Ah, the Days of Valentines and Vampires...
To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West
by Mark Lee Gardner
“The double-helix relationship between Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett is one of the abiding fascinations of the West. No one has come closer than Mark Lee Gardner to capturing their twin destinies and their inevitable final collision.... you can almost smell the gunsmoke and the sweat of the saddles."
— Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder, and Ghost Soldiers
Recommended both for readers of popular history and for scholars, To Hell on a Fast Horse: Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, and the Epic Chase to Justice in the Old West re-creates the exciting manhunt for the Wild West's quintessential outlaw. It is also the first dual biography of the Kid — horse thief, cattle rustler, charismatic rogue, and cold-blooded killer — and Sherriff Pat Garrett. The account, and the chase, really gets underway during Christmas week, 1880, after the capture and confinement of Billy the Kid then saw his daring daylight courthouse escape in Las Vegas on April 28, 1881, leaving bullet-peppered bodies behind. “I am not going to leave the country,” said the Kid, “and I am not going to reform, neither am I going to be taken alive again.” An assertion he surely held until Garrett finally shot him down on July 14, 1881.
Drawing on voluminous primary sources and a wealth of published scholarship, Mark Lee Gardner delves beneath the myth to take a fresh look at these two legends of the Wild West, their association, and their epic ride to immortality — concluding with a survey of the Kid's “robust mythic afterlife” in books and films.
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