Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid as I Knew Them

Reminiscences of John P. Meadows

John P. Wilson

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780826333261
• eBook ISBN: 9780826333278
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Cowboy, army guide, farmer, peace officer, and character in his own right, John P. Meadows arrived in New Mexico from Texas as a young man. During his life in the Southwest, he knew or worked for many well-known characters, including William “Billy the Kid” Bonney, Sheriff Pat Garrett, John Selman, Hugh Beckwith, Charlie Siringo, and Pat Coghlan. Meadows helped investigate the disappearance of Colonel Albert Jennings Fountain, and he later bought part of downtown Tularosa, New Mexico, where he served a term as mayor.

The recollections gathered here are based on Meadows’s interviews with a reporter for the Alamogordo News, a partial transcript of his reminiscences given at the Lincoln State Monument, and a talk he gave by invitation in Roswell, New Mexico, to refute inaccuracies in the 1930 MGM movie Billy the Kid.

Chapter 1

Getting Acquainted

Fort Sumner, Pinos Wells, White Oaks

The time ain’t long enough to tell all I know about Billy the Kid. I guess I come into Fort Sumner in 1880—in the spring some time, I think about March.¹ I had had a little bad luck on the plains. I had lost my hat down there and consequently was out on the plains nearly three days without a hat. You can imagine what my face looked like after three days in the sun and wind. My partner’s name was Tom Norris. I knew him a long time and will say this for him; a better man never lived than Tom Norris.

When we got into Fort Sumner, Tom went to get me a hat, and while he was gone, I went and throwed my bed [roll] on the ground under a tree and lay down and pulled a red handkerchief over my face. I was feeling mighty bad, and I was suffering something terrible with my face. After a while some fellow came along and give me a kick on the foot. This made me take the handkerchief off my face. The newcomer said,

“Say, pardner, looks like you were up against it.”

I said, “Yes, that’s the way it feels.”

He said, “What’s the matter with that face of yourn?”

So I told him my troubles and about my hat. He said, “You can’t lay here in that hot sun and wind in that fix.”

I said, “I say so, too.”

He said, “Get up and come on. I’ll give you a room and a cot to lay on.”

I thanked him and said I thought I’d better stay right where I was at. You see Tom and me had just crossed the plains, and I had got so plumb full of creeping vermin that I didn’t want to go into his room, and I told him so.

But he said, “Oh, I’ve had a million on me. Come on.”

So he picked up my bed and walked over to one of the old ’dobes belonging to the Fort. He walked into one of the rooms and laid my bed on an old iron cot that was there. I went in and laid down on it.

Then this young man—he was in his early twenties, but rather boyish looking—went over to the Maxwell house and told old lady Maxwell about me. She was a good, kind woman, and when she learned the condition I was in, she came over and looked at me. She had the young fellow go get a sponge and wash my face off good. Then she started in to doctor me back to health again. The job took five or six days, but my face got as good as ever.

That was how I came to meet Billy the Kid the first time. Up to then I had never heard tell of him, much less saw him. When I began to think of getting up and moseying around, I asked Tom Norris about the hat he was supposed to get for me.

“’Fore God, John,” he said, “I couldn’t find no hat here. Looks like they don’t wear them out here.”

Billy the Kid heard us talking, and says “I’ll give him one” and he did, giving me an old Stetson hat he had. The Kid was around the place for several days and each day came to see that I had something to eat and that my face was doctored. I soon got up and was able to get around. In the meantime Billy the Kid was dealing monte for Pete Maxwell’s sheep herders and sheep shearers. This was his game and he was a master at the art of dealing monte.

Kid and I began to get pretty well acquainted. I found out from him that the day he found me laying out under the tree, he also had just come into Sumner. We had come in from different directions. I had got there about nine or ten, coming down from Sunnyside six or seven miles to the north, while Kid had come about eleven from Cedar Canyon on the south.

At this time he was on his good behavior and the officers were not molesting him. I got to talking with him pretty freely, and the more I talked to him, the better I liked him. And to tell the truth, to many when in life he had quite a little personal charm to his friends. I had a few business dealings with Billy and he always treated me fairly. As we go along I will indicate that the man who is generally chronicled as having turned outlaw really had some excellent traits, along with some of his bad ones. I don’t know how many [men] he had killed—in fact, I didn’t know then he had killed any—and I didn’t care. As a matter of fact, I don’t care even to this day. I liked him right off the reel, and I do to this day, though it has been fifty years since Pat Garrett captured him by killing [him].

