Rules of Engagement: Red Dead Online & Billy the Kid
- James Townsend
- Dec 13, 2022
- 3 min read
It's quite common in the Billy Community that one will see a comment on a social media post that goes something like "Pat Garrett was a coward, hiding out in a bedroom in the dark and ambushing the Kid like that."
Comments like that remind me of a recurring experience I have while playing the video game Red Dead Online, or RDO for short. RDO is a multi-player game played online that is based off of the game Red Dead Redemption 2. You create your own character, and enter a fictionalized version of the American South around the year 1898 or so. You can join posses, find treasures, make and run moonshine, be a bounty hunter, and much more.
You can also gallop around on your horse and shoot other players. People who do this over and over just for the fun of it are called "griefers."
I'm not an aggressive player in RDO. I don't really like messing too much with other players. I sign on and dig up arrowheads and complete daily challenges and hope the next outfit the developers release will be cool.
But often, I'll be out digging up an old family heirloom or something, and another player will sneak up on me and gun me down. When I respawn, I usually load my Navy revolver with explosive ammunition and shoot them, taking them down in one fiery shot. Then I parley with them; which means they cannot attack me or engage me in battle for about ten or fifteen minutes.
When I do this, they almost always get furious, and they will send me a message to the effect of, "Yeah, you had to use explosive ammunition because you're not good enough to fight me fair."
It's always perplexing. First off, I did fight fair, in that I did not cheat the system, or use any game modification or hack to win a fight. I simply used tools provided by the game itself to stop you from killing my character. And second, I didn't agree to some sporting competition in the video game world where I abide by some rules of engagement, meeting the player in the main street of Valentine (an RDO town) and having a formal duel. In fact, I was digging up a treasure and that player popped me from behind.
This experience points to an absurd idea of neo-chivalrous "rules of engagement" and is very similar to what, I believe, people retrospectively expect of Pat Garrett, and accuse him of failing to fulfill.
Pat Garrett did not agree to a formal duel with Billy. And Billy did not abide by any "Code of the West" or rules of engagement as far as "cowboy gunfighting" went.
Billy the Kid, along with other Regulators, shot and killed Sheriff Brady from behind an adobe wall in the streets of Lincoln, when Brady was completely unaware of their presence. Billy the Kid took on Andrew Roberts as part of a posse of fourteen Regulators against one man - hardly a fair fight. Billy the Kid and other Regulators (most likely) assassinated Morton and Baker without giving them a fair shake at victory or escape. Billy the Kid (if you believe the anecdotes) removed Joe Grant's bullet or reset the revolver's cylinder so that it wouldn't fire, giving Billy the drop on Joe. It's possible that Billy the Kid shot Jimmy Carlyle in the back (also possible he didn't shoot him at all). Billy the Kid shot Olinger before giving Olinger a chance to draw.
These are not judgments on the nature of Billy's deeds, or declarations of whether or not these deeds were justified. These are simply examples of times that Billy the Kid did not, himself, follow these unwritten "rules of engagement" that people seem to expect Pat Garrett to have followed that night in Fort Sumner.
The goal in Billy's time seems, like any other time, to have been survival: you did what you had to do in order to survive.
It's not surprising that Pat shot Billy in the dark of Maxwell's bedroom. Pat was shooting to kill Billy at Stinking Spring. Billy had killed Bell and Olinger months before and was literally running for his life. Billy would not have let Pat live.
With those two men in the same room, it was literally a game of two, and the winner was whoever got there first.
It's a shame that armchair outlaws so frequently look back and hold Pat Garrett to higher standards than the Kid ever would've held Pat to, himself.
I don't believe Pat Garrett was a coward. He was on one side of the game, and Billy on the other. That night, Pat just happened to get there first.
Excellent commentary though I will add that at the end of his life Billy showed a moral compass in that even though he felt danger in Pete’s room he refused to shoot at an unknown person. That final act or morality cost him his life.
The way I look at it is like this, of all the people that call Garrett a coward, how many would have the stones to chase down a fellow like Billy the Kid.....twice? Garrett might have been a lot of things, but a coward wasn't one of them.