• Just as James Swanson did for the chase for John Wilkes Booth, Mark Lee Gardner takes readers along on Pat Garrett’s hunt for Billy the Kid, offering a fresh, thrilling angle on a legendary historical figure.

• While Billy the Kid is the marquee name, the Pat Garrett story—told briefly in the Sam Peckinpah movie—is equally fascinating and told in full, with a startling revelation about the man who murdered Garrett.

• To find the truth about Billy the Kid, Gardner re-examines previous interpretations of the tumultuous events in which the Kid and Garrett were active participants, revisits old myths, and probes the many remaining mysteries surrounding the legend.

• With his winning blend of popular and scholarly history, Gardner is a go-to writer for the National Park Service, for whom he has written numerous official guides, and a Western scholar who has written monographs for several prominent university presses.

Billy the Kid—a.k.a. Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim, and William Bonney—was a horse thief, cattle rustler, charismatic rogue, and cold-blooded killer. A superb shot, the Kid gunned down four men single handedly and five others with the help of cronies. Two of his victims were Lincoln County, NM, deputies, killed during the Kid’s brazen daylight escape from the courthouse jail on April 28, 1881. After dispensing with his guards and breaking the chain securing his leg irons, The Kid danced a macabre jig on the jail’s porch before riding away on a stolen horse as terrified townspeople—and many sympathizers—watched. For new sheriff, Pat Garrett, the chase was on . . .

To Hell on a Fast Horse recreates the thrilling manhunt for the Wild West’s most iconic outlaw. It is also the first “dual biography” of the Kid and Garrett, two larger-than-life figures who would not have become the stuff of legend without the other. Drawing on voluminous primary sources and a wealth of published scholarship, Mark Lee Gardner digs beneath the myth to take a fresh look at these two men, their relationship, and what they would come to mean to a public enamored of a violent national past.