Time went on, and we heard about a big fiesta taking place at Puerto de Luna, a Mexican settlement a few miles to the north of Fort Sumner. Kid says to me one day, “John, I have just come over from White Oaks, the new mining town down in Lincoln County, and I want to go to the fiesta and deal monte to them Puerto de Luna fellows. I been dealing monte at White Oaks, and I made some money. I want to try my luck up at Puerto de Luna.”

Then he went on to tell me that he had forty-two head of cattle, yearlings, calves, cows, and two-year-olds, and he put the question to me, “How would it suit you to work for me a little?”

I said, “Kid, I’d work for anybody, if he would give me something to eat.”

He laughed and said he’d give me something to eat and a dollar a day besides if I’d help him take those cattle to Los Portales, where as he put it, he wanted to start a ranch.

I said, “All right, I’ll go, just so I get something to eat.”

My partner, Tom Norris, had got a job driving the mail buckboard from Fort Sumner to Roswell. Pat Boone had been driving on that line, but they changed him from Roswell to Fort Stanton and Tom Norris stepped into his place from Fort Sumner to Roswell.

So I helped Kid take his little bunch of cows over to Los Portales. The first day’s drive with the 40 or more head of cattle brought us to “Stinking Springs.”² We stayed all night there. From there it took two days pretty hard driving to get to Los Portales. I stayed about ten days alone at Portales with that little bunch of cattle.

But things didn’t look good to me, leastways so far as starting a ranch was concerned. First of all, he had only forty-two cattle, a pretty small bunch. In the next place, his location looked like a hide-out. It was in one of the depressions common in that country, which you can’t see from a distance. In this particular one, there were some springs and a rock corral, close to a small cave-like opening in the side of the depression.

The next day after we got there, Kid went back to Fort Sumner and then on up to Puerto de Luna. I was left with the cattle. A few days later a man named Pankey came along who lived on the Arroyo Plaza Larga between Fort Sumner and old Fort Bascom.³ He brought a note from the Kid that said, “John, I have sold that entire outfit, brand and all, to Mr. Pankey, in case he likes it. If he does, count them, tally them out, and collect so much (the note gave the prices for cows, calves, steers, and so on).”

I did just as the note said. Pankey liked the cattle, and I tallied them out and collected just what the Kid had put as the price for each kind. I hadn’t been working for the Kid long enough to earn enough for a new hat; so I helped Pankey drive them back part of the way. At Stinking Springs, Pankey pulled out towards home across to what used to be called Hubbell Springs. I helped him to get them started on the trail that headed for his ranch. Then I got my pack horse and headed into Fort Sumner, getting there late in the evening.

At Fort Sumner there was no store nor saloon at that time.⁴ An old man by the name of Jack Bell was postmaster.⁵ He was an old race rider whom old man Maxwell (Pete Maxwell’s father), had had with him for many years.

I don’t think I ever saw a rougher bunch of men in my life than I found in Fort Sumner the evening I returned. They were all playing poker and drinking heavily. I got pretty uneasy about the $420.00 of the Kid’s money I had in my pocket. I went to Bell’s to get a cigar box to put the money in and he didn’t have any such thing.

Uncle George Fulgum was running a restaurant there, but he was not in sympathy with the rough element.⁶ In fact, they had to bring their whiskey into his place from the outside. I asked Uncle George if he had an old cigar box around anywhere, and he dug around on the shelves awhile and finally found one. I put the money in the cigar box together with a slip of paper that told how many cows, calves, etc., I had sold. Then I went to a spot in the bend of the Pecos River where there were a whole lot of stumps. I selected a big one with a bunch of grass growing around it. I slipped my box under the grass, and then to make doubly sure about marking the spot, I got a rock and laid it on top of the stump.

When I went back and told Uncle George about it, he said, “John, you acted wise. Them men is now over in the Kid’s room, drinking whiskey and playing poker. There must be eight or ten, and they have been at it here for two or three days now. They are a pretty rough bunch, all right, and no mistake.”

When I got up the next morning pretty early, I found that the men were all gone—evaporated, I might say. I didn’t know where they had went, but I knew one thing—I was mighty glad they was gone. I guess from their looks I thought it may have been unhealthy for them to be too conspicuous in the daytime. They were a bunch of outlaws. I did not know a single one of them. They evidently had free and welcome access to Billy the Kid’s room.

