The Tipsy Texan

An interesting excerpt from the Denton Record Chronicle, June 23, 1963, concerning John W. Poe’s informant in White Oaks:

A Tipsy Texian From Tascosa Betrayed Billy the Kid… His Reward: a Silver Dollar

Curiously, in 1881 when large rewards were paid for turning in desperados, Billy the Kid – the greatest desperado of all time – was “informed on” for a single, solitary silver dollar. The dollar’s worth of information was so accurate that the Kid was dead before Sheriff Pat Garrett’s gun in a matter of days. Truly, his time was up.

John W. Poe, a Texian from Fort Griffin, and once a marshall [sic] at Tascosa, was a deputy sheriff under Pat Garrett in 1881. Poe told in a newspaper interview, years after the Kid’s death, how a tip he received from a shaky, whiskey-sodden tramp spelled doom for William H. Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid…

“One day in White Oaks I met a man I will call George Graham,” Poe related in the newspaper interview. “He was a drunkard who was once a man of substance in Tascosa. He called me aside and said he knew a terrible secret he was afraid to tell for fear of being killed. Graham was shaky and needed a drink. I gave him a silver dollar. He then told me he had been sleeping in the haymow in the Dedrick brothers’ livery barn and that Billy the Kid had hidden there for a few days and was now at Fort Sumner. Graham said he heard the Kid’s friends say that the Kid planned to assassinate Pat Garrett and then light out for Old Mexico, but for a few more days he would be at Fort Sumner.”

…Whatever happened to George Graham, the pitiful drunkard from Tascosa, no one seems to know.