Chapter XVIII
The Man Hunt—The Western Peace Officer, a Quiet Citizen Who Works for a Salary and Risks His Life—The Trade of Man Hunting—Biography of Pat Garrett, a Typical Frontier Sheriff.
The deeds of the Western sheriff have for the most part gone unchronicled, or have luridly been set forth in fiction as incidents of blood, interesting only because of their bloodiness. The frontier officer himself, usually not a man to boast of his own acts, has quietly stepped into the background of the past, and has been replaced by others who more loudly proclaim their prominence in the advancement of civilization. Yet the typical frontier sheriff, the good man who went after bad men, and made it safe for men to live and own property and to establish homes and to build up a society and a country and a government,
is a historical character of great interest. Among very many good ones, we shall perhaps best get at the type of all by giving the story of one; and we shall also learn something of the dangerous business of man hunting in a region filled with men who must be hunted down.
Patrick Floyd Garrett, better known as Pat Garrett, was a Southerner by birth. He was born in Chambers county, Alabama, June 5, 1850. In 1856, his parents moved to Claiborne parish, Louisiana, where his father was a large landowner, and of course at that time and place, a slave owner, and among the bitter opponents of the new régime which followed the civil war. When young Garrett's father died, the large estates dwindled under bad management; and when within a short time the mother followed her husband to the grave, the family resources, affected by the war, became involved, although the two Garrett plantations embraced nearly three thousand acres of rich Louisiana soil. On January 25, 1869, Pat Garrett, a tall and slender youth of eighteen, set out to seek his fortunes in the wild West, with no resources but such as lay in his brains and body.
He went to Lancaster, in Dallas county, Texas. A big ranch owner in southern Texas wanted men, and Pat Garrett packed up and went home with him. The world was new to him, however, and he went off with the north-bound cows, like many another youngster of the time. His herd was made up at Eagle Lake, and he only accompanied the drive as far north as Denison. There he began to get uneasy, hearing of the delights of the still wilder life of the buffalo hunters on the great plains which lay to the west, in the Panhandle of Texas. For three winters, 1875 to 1877, he was in and out between the buffalo range and the settlements, by this time well wedded to frontier life.
In the fall of 1877, he went West once more, and this time kept on going west. With two hardy companions, he pushed on entirely across the wild and unknown Panhandle country, leaving the wagons near what was known as the "Yellow Houses," and never returning to them. His blankets, personal belongings, etc., he never saw again. He and his friends had their heavy Sharps' rifles, plenty of powder and lead, and their reloading tools, and they had nothing else. Their beds they made of their saddle blankets,
and their food they killed from the wild herds. For their love of adventure, they rode on across an unknown country, until finally they arrived at the little Mexican settlement of Fort Sumner, on the Pecos river, in the month of February, 1878.