A day or so later, Kid himself come in from Puerto de Luna. I was sitting on a bench in front of the old man’s restaurant, when Kid rode in and got off his horse. He asked me about the cattle, and I said, “Yes, I sold them, and have got the money down there in the bend of the river.”

“Well,” he says in great surprise, “what’s it doing there?”

Then I told him about all those men, and he smiled and said, “I guess I can tell you who they were. There was Tom Cooper, Charlie Bowdre, Tom O’Folliard, Billy Wilson,” and he named several others whose names I don’t recollect. Then he added, “I don’t think you was in any danger from them fellows, especially if you had let them know it was my money you was taking care of.”

I went out with him to where the cigar box was, set it up on the stump and opened it. I pulled out the paper and said, “Here’s how many cattle you had and how much they brought.”

He went over the tally list carefully and then said, “You have got one two-year-old steer too many. But I see you’ve got the money for him, so there’s no kick coming.” Then when he finished going over the list, he said, “I see how you done it. You run in a long yearling for a two-year-old steer.” Then he laughed and said, “That’s pretty good, and you made a $10.00 bill by it.” Picking up one of the bills, he handed it to me saying, “John you need it. I think you deserve it too if you can make a cow man like Pankey take a long yearling for a two-year-old.”

This generous treatment brought a warm spot in my heart for that boy, and it’s there yet. When he was rough, he was as rough as men ever get to be, yet he had a good streak in him. Where he got it, the Lord only knows, and He won’t tell. But Kid certainly had good feelings. He done some things I can’t endorse; for example when he killed Charlie [sic; James] Carlyle. He really had no need for doing that.

Kid, I must admit, was too awful rough at times, but everything in the country was rough right about then. It was, to tell the plain truth, very rough. The country was full of all kinds of bad men from cold-blooded deliberate murderers down to sneak thieves, and everybody just had to take care of himself in his own way. The man that was quickest with his gun was the fellow most likely to come out first best. The Kid was always quick with his gun, but sometimes he was quicker than he ought to have been. He done some things that nobody could endorse, and I certainly do not.

But I have gotten far away from my first meeting Kid at Fort Sumner in 1880, about three years after the Kid had come into those parts. A few days after I had reported to Kid about the sale of his cattle, a man named Doc—at least that is what everybody called him, and nothing more—came into Sumner, saying he had lost six head of horses, two of them being especial favorites.

From the way he talked, you could tell that he thought the Kid was mighty likely to know something about the whereabouts of them horses. Doc claimed he had trailed the horses to where they had crossed the Pecos right below Sunnyside. The Kid couldn’t tell him anything about the horses, but, as Doc was the partner of Pankey, Kid turned the talk to the cattle Pankey had bought. The Kid said, “I’ve sold my forty-two head of cattle to Pankey, and I’ll just send him the bill of sale by you.” Then he made a bill of sale out, and George Fulgum and I witnessed it.

After Doc had gone, Kid said, “I’ll bet them horses are up at Pinos Wells.⁷ There’s a bunch of thieves laying up there that’s most likely got them.”

I said, “If that’s so, let’s go get them. That $100.00 reward Doc offers looks good to me.”

The Kid sorter [sort of] put his veto on the plan, saying “I don’t care about fooling with it. I want to ge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Getting Acquainted: Fort Sumner, Pinos Wells, White Oaks
• Chapter 2 Billy and the Lincoln County War
• Chapter 3 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
• Chapter 4 Seven Rivers and Fort Sumner to Silver City in 1880
• Chapter 5 Southern Arizona and Return to New Mexico, 1880
• Chapter 6 I Go to Work for Pat Coghlan
• Chapter 7 How We Guarded One of Pat Garrett’s Prisoners
• Chapter 8 Recovering Stolen Horses from the Indians
• Chapter 9 Life in the Sacramentos in 1881
• Chapter 10 Murder of the Nesmith Family
• Chapter 11 Arresting a Murderer in 1883 in the Agua Chiquita Country
• Chapter 12 My Association with Pat F. Garrett
• Chapter 13 The Howe Murder Case
• Chapter 14 The Cowboys and Their Diversions
• Chapter 15 Experiences in the Early 1890s
• Chapter 16 Feud Murder on the Sacramento River
• Chapter 17 Making Hay Where No Grass Grows Now
• Chapter 18 Calls ’Em Down
• Chapter 19 Catching a Slippery Cow Thief
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Index