant.

He’s still a sheriff 15 years after Billy’s death when he’s assigned one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the Old West – the disappearance of Albert Fountain and his young son. Fountain was a crusading lawyer – the defense attorney for Billy the Kid himself – who disappeared after getting indictments against a cattle-rustling ring. It’s a strange twist that the killer of Billy the Kid seeks justice for the defender of Billy the Kid. Garrett tracked down the reputed killers after a long hunt and at least one gunfight – only to see them declared not guilty. The killers were linked to some of the most powerful people in New Mexico. The mystery still has never been solved, but it was Garrett’s last job as a sheriff.

Teddy Roosevelt himself personally appoints Garrett to the post of customs collector in El Paso in 1901, 20 years after Billy’s death. But the appointment is withdrawn five years later, for reasons that are not altogether clear.

And a quarter century after the death of Billy the Kid, something very strange begins to happen to Pat Garrett. So strange, in fact, that historians tend to go to great lengths to say “nothing strange happened!”

It begins with Pat’s money problems. He had no job, he was in debt, and told people he was in serious trouble... though he never said what the trouble was. What is clear is that Pat was involved in a complex land dispute with his neighbors. A young cowboy named Jesse Wayne Brazel was grazing goats on Pat’s land – much to Pat’s dismay. On February 29, 1908, Pat was riding in a buggy with his neighbor Carl Adamson, when they ran into Brazel. Words were exchanged. Guns were fired. A couple of hours later Brazel showed up at the local sheriff’s office and confessed to killing the famous lawman Pat Garrett in self-defense.

The murder was bizarre, and nearly inexplicable. Brazel said that in the argument, Pat went for his gun and Brazel fired. When the sheriff arrived at the scene, Pat was lying face down, one bullet wound in the back of his head, another in his chest, apparently killed while urinating. His shotgun was lying nearby, disassembled, still in its case. Clearly, this was not “self-defense” – though a jury declared Brazel not guilty in his murder trial.

Brazel apparently had no reason to kill Garrett. Various theories and various killers have been suggested as the real murderers. A federal investigator named Fred Fornoff suggested that a ring of illegal alien smugglers were responsible (in fact, the man driving Pat’s buggy was convicted of smuggling Chinese laborers just one year later). Some have suggested that professional assassin “Killin’ Jim” Miller was responsible, or the local powerful rancher W.W. Cox, or the cattle-rustling ring that killed Albert Fountain a decade before.

I think author Bill Brooks has the best theory of all in his novel THE STONE GARDEN… Billy the Kid did it, after surviving Pat’s bullet and living in hiding under the name John Miller.

No one knows who killed Pat Garrett or why. The man who was once the West’s most-lauded lawman died along a lonely stretch of desert road, shot in the back of the head, the killer unknown, the motive unclear.

Is it poetic justice -- or justice denied -- that this mystery of the West has never been solved? Does anyone remember how Judas died? And did Garrett die with the same last words as Billy the Kid: “Quien es?” – “Who is it?”

All I know is that as I’ve gotten older – given up some dreams, made compromises, done what I had to – I see myself reflected less in Billy and more in Pat.

So 100 years to the day, I say Adios, Senor Garrett -- mon semblable -- mon frère.