Garrett fires in the dark, and Billy the Kid is dead at twenty-one
Two and a half months earlier, Billy the Kid had escaped Lincoln County jail by killing two deputies, dodging the noose a judge had already set for him. On the night of July 14, 1881, Sheriff Pat Garrett sat waiting in the dark bedroom of Pete Maxwell's house in Fort Sumner, New Mexico Territory. Billy walked in without recognizing Garrett in the dark, drawing his revolver and asking twice in Spanish, "¿Quién es?" Garrett fired twice; the first shot struck him just above the heart, and and the Lincoln County War's last fugitive was dead.
Billy the Kid became the only person ever convicted of a crime in the Lincoln County War, a range conflict born of the same frontier lawlessness and commercial rivalry that shaped New Mexico Territory's path to statehood. His death closed that chapter, but his legend opened another: more than 50 films later built the American mythology of the fast-drawing outlaw around an orphaned son of Irish Catholic immigrants from New York City.
QHow did Billy the Kid trick a man into shooting an empty chamber?
Six months before his own death, Billy killed a man named Joe Grant in Hargrove's Saloon in Fort Sumner using a trick with the revolver itself. Billy had been warned that Grant intended to kill him. Billy, wary, asked to see Grant's pistol, admired it, and while handling it quietly rotated the cylinder so the next pull of the trigger would land on a spent or empty chamber. When Grant tried to shoot him, the hammer fell on nothing. Billy drew his own gun and shot Grant in the head. A reporter for the Las Vegas Optic later quoted him calling it simply a game of two, and he got there first.
QWhat did Billy the Kid say to the deputy he killed during his jailbreak?
During his April 28, 1881 escape, Billy killed two guards, Deputy Bob Olinger and Deputy James Bell. Olinger, who had reportedly mistreated Billy during his confinement, responded to the sound of gunfire and approached the jail. Billy was waiting at a window with Olinger's own shotgun, which he had taken from Garrett's office. He called down to him, "Look up, old boy, and see what you get," then fired. It was one of the rare moments in the historical record where Billy is quoted taunting a man he was about to kill, rather than joking about his own predicament.
QWhy did a blacksmith's insult end in a killing that started Billy's outlaw career?
Before Lincoln County, before Pat Garrett, there was Francis P. "Windy" Cahill, a blacksmith in Bonita, Arizona Territory, who made a habit of bullying the teenage Billy and had called him a degrading name. In August 1877, the harassment ended in gunfire, and Billy shot Cahill dead. A witness at the time offered a blunt defense: Billy had no choice, he had to use his equalizer. It was the killing that turned a teenage laundry thief and jailbreak artist into a fugitive gunman, more than a year before he ever joined the Regulators in Lincoln County.
