Billy the Kid

by Robert M. Utley

  The raid on the Dolan cow camp turned out to be a heavy-handed blunder, less damaging to Dolan’s interests than to those of Thomas B. Catron. All of Dolan’s property now belonged to that unforgiving potentate, and when he learned two weeks later that his cattle had been scattered across the Pecos Plains, he erupted in fury. He complained to Governor Axtell, who complained to Colonel Edward Hatch, commander of the District of New Mexico. Hatch ordered troops to the Pecos, but had to cancel the order when his superiors decreed that he had overstepped his authority. Even so, the Regulators’ grubby little victory and the execution of “Indian” scarcely balanced the enmity of the territory’s most powerful politician.14

  The cow-camp operation marked the beginning of more than a month’s lull in hostilities. For one thing, Jimmy Dolan had left Lincoln to help Lawrence Murphy, fearful of assassination by the Regulators, settle in a new home in Santa Fe, where he died from the effects of alcoholism five months later. For another, a federal investigation was under way, and the two factions tried to stay on good behavior. Distressed over the murder of one of Her Majesty’s subjects, the British foreign office had stirred up Washington officialdom, and Frank Warner Angel had come west to look into the matter on behalf of both the Justice and Interior departments.

  Although his sentiments ran to the McSween side, Angel dutifully gathered depositions from almost everyone involved in the outbreak of the war. Even young Bonney told his story under oath certified by Squire Wilson, once more justice of the peace. This took place on June 8 in Lincoln, where the Regulators had again taken up residence at the McSween house. Centering on the events of February 11–18 that culminated in the murder of Tunstall, Billy’s deposition, in Rob Widenmann’s handwriting, bore a suspicious resemblance to Rob’s own deposition. How much of it represented Rob’s prompting may be wondered.15

  Meanwhile, Jimmy Dolan had not been idle in Santa Fe. He wrote complaining letters to the New Mexican and surely unburdened himself to Governor Axtell and U.S. District Attorney Catron. Who else but Dolan would have brought to the governor’s attention the obscure legal technicality that Sheriff Copeland had failed to post bond within thirty days of his appointment? Citing this transgression, on May 28 Axtell removed Copeland as sheriff and three days later named George W. Peppin as his successor.16

  Except in his firm allegiance to Dolan, the new sheriff was a virtual clone of the old. Thirty-nine, a Frenchman and a stonemason, “Dad” Peppin was amiable, well intentioned, weak of intellect, and easily dominated. He gave promise of serving Dolan as loyally as Copeland had served McSween.

  Badly outmaneuvered, the Kid and his friends faded into the mountains as Peppin stormed into Lincoln on June 19. He led a formidable force: not only Dolan himself and the usual posse of Dolanites but also a cavalry detachment and, to Colonel Dudley’s disgust, a dozen deputized gangsters from the Mesilla Valley under Jesse Evans’s old partner John Kinney. They seem to have been recruited to the cause by Johnny Riley with promises of booty. As Frank Coe recalled Riley’s part in the war, he was The House’s “confidence man”—“smooth talker and make you believe anything, worked in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Las Cruces and sent in men to help them. Was a damned coward but gave us more dirt than any of them.”17

  Peppin also brought with him still another arrest warrant to add to the bewildering collection that already existed. Drawn up by U.S. Marshal for New Mexico John Sherman, almost certainly with the collaboration of Dolan, Peppin, and District Attorney Rynerson, it was a federal rather than a territorial document, commanding the apprehension of Billy and his comrades who had fought at Blazer’s Mills—even the dead Brewer. The schemers behind this ploy reasoned that since the slaying of Roberts had occurred on an Indian reservation, it fell under federal jurisdiction. When the fugitives failed to appear before the U.S. District Court in Mesilla on June 22 (Judge Bristol served as both federal and territorial judge), the U.S. grand jury indicted them all for murder. Thus Billy now found himself wanted by the territory for the murder of William Brady and by the United States for the murder of Buckshot Roberts.18

  After fleeing Lincoln, the Regulators took refuge in the familiar haunts of San Patricio. At night they hid in the mountains, with the ubiquitous George Washington serving as camp cook. Even McSween joined his troops in the field—“clean shaved and with a very large hat,” according to Washington. By day the fugitives consorted with the congenial people of the town, with whom Billy, in particular, was popular. He spoke their language, never patronized, loved their bailes, and captivated their damsels.

