To Hell on a Fast Horse Read Online Free PDF Page B

Mexico. At the close of the war, not only did Garrett lose his slave labor force, but a portion of his cotton crop was reportedly confiscated by the occupying Federals. The debts piled up as the senior Garrett went into a spiral, his health failing and his drinking rising inproportion. He lost Elizabeth on March 23, 1867; she was only thirty-seven. He held on for almost a year longer, struggling to maintain both his livelihood and his large family. John Garrett died on February 5, 1868.
    Pat, not yet eighteen, could only watch as court-appointed estate executors dealt with the financially ruined plantation; his father had left debts of more than $30,000. Pat’s brother-in-law, Larkin R. Lay, the final estate executor, sold the lands and possessions to satisfy the creditors, and the Garrett children moved into the Lay home to be raised by their sister Margaret. Furious with Larkin, Pat struck out for Texas on January 25, 1869. He had little more than a rifle, a saddle, a bridle, and a horse.
    There are a number of stories about Pat Garrett’s Texas years—that he killed a black man, started and then abandoned a family, helped drive a herd of Texas cattle to Dodge City. But they remain just that, stories. Garrett first went to Dallas but soon located in Lancaster (twelve miles from Dallas), which was also the home of some old Claiborne Parish neighbors. There the strapping young fellow tried his hand at what he knew best—farming.
    “I went into partnership with the owner of the land,” Garrett recalled, “my share was to be one fourth of what we made and my first work was to grub the ground and clear the land. I got mighty homesick before the crop was made, but I stayed with it.”
    He stayed with it for about two years, until he met a cattleman from Uvalde County who was hiring cowboys, and Garrett’s farming days came to an end. In 1875, Garrett started north with a trail herd bound for Kansas. After about three hundred miles, the cowboys reached the Red River at Denison, where they found thousands of head of cattle, waiting to cross the famed river, then in flood stage. Here Garrett got a close-up look at the dangers of the trail, for some punchers and their horses, as well as a number of cattle, had been lost to the deep, blood-colored waters. A few days’ tough work were required to get the herdsacross and straightened out, after which cowboying had lost much of its romance for Garrett.
    He and a buddy by the name of Luther Duke quit the herd and traded away their ponies and gear and started farming a small patch of corn and cotton. This was hardly a step up, though, and when Garrett met Willis Skelton Glenn, a twenty-six-year-old Georgia native who was about to embark in the buffalo hide business, Glenn found himself with two eager partners.
    “I remember our meeting,” Glenn wrote years later. “Pat was rather young looking for all of his twenty-five or twenty-six years, and he seemed the tallest, most long-legged specimen I ever saw. There was something very attractive and impressive about his personality, even on a first meeting.” Garrett would remain associated with Glenn on the buffalo range for roughly the next three years, first as a business partner and later as Glenn’s salaried hunter. And it is because of Willis Skelton Glenn that the details of what was, for Garrett, his most mortifying deed have been preserved. In fact, Glenn made it a mission of sorts to keep Pat Garrett’s first known killing from ever being forgotten.
    In the brief boom years of buffalo hunting, a good man with a rifle, and Garrett fell into this category, could down sixty or more buffalo a day, and there were hundreds of such hunters on the plains. The skinning and transporting of these hides, several hundred at a time, was hard work that required a crew of men. In camp, Garrett and the others broke the tension and monotony with an occasional practical joke, or if they were near one of the trading points, with gambling,