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Susan McSween
Nobody in Lincoln, before or since, has seen anybody quite like Susanna Ellen Hummer McSween Barber. Brash, opinionated, independent, and unrelenting, and possessing an iron will and self-righteous temper, she was, in the words of Special Investigator for the U.S. Department of Justice Frank Warner Angel, "…a tiger."
Widowed, Susan deftly administered the estates of her slain lawyer husband and his English partner; continued to challenge male authority figures; brought lawsuits and countersuits; weathered threats against her life and a scandal; purchased land, made improvements, and sold properties; divorced her second husband; slowly but shrewdly built and managed a cattle empire; and for the rest of her life was the combative protectoress of her and her slain husband's name, reputation, and legacy.
Dubbed the Cattle Queen of New Mexico, she succeeded in a man's world and lived out her independent, self-empowered life long enough to see -- and scold and walk out on -- King Vidor's 1930 film, "Billy The Kid", in Carrizozo's Lyric Theater just six weeks before her death.
Born on Dec. 30, 1845, 10 miles north of Gettysburg, Pa., Susanna Ellen Hummer was one of eight children of a strict Anabaptist father. Her mother died when Susan was six. Five months later, her widowed father, a dirt-poor farmer, married his late wife's younger sister and eventually had eight more children.
Susan left or ran away from home shortly after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 or the end of the Civil War (in 1865) and headed to the home of one of her two elder sisters, who lived in New Baltimore, Oh., and Stockport, Mo.
She and McSween (Susan insisted they'd first met in Pekin, Ill., in 1870) were married on Aug. 23, 1873, in Atchison, Kan. (50 miles NE of Topeka), where she was living. Sue moved to Eureka (90 miles SW of Topeka), where McSween, once a law student at Washington University in St. Louis, was already a practicing attorney. In midsummer, 1874, when Eureka's townsfolk found that the county treasurer had embezzled $25,000, the local economy, already drought-stricken, collapsed. That Sept., the McSweens slipped away, Silver City bound, leaving behind a nearly $650 debt.
In New Mexico, they were advised to head instead for Lincoln, which had no lawyer. They arrived there in an ox-drawn wagon laden with almost everything they owned, in March, 1875. McSween quickly went to work for L.G. Murphy & Co.; his salary 10 percent of every debt he could collect. He also attracted cattle baron John Chisum as a client, helping him sell his Bosque Grande Ranch in 1875.
Like her husband, Susan was red-haired and fair-skinned. Her hair was always carefully like so, and her dresses flattered her figure. She was attractive, vain and fussy, vivacious, and a good hostess. Susan played the organ, too. Decades later, she recalled that during Tunstall's wake (which was held in her home), Billy the Kid had a wonderful tenor singing voice.
In Lincoln, Susan didn't blend in; she stuck out. She didn't mix with the Hispanic Catholic women. Her nine-room, hacienda-style adobe home in Lincoln, built in mid-1877, was her pride and joy. Worth nearly $1,900, the palatial McSween home had lace-curtained windows, carpeted plank floors, stuffed chairs, lamps, clocks, a sewing machine, and an organ. It oozed wealth, status, and success. Her husband's law office was next door in the fortresslike Tunstall Store. So was the Chisum-backed Lincoln County Bank. The McSweens' property extended eastward along Main Street past the torreon (stone tower).
"I told Tunstall and Mr. McSween they would be murdered if they went into the store business," Susan recalled in a 1927 interview. "I did my best to keep McSween from entering the business, but he went in against my will."
In 1880, the widow McSween's estate was worth about $1,000. By 1891, Susan's 8,000 cattle on her Tres Rios ranch, 32 miles south of Carrizozo, were valued at $49,000. By then, she had overseen several improvements there: a small dam upstream to capture seasonal runoff; a white-walled adobe home filled with books, pictures, fine china and silverware; and apple and peach orchards. Susan hired and directed the ranch hands.
She supplemented her income by selling off her separate homesteads "…at a nice profit" over the years.
In 1887, Susan sold a half-interest in her ranch "…for an undisclosed amount." In 1902, she sold most of what was left of it for $32,000. She lived there until 1917, when she sold the last of it for $6,500 and moved to a two-story home in White Oaks. There she survived a calamitous house fire in 1923, and lived off her dwindling wealth in a dilapidated second home for the remainder of her years..
She was always tight with a buck, refusing to help her late husband's Lincoln law partner (and her brother-in-law), David Shield, in 1888, and her sister, Elizabeth Shield, with her son Edward's college expenses. Susan also felt it a waste of money to erect a marker on her slain husband's grave behind the Tunstall Store.
Toward the end of her life, Susan was grateful to author Walter Noble Burns for the fame that his best-selling book about Billy the Kid brought her. But she remained upset by the mythic figure of the Kid dwarfing everything (and everybody else) in the Lincoln County War.
In retrospect, if anyone could have provided authors and historians with a wealth of insights about the Tunstall-McSween-Chisum and Murphy-Dolan-Riley personalities and partnerships, and other Lincoln County War personalities, it was she. Instead those people chose to focus on the Kid.
Susan died of influenza on Jan. 3, 1931, and was buried in White Oaks' Cedarvale Cemetery.
Sources:
Chamberlain, Kathleen P., "In The Shadow Of Billy The Kid", Montana, The Magazine of Western History (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, Winter, 2005).
Keleher, William A., Violence In Lincoln County, 1869-1881 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957).
Mullin, Robert N., ed., Maurice G. Fulton's History of the Lincoln County War (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1968).
Nolan, Frederick, The Lincoln County War, A Documentary History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992).
Nolan, Frederick, The West of Billy the Kid (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).
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