To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West

Perhaps I should be embarrassed to admit this, but I was only vaguely family with Billy the Kid, and I'd never heard of Pat Garrett before I read this book - which I picked up at the library entirely because of the title. That I quickly discovered it was set in New Mexico, which I've come to believe is one of the most beautiful, yet underrated, parts of this country, was the icing on the cake. (I've included a couple of pictures below in an attempt to show you what I mean.)

As in Dick Kreck's Hell on Wheels - hell, it seems, being a very common theme in books about the American West of yesteryear - Mark Lee Gardner draws his reader into a time and place that has entirely vanished, except in the collective imagination. Outlaws were common then, every man - and not too few women - packed at least one weapon at all times and gambling, liquor, and errant (to say nothing of well-aimed) shots were entirely commonplace. Cattle rustling was rather an accepted risk, and Billy the Kid and his friends might have continued merrily along, stealing a horse here and a heifer there, if it weren't for the fact that two of the men who died at their hands were Sheriff William Brady and his deputy, William Hindman. (As Gardner notes, no one, including the US District Attorney, appeared to be upset by the outcome of a previous murder trial for the death of one Andrew Roberts, which resulted in the entire case being dismissed.)

Even if they'd wanted to put an end to the Kid's antics, no one had been able to arrest him for years, not until Pat Garrett accepted the challenge to become one of the first bounty hunters. It was Garrett who made possible the trial - both for Roberts and for Brady/Hindman - and whatever flaws he may have had personally (he himself having killed not too few men and being an inveterate gambler who once told Teddy Roosevelt, when asked about his gambling, "I know the difference between a straight and a flush, Mr. President, and in my section of the country, a man who doesn't know this doesn't know to keep the flies off in fly season.") - he was also deeply committed to justice.

To Hell on a Fast Horse is full of outsize characters and improbable events. Yet, Gardner both brings them alive and brings them all down to size with pithy language that is worthy of the people and events he describes. When writing of a posse hunting for one of Billy's outlaw friends, Gardner writes that he could not be caught: "Folliard's horse was damn fast; outlaws generally try to steal the best horses," and of the Kid himself, he "was not an early riser - long nights of women, dancing, and gambling will do that."

To Hell on a Fast Horse should be required reading for anyone with even a hint of interest in the American West. And, of course, you should all try to visit New Mexico.