  Peppin lost no time in launching his offensive. He named as field commander Jack Long, a garrulous, hard-drinking deputy who, like Peppin, had been with Brady on the fatal April 1. At dawn on June 27 Long and five possemen, bolstered by “Colonel” Kinney and his dirty dozen, rode into the plaza of San Patricio. They found no Regulators, but flushed George Washington, who sprinted across a wheat field in an attempt to escape. Kinney’s Winchester tore up the ground around his feet and brought him to a halt. Dropping his rifle, Washington promptly poured out all he knew about his friends.

  While Kinney held San Patricio, Long and his men rode up the Ruidoso Valley to search John Newcomb’s ranch. Finding nothing, they returned. Two miles west of San Patricio, they spied a dozen horsemen across the river and, supposing them to be Kinney’s squad, rode in their direction.

  Long was mistaken. Eleven Regulators had come down from the mountains and, probably accidentally, stumbled into the six deputies. Present, besides the Kid, Waite, Bowdre, and others, were McSween and former sheriff Copeland, who had promised Peppin to go home and mind his own business.19 At a range of seventy-five yards, Billy and his friends let fly a fusillade of rifle fire. They saw two horses drop and the rest scamper out of range.

  The firing brought Kinney charging to the rescue. Sighting the reinforcements, the Regulators turned and ascended a ravine-scored mountaintop, where they dismounted and spread out in strong defensive positions. The enemy shrank from a direct assault, but Kinney and six men tried to work into positions from which to dislodge the defenders. A heavy fire held them a full five hundred yards distant.

  The standoff lasted for four hours, when Billy and his companions slipped off to the south, made their way through the mountains to Frank Coe’s ranch, then lost themselves north of the Hondo in the Capitan foothills. The cavalry command summoned by Long followed the trail but never overhauled the quarry.20

  Imitating McSween, Peppin decided to get Hispanics involved on his side too. Stimulated by the sheriff’s command, fortified by legal summonses, fifteen found themselves enlisted in a posse under Deputy José Chavez y Baca and dispatched on another foray against San Patricio. They reached the town shortly before dawn on July 3.

  This time the Regulators were waiting, posted on the rooftops. “Those dobes had little breastworks around the tops,” said George Coe, “and we got behind those and punched out loopholes.” Riding into the plaza in the early morning gloom, the attackers encountered a storm of bullets. “We were scattered around all over town,” related Coe. “Two or three of us got on top of every house. It was too dark to see to shoot accurately, but we killed a horse or two and think we wounded a man.” They had. Julian López had his arm shattered as the posse retreated.21

  Expecting the enemy to return in greater strength, the Regulators abandoned San Patricio and made their way down the Hondo. A stronger force soon appeared in their rear—Jack Long, Kinney and his crowd, and Jimmy Dolan himself. Pressed closely, Scurlock dismounted his men and posted them in firing positions along the crest of a steep ridge four miles east of town. When the pursuers ran into a burst of rifle fire that cost them two horses, they abandoned the mission and fell back. Foiled a second time in less than a week and irate over the sympathies of the citizens of San Patricio, they tore up the town and terrorized the residents before returning to Lincoln.

  The Regulators continued down the Hondo to the Pecos and put in at Chisum’s ranch. “
We went down to visit Old John and to rest on the Fourth,” recalled George Coe. Chisum was not there, but the ranch hands prepared a big dinner, and everyone made ready to celebrate Independence Day.

  If the chief was absent, Sallie Chisum was not. Athletic and strong-willed, Old John’s niece was a pretty sixteen-year-old with long, straw-colored hair. Billy Bonney found her fascinating, and she returned the favor.22 During the morning, accompanied by Frank and George Coe and several others, Billy rode over to Captain Lea’s store to buy candy for Sallie from clerk Ash Upson. On the return, twelve Seven Rivers possemen galloped to the attack. In a running fight, the two groups of horsemen exchanged fire all the way back to the ranch.

