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Outfoxing Pat Garrett

The great western historian, C.L. Sonnichsen,  called Eugene Manlove Rhodes “The Bard of Tularosa”. The accolade was not casually considered. Rhodes’s, a true southwest cowboy, wrote stories and poems that painted the “hired man with a horse” as a western warrior of muscle and courage, a veritable knight of the desert, his women always virtuous and admirable. However, in 1933, a year before he died, Rhodes asked that his books never be advertised as “Westerns”; rather, he wanted his books fit to be read by “the Discriminating Reader,” and his work called “New Mexico stories.” His point being that The Virginian and The Log of a Cowboy were not “Westerns” (“…where “Western” has come to mean – worthless, trashy, blood and thunder stuff…”) and neither was his work.

The life and work of arguably the best writer of “New Mexico stories” in the early twentieth century have faded from view. His stories are no longer in print. Few of the reading public and relatively few writers, including western writers, are aware of Eugene Manlove Rhodes or his work. He published his first seven novels and numerous magazine stories between 1910 and 1926 while living in Apalachin New York during his “self-imposed exile” from New Mexico. His novels include the classics Pasó Por Aqui, Good Men and True, Bransford of Rainbow Range (The Little Eohippus), and The Trusty Knaves. These tales are unexcelled in painting vivid pictures of southern New Mexico landscapes, in accurately capturing the language and personalities of its men and women, and in describing the hard work and skills it took to survive and perhaps even succeed on the rough desert range and its mountains, places he called “the land of enchantment.”

Eugene Manlove Rhodes’s life and work might be better known today if his publisher had used, in a planned major advertising campaign, the exciting, true story of how Rhodes helped Oliver Lee and Jim Gililland outfox Pat Garrett to avoid a deadly confrontation. It is a story that, even today, might still bring one of the west’s greatest storytellers long overdue, renewed interest and recognition he richly deserves and bring wider recognition to Pat Garrett’s last major case. It is the story told here.

On February 1, 1896, Albert Fountain and his eight year-old son, Henry, vanished near White Sands, New Mexico Territory. Fountain was a tough frontiersman who had led posses and militias to wipeout bandit gangs and marauding Apaches, an attorney, a newspaper publisher, and a leading Republican. He was returning home from a meeting of the grand jury in Lincoln, New Mexico. He had obtained indictments against a number of small ranchers and itinerant cowboys for cattle rustling. Among them was an indictment for Oliver Lee, one of Fountain’s primary Democratic opponents, and a leading light among the small ranchers struggling to survive after a seven-year drought. Within two days after the Fountains disappeared, while posses were still combing the desert looking for some sign of them, Lee was blamed for their murder and Republican oriented newspapers in Las Cruces and El Paso called for him to be lynched.