Patrick Floyd Garrett

Pat Garrett was a buffalo hunter and Fort Sumner saloonkeeper who once counted Billy the Kid among his friends before running for sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico, in 1880 on a promise to bring the Kid in. He tracked his former companion for over a year, capturing him once — after which the Kid escaped and killed two deputies — before finally shooting him in a darkened room at Fort Sumner in July 1881. The killing made Garrett famous and permanently controversial; many in the territory believed the fugitive he shot deserved a trial rather than a bullet in the dark, and Garrett spent years defending the encounter in print, including a ghostwritten memoir. He later served as a customs collector and Doña Ana County sheriff, but never fully escaped the shadow of the single shot that made him notorious. He was murdered in 1908 in a dispute over grazing land, a killing that, like so much of his life, was never definitively resolved.