The Hunting of Billy the Kid

He said: “God damn you, Garrett; I hope to meet you in Hell.”

Pat said: “I would not talk that way, Tom. You are going to die in a few minutes.”

He said: “Ah, go to hell, you long-legged sonofabitch.” (Pat w as six feet, five inches tall).

The game went on and the blood began running inside Tom. He began groaning and asked me to get him a drink of water. I did. He drank a little, lay back, shuddered and was dead. The poker game went on. It was a thing to get the minds of the men off the fight and keep them from growing morbid.

The next morning at daylight, Bausman and another man were sent out as scouts to see where they had gone. They went up towards the Taiban and found a dead horse, one that Dave Rudabaugh was riding. They had gone about a mile before his horse, which had been shot, died on him, and he had to dismount and get up behind another of the boys. It kept snowing. The winter of 1880 was an exceptionally cold one, and there was a heavy loss of cattle along the Canadian.

We lay over that day, got a Mexican to bury Tom O’Phalliard. We got a Mexican to make a box for him. The next day about twelve o’clock a man by the name of Wilcox who owned a ranch about three miles from the Taiban and about fifteen miles east of Fort Sumner, on what they called the Texas Road but which was not traveled much, came in and said: “Boys, the Kid and his bunch had supper at my house and have gone over to that rock house on the Taiban.” This was a one room house with one door and a little window next to the arroyo near which it stood. It had probably been a sheep ranch. The snow was pretty deep and we had to travel slowly.

We started up there and got to this house just before daylight. Garrett took Tom Emory, Lon Chambers, Jim East and Lee Hall and crawled up the arroyo until he was within about thirty feet of the house. Their horses were tied to the vega poles and we could see them. We crawled up by the low bank of this dry arroyo which was covered with snow to keep under cover.

It was some time before news of the Kid’s capture reached the possemen who had stayed in White Oaks. One of them, the man who called himself Frank Clifford, tells the story:

The boys came in from Fort Sumner, telling us that the “Kid” had been captured, and from there I must tell the story as they told it to us. The only hearsay about this story is from the lips of the men who were actually present at the occurrences, and told to me and the other boys by these men immediately after the event took place.

Garrett and his deputy, Kip McKinney [he means Barney Mason], and five men, together with Frank Stewart and six of our men, formed a posse and went to Fort Sumner. Pat hired a Mexican for one hundred dollars to go to the “Kid’s” hideout on the edge of the Staked Plains and tell the “Kid” that “the Texans,” that was us, had turned back home, and that it was now safe for him to come on in to Fort Sumner, which the “Kid” told the Mexican he would do that evening. When Pat Garrett got that word, he placed his posse out of sight, where they could cover the road which the “Kid’s” gang would ride in on. There were in the gang, the “Kid” (whose name was “William Bonney”), Dave Rudabaugh, Charley Bowdre, Tom O’Phalliard (they have spelled his name O’Folliard on the tombstone which has been put up for these three, as I notice in a photograph which I saw, but we always called him O’Phalliard), and one other whose name I cannot be sure of. I think it was “Wilson”.

When they got opposite to where Pat’s men were hiding, Pat opened fire on them without calling to them to surrender, according to the definite words of these men who told us about it, men who were in the posse, Lon Chambers, Tom Emory, Jim East, “the Animal,” Cal Polk, and Lee Hall, all men who were from our expedition. Well, O’Phalliard was killed, and the rest of the “Kid’s” gang turned back and headed away from there, but with eight or ten inches of snow on the ground they were easily tracked. They went out to their hideout, which was a crude rock shanty at the edge of the Staked Plains. Pat’s men placed themselves just under the edge of a draw where they had full view of the shanty, but were out of sight themselves, and waited for daylight.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to