  They “fought around the ranch most of the day,” remembered George Coe, “but the ranch was a good defensive work and no harm was done.” The feast proceeded as planned, while the posse sent to Lincoln for help. By the time reinforcements arrived, grumbled one, “McSween’s mob had escaped.”23

  Inexorably, the Lincoln County War escalated toward a climax. The Battle of Lincoln on April 30 marked the first armed clash between opposing forces. The two fights at San Patricio and the one at the Chisum ranch also represented open warfare between the two factions. Except for slain horses and slight wounds, these skirmishes had been virtually bloodless. The genuine bloodshed had occurred earlier, in homicides rather than battles. But by July, battle had become the accepted form of conflict, and tempers on both sides flared ominously. At the same time, the only restraining influence had been neutralized. A congressional ban on military involvement of any kind in civil affairs had withdrawn the army from the equation altogether. Now the issue rested with Dolan and McSween, and both seemed ready to have it out once and for all.

  9

  The Fire

  Four months into the Lincoln County War, Billy Bonney had become an accomplished fighter, rash at times, but confident in his abilities, trusted and liked by his comrades.

  He had also grown callous toward human life and stood ready to kill, without hesitation and by means fair or foul, when the cause seemed to require it. In this he was not unique. He shared the attitude and instinct with his companions. However barbarous, the mindset is at least understandable in terms of a feud that had escalated into a war.

  Of those who rode with Billy at this time, only Frank Coe has left a full and convincing portrait. Allowing for his unabashed partisanship, Frank’s appraisal is to be taken seriously. He recalled that as a fighter, Billy

  stood with us to the end, brave and reliable, one of the best soldiers we had. He never pushed in his advice or opinions, but he had a wonderful presence of mind; the tighter the place the more he showed his cool nerve and quick brain. He was a fine horseman, quick and always in the lead, at the same time he was kind to his horses and could save them and have them ready and fresh when he needed to make a dash.

  Frank also touched on other traits:

  He never seemed to care for money, except to buy cartridges with; then he would much prefer to gamble for them straight. Cartridges were scarce, and he always used about ten times as many as anyone else. He would practice shooting at every thing he saw and from every conceivable angle, on and off his horse. He never drank. He would go to the bar with anyone, but I never saw him drink a drop, and he never used tobacco in any form. Always in a good humor and ready to do a kind act for some one.1

  Sometime in May or June 1878, the Regulators picked up another recruit, destined to grow even closer to Billy than Fred Waite. More than six feet tall, red-headed, younger by two years than Billy, “Big Foot” Tom O’Folliard had come up from Texas and, like Billy before him, asked Frank Coe for work. “The Kid came in and said he could make a real warrior out of him,” related Coe. “He did this.” With a big, long-range buffalo gun, Billy taught Tom how to shoot. After that, “he followed the Kid everywhere he went,” said Coe. “He was the Kid’s inseparable companion and always went along and held his horses. He held his horses when the Kid would pay his attentions to some Mexican girl. It mattered not that he was gone thirty minutes or half the night, Tom was there when he came out.”2

  Tom O’Folliard idolized Billy and constantly fed his self-esteem. So did the other Regulators, who admired his abilities and achievements and said so. Aside from such reinforcement, Billy could not have been oblivious to his expanding talents. Since leaving the Evans gang, he had made much progress in the skills that frontier society valued highly and that found frequent expression in the operations of the Regulators. As the Lincoln County War moved toward its fiercest battle, Billy Bonney took on a self-assurance that would lift him into the front ranks of the Regulators.

  After the bloodless battle at the Chisum ranch on July 4, McSween resolved to run no more. Dashing about on horseback, exchanging gunfire with the enemy, and bedding down in mountain hideaways was not his style of conflict. He had been led into this kind of fighting, said Sue McSween, by the “foolhardy boys” he rode with, among whom she numbered Billy Bonney in the forefront. “I never liked the Kid,” she later wrote, “and didn’t approve of his career.” She thought him “too much like Dolan, did not think it amounted to much to take a man’s life.”3

  A strange mix of defiance and despair drove McSween back to his home in Lincoln. On the one hand, he clearly intended to fight if pressed, for he brought with him nearly sixty men, including a large contingent of Hispanics under Martín Chavez of Picacho. “He had been out in the hills long enough,” Dr. Daniel Appel, the Fort Stanton surgeon, quoted him as explaining. “As he had now returned to his house they would not drive him away again alive.” On the other hand, Reverend Ealy’s wife remembered, “He seemed to think he was doomed. He was Scotch and had some superstitions.”4

