Billy the Kid

by Robert M. Utley

  The next day the Regulators compounded the mistake. Peppin had sent two marksmen to the hills south of town to clear the Regulator rooftops. Somehow the pair concluded that the enemy had fled, and they walked down the mountainside. From the Montaño store, Doc Scurlock’s father-in-law took careful aim and fired. The ball hit one of the men in the stomach and smashed his spine. “Fernando Herrera shot Charlie Crawford with a 45–120–555 Sharpes,” recalled a contemporary, who ranked the shot “among the great examples of marksmanship.” Accompanied by another officer and two soldiers, Dr. Appel, who was in town to investigate the previous day’s firing on the trooper, went to Crawford’s succor. Although clearly recognizable by their uniforms, the party drew further fire from the Montaño store. As bullets tore up the hillside, they retrieved the fatally wounded man and returned to cover without being hit.9

  These insults to the federal uniform scarcely helped to keep Colonel Dudley out of the fray. His orders barred him from lending any aid to either side and enjoined him to remain aloof from civil affairs. But for a week he had been bombarded by the pathetic pleas of terrorized citizens. When the fight settled in the heart of Lincoln, innocent people came under immediate threat of injury or death. “All possessed of terror,” said José María de Aguayo. “You could not see in the town any person except Nigger Joe [Dixon] and myself,” he related, “because my children were crying, because they were hungry and I had to go about and look for milk.”10 To stand by while women and children were imperiled by a senseless war over money and power sorely tested the officers at Fort Stanton.

  Not until the fifth day did the impasse break, and then only because Colonel Dudley, disobeying explicit orders, could no longer resist rushing to the aid of helpless citizens. He went for worthy and defensible motives, but his elaborate show of neutrality in fact favored Peppin and Dolan. Representing the most credible institution of law, the sheriff had Dudley’s sympathies, besides which Dudley disliked McSween and all his friends, especially after the two Regulator attacks on blue uniforms. Despite good intentions, Dudley displayed the same bad judgment in Lincoln that had marked his career for more than twenty years.

  About midmorning on July 19, Billy Bonney and his friends looked out the front door of the McSween house on an ominous scene. Astride his mount, the erect colonel led a blue column down the street. With him rode four officers, followed by eleven mounted troopers of the black Ninth Cavalry and twenty-four white footmen of the Fifteenth Infantry. In the rear, tended by infantry, rattled a small twelve-pounder mountain howitzer and a rapid-fire Gatling gun.11

  A short time later the defenders of the McSween house saw three mounted soldiers return to the Wortley, then head back east accompanied by Peppin. The sight of the sheriff riding the street with military escort led to an obvious conclusion: Dudley had come to help Peppin. “We all became alarmed,” said Sue McSween.12

  McSween hastily scribbled a note addressed to Dudley and handed it to Billy to read:

  Would you have the kindness to let me know why soldiers surround my house. Before blowing up my property I would like to know the reason. The constable is here and has warrants for the arrest of Sheriff Peppin and posse for murder and larceny. Respectfully. A. A. McSween

  Billy handed the note back, and McSween passed it to the Shields’ little daughter to carry to Dudley. Soon she returned with Dudley’s reply, signed by his adjutant. It said that no troops surrounded McSween’s house and added that if he wanted to blow up his own house, the colonel had no objection provided soldiers were not endangered.13

  In fact, no soldiers surrounded McSween’s house, although the alarm of the occupants is understandable. Dudley had pitched camp on the north side of the street, just beyond the Montaño store. Except for details of soldiers such as were sent for Peppin, he kept his troops well in hand. He made a big show of neutrality, informing everyone that he had come solely to protect women and children and would not take sides. If either side endangered his camp, he vowed, he would respond with force.

