If there is a story that perfectly reflects the image we all have of the American Wild West, it is the confrontation between the marshal Patt Garrett and outlaw Billy the Kid.
Much has been written about the figure of the bandit William Bonney and his bloody death record since he was a teenager. William Henry McCarthy was born in New York around 1859. His father died as a child and young William traveled through various states with his mother Catherine and her brother until she found a new partner. In 1874 William's mother died in Silver City, New Mexico, and his stepfather left for Arizona.
Billy is forced to look for life and begins to stumble with justice and earns a certain fame, especially for his ability to escape from the various prisons in which he was imprisoned after various incidents that ended with the death of his adversaries, although in In some cases, it seems that Bonney acted in self-defense.
In any case, in 1877 young William's reputation as a gunfighter led him to be hired by John H. Tunstall, an Englishman who was in Lincoln, New Mexico, in the midst of a trade war for control of government contracts for the supply of meat for the army and the Indian reservations. Both Tunstall and his rival, former Army officer Lawrence G. Murphy, had powerful supporters and the affair escalated into open warfare with several deaths. As a consequence of the high position of both contenders, some of the deceased had been designated as a representative of the law. Billy the Kid was involved in some of those deaths.
Precisely the accusation that weighed on Billy of having killed a sheriff it deprived him of benefiting from the pardon that ended the conflict in Lincoln and that was ordered by the new governor of New Mexico, a character that we have already talked about other times in the blog:Lewis Wallace, author of the novel Ben-Hur.
Billy became one of the most famous outlaws in the West and saw a price put on his head. There are doubts as to whether Bonney carried out any of the murders of which he was accused, but the truth is that he became the main target of the law and bounty hunters in the territory.
And it is at that moment when the other protagonist of our story, Pat Garrett, enters the scene. Garrett's story is that of a much-repeated figure in the turbulent 19th-century West:that of the gunslinger who at one point goes over to the side of the law, agrees to wear the star, and persecutes those who until recently had been his fellow adventurers.
Many legends have been written about the previous relationship between Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. That they knew each other is clearly proven; that they were friends as some maintain is not so. The fact is that for Garrett the capture of Billy becomes the task of his life. In fact, in 1880 Pat arrests "the Kid" who is sentenced to death after a trial in Lincoln, but Billy escapes from his prison by killing two of the sheriff's deputies.
Finally, on July 14, 1881, and after the tip of a friend of Billy, Garrett located him on a ranch in Fort Summer, New Mexico and fired three shots that ended the life of Billy "the Kid". At the time of his death he was twenty-one years old and his involvement in many of the deaths attributed to him has since been questioned, but Billy "the Kid" has gone down in history as the prototype outlaw of the American Wild West. /P>
Once again I have to recommend for those who want to learn more about this and other stories of the West the book "A Brief History of the Wild West. Gunmen and outlaws”, by Gregorio Doval. More specifically, in relation to the story of Billy “the Kid” and Pat Garrett, I recommend Mark Lee Gardner's book “To Hell on a Fast Horse”. Both have served as a source for this entry.