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The Notorious Men of the Wild West

Khalid Elhassan December 4, 2019 32 min

8. From Regulator to Rustler

The building where Sheriff Pat Garrett surrounded Charlie Bowdre, Billy the Kid, and the rest of their outlaw outfit. True West Magazine

Bowdre wound up on the losing side of the conflict, and the Regulators, now led by Billy the Kid, became a cattle thieving gang, appropriately renamed the “Rustlers”. In 1880, Bowdre joined the Rustlers in a failed attempt to assassinate lawman Pat Garrett. A gunfight ensued, and Bowdre and the surviving Rustlers fled to an isolated stone house hideout.

Unbeknownst to the Rustlers, they were tracked by a posse, which surrounded their hideout during the night. The following dawn, Bowdre emerged from the house to feed the horses, and was immediately shot multiple times. He fell back into the house, mortally wounded. Urged by Billy the Kid to “take a few of them with you when you die“, Bowdre staggered to his feet and charged out the door, to be met by another hail of gunfire that instantly killed him.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.