  “God damn you understand me,” he exploded at Peppin, “if one of your men wound one of my men I will blow you above the clouds.”14

  However neutral in intent, Dudley’s actions wrought disastrously unneutral consequences for McSween. Immediately on reaching his campsite, supposedly as a defensive measure, Dudley unlimbered his howitzer and turned it on the front door of the Montaño store. Frightened, the Regulators there poured out and ran down the street to join their cohorts in the Ellis store. Dudley then had the howitzer aimed at the Ellis store. The combined force evacuated that bastion and, amid a scattering of shots from Peppin deputies, crossed the river into the hills beyond. Later in the day they made a halfhearted attempt to join McSween, but Dudley had his Gatling gun turned in their direction, and Peppin fired a few rifle shots at them from the top of the torreon. They faded back into the hills.15

  Dudley’s “defensive” measures cost McSween two-thirds of his men, giving Peppin a two-to-one numerical superiority and freeing him to concentrate his entire force on the McSween house. Moreover, Dudley’s warning to blow above the clouds anyone whose fire came his way favored Peppin. He could fire at the McSween house without coming close to soldiers; McSween could not fire back without risk to soldiers. As Jack Long later remarked, “There was a more confident bunch inside the McSween house than was to be found outside it, until after the soldiers arrived.”16

  Late in the morning, the people in the McSween house heard a commotion at the southwest window, which fronted the street. They had closed the shutters and piled up adobe bricks there as a barricade. Several possemen, however, had crept along the front wall, pried loose the shutters with butcher knives, and ripped them from their fastenings. The men then used their rifles to smash the glass and to push over the adobe barricade. From the cover of the outside wall, Deputy Marion Turner shouted that he had warrants for McSween’s arrest. McSween answered that he would not surrender, that he had warrants for the posse’s arrest. Turner demanded to see them.

  “Our warrants are in our guns, you cock-sucking sons-of-bitches,” yelled Jim French.

  Turner and his men decided not to face the guns and pulled back.17

  Early in the afternoon Sue McSween announced her determination to have a talk with Dudley. En route down the street, she saw preparations being made to set fire to her house. At the torreon she had a spirited argument with Sheriff Peppin, who told her that if she wanted to save her house from flames she had to persuade the men inside to surrender. At the military camp, she quickly fell into a shouting contest with Dudley, alternately denouncing him for siding with Peppin and imploring him to intervene to save her husband. Dudley stubbornly refused to interfere in any way with a sheriff in the lawful discharge of his duty.18

  Back in her home, Sue found efforts well advanced to set it afire—not an easy task with an adobe structure. The house had two kitchens, one at the end of each wing. Billy Bonney had gone to the rear of the Shield wing, to the room next to the kitchen. Mrs. Shield was removing furniture and other valuables in anticipation of the fire. Billy watched through the door as Jack Long and a deaf-mute known only as “Dummy” piled kindling on the kitchen floor, doused it with coal oil, and set it afire. Incredibly, Billy made no move to interfere, possibly out of concern for Mrs. Shield.

  The kitchen opened onto a small backyard enclosed by an adobe wall with a door on the north and by a board fence on the east. A privy stood in the corner, its vault dug into a slope and uncovered in the rear. A gate at the northeast corner afforded passage to an open space separating the McSween house from the Tunstall store.

  Unknown to Long and Dummy, George Coe, Henry Brown, and Joe Smith had slipped into the Tunstall store and taken positions at windows in the west wall. When the two possemen emerged from the gate, the Regulators let fly with their Winchesters. The two men dove for the nearest cover, which happened to be the privy vault. Another deputy jumped in at the same time. They dared not leave. As Coe remarked of the “littl
e house,” when no other target appeared, “we riddled it from top to bottom.” Until after dark, Long and his friends stood in the sink. “It was not a good place to set down,” he explained.19

  Long and Dummy failed, for the fire in the northeast kitchen sputtered for a time and then went out. Possibly Billy Bonney put it out. He would have been remiss indeed if he had done nothing after the two possemen left the kitchen.

  Andy Boyle had more success. After watching Long and Dummy for a time, he went out the northeast gate, had his neck grazed by a bullet from Coe or one of his comrades, and ran around the adobe wall to the north. Aided by other deputies, he collected the makings of another fire at the McSween stable and slipped into the northwest kitchen. “I set it on fire with a sack of shavings and chips,” he said, “and used what timber there was on top of the stable to make it burn. It burned very slowly all afternoon from one room to another turning in a circle around the house.”20

  Boyle’s fire took hold about 2:00 P.M. As it made its way from room to room, a thick column of smoke rose from the house. Room by room, the defenders retreated as the flames advanced. What transpired as their plight grew increasingly hopeless can only be guessed. The survivors told almost nothing. Elizabeth Shield and her children, and Miss Gates, left during the afternoon and sought refuge with the Ealys in the Tunstall store. Sue McSween stayed until 5:00 P.M., when she too went next door.

