Find
businesses offering goods & services to the traveling public
Visit
our video library featuring scenes from "The Land of Enchantment"
Billy the Kid & the Lincoln County War
William H. Bonney rose to notoriety as a result of the Lincoln County War, a brief but bloody feud that began soon after a wealthy young Englishman, John H. 
Tunstall, and his equally ambitious older partner, an asthmatic Canadian lawyer named Alexander A. McSween, tried to oust the established mercantile monopoly.
That monopoly was the powerful L. G. Murphy & Company, founded at nearby Fort Stanton by a former divinity student from Ireland, Lawrence G. Murphy, in 1866. Kicked off the post for unscrupulous business practices in 1873, he quickly moved to Lincoln, where he built a large mercantile and continued his profiteering.
McSween arrived in Lincoln, a village of roughly 400 mostly Hispanic residents, in March, 1875, and Tunstall in November, 1876. By then the alcoholic Murphy and his empire were ailing. But the ex-officer's junior partner, James J. Dolan, bought out Murphy's interests, renamed the nearly bankrupt firm the J. J. Dolan & Company, and continued to fix prices,
intimidate ranchers and farmers, and, whispers went, deal in stolen cattle.
Tunstall's motives became clear when he opened a competing mercantile in late 1877. Tensions mounted. Kindled by a winter-long legal dispute between Dolan and McSween over the proceeds of a $10,000 life insurance policy, tempers finally flared.
When Tunstall was shot and killed in the wintry twilight of February 18, 1878, the Lincoln County War erupted.
Tunstall's foreman, Dick Brewer, formed a posse called the Regulators, some of whom, like the Kid, were Tunstall ranch hands. Others, like the Coe cousins and Charley Bowdre, were sympathizers. The Regulators were deputized by Lincoln’s justice of the peace. Opposing them were Dolan's hired guns, backed by a territorial government that served a political cabal known as the Santa Fe Ring.
As gunfire erupted along the Rio Bonito, Rio Ruidoso and down in the Pecos River Valley, the Kid displayed a reckless daring that earned him a reputation, then 
embellished it.
On the morning of April 1 in Lincoln, six of the Regulators, the Kid among them, ambushed Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady and four deputies. Brady and a deputy were killed. While retrieving the Winchester that Brady had taken from him weeks earlier amid the gunfire, the Kid was wounded in the thigh, but limped away and him, then eluded his pursuers.
Three days later, when the Regulators gunned down another Dolan sympathizer at Blazer's Mill, the Kid, although grazed in the arm, rushed his armed adversary after shrewdly counting his opponent's expended rounds until he knew his adversary was out of ammunition.
When McSween and four supporters were shot and killed as McSween's lavishly furnished adobe home, beseiged for five days by 40 of Dolan's armed men, burned to the ground in Lincoln on July 19, the war ended. But not before the Kid led some of his pals to safety on a daring last-minute escape from the inferno at dusk, guns blazing, amid a hail of gunfire.
[ back to the top ]
