Patrick F. Garrett Autographs, Memorabilia & Collectibles

PAT GARRETT (1850-1908) was elected sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico in 1880. As Sheriff, he captured his onetime friend Billy the Kid, who had been accused of murder. The Kid killed two guards and escaped from jail just before he was to be hanged. On July 14, 1881, Garrett caught up with him at Fort Sumner, a military post near the town of Fort Sumner, New Mexico and shot him to death from ambush in a darkened house. It was in Fort Sumner that he met and married Apolonaria Gutierrez, with whom he had nine children. In April 1882, Garrett published The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid. He lost the next election for Sheriff of Lincoln County. In 1884, he ran for the territorial Senate and lost. He moved from Lincoln County to Tascosa, a settlement on the Canadian River, in the Texas Panhandle. He served as Captain of a unit of Texas Rangers that Texas Governor John Ireland had assigned to protect ranchers from cattle rustlers. Within weeks, Garrett quit the Texas Rangers and returned to southeastern New Mexico, this time to Roswell. He set up a scheme to irrigate the desert in an area with impoverished soil and bad water. In 1890, Garrett ran for Sheriff of Chavez County, which had been carved out of Lincoln County, with Roswell as the new county seat. He lost. In 1891, he moved to Uvalde, a community in south Texas where he raised and raced horses with 22-year-old John Nance Garner, future vice president of the United States under FDR (1933-1941).