By James Abarr Of the Journal
It's one of those few places the passing decades have left largely untouched, but there was a time when Lincoln Town was anything but quiet and the gunmen were not phantoms.
Century-old commercial buildings and adobe homes that were part of a romantic and violent past still line the tree-shaded street where Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, John Chisum and other frontier legends once rode.
On the west edge of town, the historic two-story courthouse bears mute testimony to the day when its hallways echoed with the roar of gunfire as The Kid made a murderous escape from a date with the hangman.
Today, the little town in its picturesque canyon on the Rio Bonito in southeast New Mexico sleeps with memories of the time when tumultuous events made lawless Lincoln the scourge of New Mexico Territory.
It was the late 1870s, and rival factions maneuvered for control of a rich commercial empire in the town and surrounding county, once the largest in the United States.
Created by the Territorial Legislature in 1869, and named for the martyred president, Lincoln County was a vast expanse 160 miles wide and 180 miles deep, an area of 17 million acres encompassing all of southeast New Mexico. Today, it is less than one-fifth of its original size, and all or parts of six other counties were later created from within its borders.
Bonito, a ranching community settled in 1859, became the seat of the original county and changed its name to Lincoln Town.
Here, there were fortunes to be made in cattle, mercantile companies, land speculation and mining. Also at stake were lucrative U.S. Army contracts to supply beef and daily necessities to military posts and Indian reservations throughout New Mexico and Arizona.
Holding center stage in the commercial tug-of-war that was about to explode were two factions with little love for each other.
One was the powerful trio of Lawrence G. Murphy, James J. Dolan and John Riley, former soldiers and now partners in the mercantile firm of Murphy, Dolan & Co.
In the opposing camp were John Tunstall, an Englishman who had come to the American Southwest in search of investments for his family's considerable fortune; Alexander McSween, an attorney from Kansas; and John Chisum, a cattle baron whose vast ranch spanned thousands of acres along the Pecos River in eastern Lincoln County.
In 1877, Dolan and Riley bought out Murphy and established J.J. Dolan & Co., a mercantile enterprise known as "The House." With no competition, "The House" grew rich charging settlers and ranchers exhorbitant prices for everything from feed for livestock to the basic needs of daily life.
Dolan also controlled judicial and law enforcement officials in the area, and he maintained strong political connections with Territorial Gov. William Axtel and Thomas Catron, a powerful Santa Fe banker and U.S. attorney for New Mexico. Dolan also had a potent friend in William Rynerson, district attorney for the area that included Lincoln County and holder of extensive land investments.
Through this trio, "The House" monopolized the rich government supply contracts.
It was the best of all worlds for Dolan and Riley until Tunstall bid for a piece of the pie. He bought a cattle ranch south of Lincoln Town and then aligned himself with McSween to form the competing mercantile firm of Tunstall & Co.
When the new company formed a loose alliance with Chisum, who ran thousands of head of cattle on his vast spread, the company also bid for the profitable Army beef contracts.
Stung by this intrusion into their empire, Dolan and Riley moved through legal maneuvers and intimidation to put Tunstall and McSween out of business.
Suits charging fraud were brought against McSween, who earlier had been the attorney handling an insurance settlement in the death of Emil Fritz, a minor player in the old Murphy, Dolan enterprise.
At the same time, "The House" prepared to play even rougher by turning Lincoln into an armed camp with gunmen imported from Texas and other areas of New Mexico. A collision was imminent.
One resident captured the moment when he recorded in his diary:
"This is truly a frontier town, very warlike. Citizens armed. Great danger of being shot."
In a letter to his father in London, Tunstall exclaimed:
"This is the first place I have been where everyone goes armed. All the men have a great six-shooter slung on their hip and a knife on the other ... I keep my revolver mighty handy, although I don't show it."
With their control of the judicial system in Lincoln County, Dolan and Riley had little trouble securing writs of attachment against McSween's property to settle their claims in the insurance-fraud suit. Because Tunstall was McSween's partner, the writs also authorized seizure of the Englishman's cattle.
Lincoln was a powder keg, and on Feb. 18, 1878, Sheriff William Brady was the spark igniting the explosion that became the Lincoln County War.
Brady was controlled by "The House," and he deputized a posse made up of Dolan supporters to execute the writs of attachment. While Brady remained behind, the posse rode toward Tunstall's ranch to seize his herd.