  The expanded Regulator force slipped into Lincoln on the night of July 14 while most of Sheriff Peppin’s possemen were out scouring the countryside. Peppin, Dolan, and a handful of men bunked at the Wortley Hotel, across from the old Dolan store, and Jack Long and five deputies held the torreon. Heavily outnumbered, they made no move to contest the occupation. Some of the Regulators climbed to the rooftops of McSween’s house and José Montaño’s store, a short distance beyond the torreon, and knocked firing ports in the parapets. They then divided themselves among the Montaño store, the home of Juan Patrón immediately to the east, and the Isaac Ellis store on the far edge of town. Billy stationed himself at the Montaño store.

  The five-day battle for Lincoln opened on the afternoon of July 15. With high winds kicking up clouds of dust, Peppin’s posse clattered into town from the west. Reining their mounts at the Wortley Hotel, the Peppin-Dolan headquarters, they aimed a volley of rifle fire at the McSween house, splintering slats on the drawn shutters. Hearing the firing, Billy and a dozen others emerged from the Montaño store and dashed down the street to the rescue. From the torreon Jack Long shouted for them to halt. They gave him a blast of gunfire, which Long and his men answered in kind. At the McSween house, the Regulator squad fired off a fusillade that spattered the Wortley and its corral and sent the posse scurrying for cover.5

  The odds favored the McSween forces, sixty to forty. Almost equally divided among the McSween, Montaño, and Ellis buildings, however, they formed separate islands of strength, beyond communication with one another at the enemy’s discretion. About twenty, including Frank Coe, Middleton, Bowdre, and Scurlock, held the Ellis store. Another twenty, mostly Chavez’s Hispanics, defended the Montaño store and the Patrón home. The rest posted themselves in the McSween house.

  A spacious, U-shaped adobe, the McSween residence housed two families. The Ealys had moved next door, to the living quarters in the Tunstall store, leaving the McSweens to reoccupy the west half of their house. The east half sheltered the David Shield family. David, Mac’s law partner, was in Las Vegas, but Elizabeth, the sister of Sue McSween, and her five children remained at home, together with Susan Gates, Reverend Ealy’s assistant. Regulators crowding the house, besides Billy Bonney, were Tom O’Folliard, Jim French,
George Coe, Henry Brown, Joe Smith, Tom Cullens, Harvey Morris (a tubercular Kansan reading law with McSween), Florencio Chavez, José Chavez y Chavez, Yginio Salazar, Ygnacio Gonzalez, Vicente Romero, Francisco Zamora, and José María Sanchez.6

  Peppin’s group counted only about forty gunmen. Most were veterans of the Mathews posse of the previous February, both Dolan adherents and the ubiquitous Seven Rivers warriors. The posse also included John Kinney and his dozen bandits from the Mesilla Valley, and once again Dolan had Jesse Evans present “to do his part.” He had stood trial for stealing Indian horses and won acquittal, and Judge Bristol had freed him on bail to await trial for the murder of Tunstall.7

  Although outnumbered, Peppin could bring all his force against any one of the Regulator strongholds without danger from the others. His principal dilemma, rather, was how to seize them without exposing his men to a murderous fire from strong defenses.

  Neither side had much idea how to break the stalemate without getting someone killed. They contented themselves with firing an occasional shot and jockeying for position. Sometime in the next three days a stray shot punched into the McSween house and killed Tom Cullens. After dark on the eighteenth Ben Ellis, feeding a mule in the corral of his father’s store, caught another stray in the neck. The Reverend Doctor Ealy tried to go to his aid, but a blast of gunfire from the torreon drove him in panic back to the Tunstall store. The next morning he got through and patched up the severely wounded young man.8

  On July 16 the McSween house defenders committed a major blunder. At dusk men on the rooftop squinted into the setting sun and spied a rider approaching from the west. They opened fire and saw him fall from his horse, then recover and sprint to the cover of the Wortley Hotel. The rider was a cavalryman bearing a message from Colonel Dudley informing Peppin that he could not have the howitzer he had asked to borrow. The trooper had been thrown by a frightened horse and had not been hit, but firing on a U.S. soldier was not a politic thing to do. Colonel Dudley called it “this infamous outrage.”