Pat Garrett

Patrick Floyd Garrett drifted from Alabama to the Texas Panhandle as a young man, worked as a buffalo hunter and cowhand, and settled in Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory, where he tended bar and, by one account, played cards with Billy the Kid before either man's reputation was fixed. In 1880, local ranchers tired of rustling backed Garrett for sheriff specifically to end the Kid's run, and he won the election on little more than that single promise.

Garrett delivered. He captured the Kid at Stinking Springs in December 1880, lost him to a jailbreak that killed two deputies the following April, and finally tracked him to Fort Sumner, where he shot the Kid dead in a darkened bedroom on the night of July 14, 1881. The killing made Garrett famous and, almost immediately, controversial — critics in the territorial press called it an ambush rather than an arrest, and Garrett spent much of the next year defending himself in a ghostwritten memoir that fixed his version of events as the official one.

The fame never quite paid. Garrett held and lost a string of appointed posts — customs collector at El Paso, captain of an elite Texas Ranger company recruited to police the oil boomtowns — and quarreled constantly over unpaid debts and disputed grazing leases on his Doña Ana County ranch. On February 29, 1908, he was shot in the back of the head during an argument over one of those leases; his killer claimed self-defense and was never seriously prosecuted, and Garrett, who had spent 27 years explaining one killing, never got to explain his own death.