A few miles from Lincoln, they met the Englishman and some of his hands riding toward town. When Tunstall rode forward to parley, he was coldly shot from his saddle and killed as he lay wounded on the ground.
Tunstall's men scattered, but one of them, 18-year-old William Bonney, swore he would balance the scales.
Bonney, better known to history as Billy the Kid, had drifted into Lincoln County from Arizona the previous year and was befriended by Tunstall, who gave the homeless youngster a job breaking horses. At the same time, the Englishman, despite the fact that he was only 29 years old, also became a strong father-figure to Bonney, who had counted few kindnesses in his young life.
Tunstall's death brought an almost total breakdown of law and order in Lincoln, and it launched Bonney on a murderous vendetta.
Dick Brewer, Tunstall's foreman, and The Kid convinced a Lincoln justice of the peace to deputize them and other Tunstall supporters to bring in the rancher's killers. A short time later, they tracked down William Morton and Frank Baker, two members of the Brady posse. Trapped in a canyon near Roswell, the two men surrendered, but it made little difference to Bonney. He shot and killed both of them on the spot.
Four days later, The Kid, Brewer and the other deputies, who now styled themselves as "The Regulators," trapped Andrew "Buckshot" Roberts, a shotgun-toting Texan also suspected in Tunstall's death, at Blazer's Mill near Ruidoso. In the ensuing gunbattle, both Buckshot and Brewer were killed.
On April 1, 1878, Bonney struck again. The Kid and four companions lay in ambush behind an adobe wall on the main street of Lincoln and gunned down Brady and one of his deputies.
In mid-July, George Peppin, a Dolan man and Brady's successor as sheriff, touched off the final drama of the Lincoln County War.
Peppin, seeking to execute the still outstanding writs of attachment against McSween, deputized 40 men and surrounded the lawyer's house in the center of town.
Inside the house with McSween were Bonney and a half-dozen others, who had rode into town to protect him. For two days, they held off the sheriff's men in a sporadic gunbattle. On the third day, Peppin made his move to end the standoff.
Claiming that a soldier on leave in Lincoln had been wounded by McSween forces, Peppin appealed to Lt. Col. Nathan Dudley, commanding officer of nearby Fort Stanton, for federal troops to help restore order.
Dudley, a friend of Dolan's, swiftly responded to Peppin's appeal. The following day, the colonel rode into Lincoln with a troop of cavalry and a cannon, which he positioned to sweep the street.
Dudley saw himself as a peacemaker, and in a bid to establish an air of neutrality in the matter, warned the sheriff that if his troopers were fired on, "I will blow you above the clouds."
Dudley was clearly exceeding his authority by involving the Army in a civilian matter, but the presence of the troops bolstered Peppin. He ordered his men to rush McSween's house, torch it and burn the lawyer out.
With the house in flames, McSween, Bonney and the others bolted into the street. The Kid escaped in a barrage of gunfire, but the lawyer, who was unarmed, and four others were killed.
With Tunstall and McSween dead, Dolan's competition was eliminated, and the Lincoln County War, for all practical purposes, was over.
Bonney fled from Lincoln, but by now, the name of Billy the Kid had become a byword throughout New Mexico Territory.
Fluent in Spanish as well as English, the personable Bonney, known for his ready smile as well as his deadly gun, had a host of friends in Lincoln County, especially among the heavy Hispanic population. Many viewed him as a romantic figure even though he was an established killer with a number of murder warrants outstanding.
After fleeing the burning McSween home, Billy and his newly-formed gang spent the next two years rustling cattle and horses across a wide area of eastern New Mexico, and his fame grew.
Reporting on events, the Las Vegas Gazette observed: "The gang is under the leadership of The Kid, a desperate cuss who is eligible for the post of captain of any crowd, no matter how mean and lawless..."
However, Bonney's days were numbered. In November 1880, the people of Lincoln County elected a tall, rangy Southerner from Alabama as their new sheriff. Pat Garrett had been many things — cowhand, rancher, buffalo hunter and bartender. Now, as a man with a badge, he made it his primary mission to derail The Kid.
For six weeks, Garrett and his deputies pursued the slippery Billy through eastern New Mexico. They finally cornered him and his gang at Stinking Springs, east of Fort Sumner, and captured him after a shootout which left two other outlaws dead.
Bonney was jailed in Las Vegas to await return to Lincoln, where he would face charges in the 1878 slaying of Sheriff Brady. A reporter interviewed The Kid in his cell and wrote this description:
"... There was nothing very mannish about him in appearance, for he looked and acted a mere boy. He is about five feet, eight or nine inches tall, slightly built and lithe, weighing about 140 pounds; a frank and open countenance, looking like a school boy. (He has) clear blue eyes with a roguish snap about them ... he is, in all, quite a handsome fellow..."
Bonney was returned to Lincoln under heavy guard, but because of his many friends there, he was tried on a change of venue in Mesilla, near Las Cruces. After a two-day trial, he was convicted of killing Brady, and Judge Warren Bristol sentenced The Kid to hang "until you are dead, dead, dead."
The execution was scheduled for May 13, 1881, in Lincoln.
On a sardonic note, the Santa Fe New Mexican noted:
"When The Kid's execution comes off, it will probably attract more people than any similar event that ever occurred in the Territory. Certainly this consideration ought to flatter and console the young gentleman."
Returned again to Lincoln, Bonney was held in a second-floor room of the old Dolan-Riley store, which the county had purchased and was converting into a courthouse.
Billy, however, had no intention of keeping his date with the gallows, and on April 28, 1881, he made one of the most famous escapes in western annals, killing guards J.W. Bell and Robert Olinger in the process.
Startled townspeople who heard the gunfire at the courthouse, and then watched as Bonney strolled into the street, said Billy seemed to be in no hurry to get away as he called to a nearby man to fetch his horse.
Said one witness: "The Kid could have walked up and down the street all day, and no one would have stopped him."
Bonney, however, didn't tarry long. He armed himself with two six-guns and a Winchester rifle, mounted his horse and rode out of Lincoln forever.
Garrett, who had been in White Oaks on county business the day Billy escaped, pursued The Kid for the next two months. The sheriff finally tracked him to Fort Sumner, northeast of Lincoln, where Billy also had many friends, including prominent rancher Pete Maxwell.
On the night of July 14, 1881, in a darkened bedroom of the Maxwell ranch, Garrett surprised Bonney and ended his brief and violent career with two rounds from a .45 Colt.
The Kid was only 21 years old, and his death marked the birth of one of the Southwest's most enduring legends.
In his book, "The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid," written in 1882, Garrett tells of entering Maxwell's bedroom near midnight, awakening him and asking the rancher if he had seen Billy:
"At that moment, a man sprang quickly into the room, looking back and calling twice in Spanish, 'Who comes there?' No one replied, and he came on in. He was bareheaded. From his step, I could perceive that he was either barefooted or in his stocking feet. He held a revolver in his right hand and a butcher knife in his left.
"He came directly toward me. ... He quickly raised his pistol ... within a foot of my breast. Then, retreating rapidly across the room, he cried: '¿Quien es? ¿Quien es?' (Who's that? Who's that?)
"All this occurred in a moment. Quickly as possible, I drew my revolver and fired, threw my body aside, and fired again. The second shot was useless. The Kid fell dead. He never spoke. A struggle or two, a little strangling sound as he gasped for breath, and The Kid was with his many victims."
They buried Billy Bonney the next day — laid out in a borrowed suit in a plain pine coffin — in the old military cemetery on the southeast edge of Fort Sumner.
The tombstone that marks the spot says he rests with two of his "pals," Tom O'Folliard and Charlie Bowdre, and the town of Fort Sumner nurtures and cherishes the grave as a tourist attraction.
In Lincoln Town, preserved as a state monument, there is little now to disturb the tranquility. The famous cast of characters is merely a memory, but the historic landmarks remain — the courthouse, the Tunstall store and others.
In the first weekend in August each year, the town on the Rio Bonito relives its past with Old Lincoln Days and the Billy the Kid Pageant. Three days of parades, music and celebration are climaxed with a re-creation of The Kid's famous escape.
Seldom has an area been so dominated by the name and legend of a single man, and one wonders how well the Lincoln County War would have been remembered without William Bonney.
As western historian Robert Utley noted:
"The Billy the Kid of legend bears only remote resemblance to the Billy the Kid of history, but for more than a century he has held people everywhere enthralled.
"Even today, the outlaw of sunny disposition and deadly trigger rides boldly across America's mental landscape ... For those who would know the reality, New Mexico's Billy the Kid country offers a graphic introduction."
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