  As Sue recalled the scene in the burning house, “The boys talked to each other and McSween and I were sitting in one corner. The boys decided I should leave. They were fighting the fire in my sister’s house [the east wing]. McSween said he guessed that was better. . . . The Kid was lively and McSween was sad. McSween sat with his head down, and the Kid shook him and told him to get up, that they were going to make a break.”21

  This tantalizing glimpse, together with Billy’s statement that McSween showed him his note before dispatching it to Colonel Dudley, is the only firsthand testimony to Billy’s role in the McSween house on July 19, 1878. It suggests that he either assumed command or had it thrust on him by the others. In light of Frank Coe’s assertion that Billy rarely volunteered his opinions (p. 88), the latter seems the more likely. Their situation was desperate, McSween had sunk into helpless despair, and someone needed to produce a solution and the leadership to carry it out. All probably looked to Billy, only eighteen but a veteran.

  As darkness fell, the flames drove all the men into the northeast kitchen, cluttered with the debris of Long’s abortive attempt to kindle a bonfire. “The house was in a great blaze lighting up the hills on both sides of the town,” recalled Dr. Appel. Firing intensified. Captain Purington remarked that “if the poor devils in that house could live through such a fire and get away they were certainly entitled to freedom.”22

  The men in the house had only one avenue of escape: out the back door, across the little yard, through the northeast gate, along the back of the vacant lot between the fence and the Tunstall store, and into the timber lining the river to the north. The flames lit the night sky and the vacant lot, but the backyard, enclosed by the board fence and adobe walls, lay in shadows. The possemen at the door in the back wall, only a few steps from the kitchen door, could make out almost nothing in the yard.23

  With the kitchen beginning to catch fire, the breakout came shortly after 9:00 P.M. One by one, the men slipped out the door into the gloom of the yard and crept to the gate in the fence. In single file they started into the open. Jim French went first, followed by Harvey Morris, Tom O’Folliard, José Chavez y Chavez, and Billy Bonney.

  Not until the escapees were in the middle of the space between the fence and the Tunstall store did the light of the flames fall on them and alert the possemen. From behind the north wall and from the street, they opened a hot fire. At the first volley, said José Chavez y Chavez, “I went with all my might,” and so did the other four. A fatal ball struck down Harvey Morris, but the rest dodged through the leaden storm and lost themselves in the darkness of the river and its sheltering trees.

  Only these five made it out of the gate before the heavy fire of the deputies sealed off the escape route. McSween and the others fell back into the shadows, some crouching against the adobe walls, others taking refuge in a chicken house in the northwest corner of the yard. After about five minutes, a few of the trapped men tried to break through the gate but were again driven back.

  Ten minutes passed. Then McSween called out, “I shall surrender.”

  Robert Beckwith, old Hugh’s son from Seven Rivers, replied, “I am a deputy sheriff and I have got a warrant for you.”

  Accompanied by John Jones (son of Heiskell and Ma’am Jones), Joe Nash, and Dummy, Beckwith entered the yard through the door in the wall and walked to the kitchen door, where he faced McSween.

  Suddenly McSween yelled, “I shall never surrender.”

  Andy Boyle was standing in the door in the adobe wall. “When McSween said he would not surrender,” Boyle related, “every one of them commenced to shoot.” He called the wild and confused melee “the big killing.” In the darkened yard, both sides fired blindly and at close range. Bob Beckwith caught the first ball in the corner of his left eye and died instantly. Five bullets cut down McSween. Vicente Romero and Francisco Zamora fell dead next to McSween. Young Yginio Salazar crumpled with a bullet in the back and one in the shoulder. Later he crawled to safety. His arm smashed by a bullet, Ygnacio Gonzalez got away in the confusion, as did Florencio Chavez and José María Sanchez.

  In the river bottom, Billy and his friends joined George Coe, Henry Brown, and Joe Smith. Taking their cue from the men in the McSween house, the three had abandoned the Tunstall store at the same time. Slipping into the corral behind the store, they had confronted an eight-foot adobe wall. Tunstall’s bulldog, chained in a corner, charged at Brown, who threw down his rifle on him.

  “Henry,” shouted Coe, “let that old dog alone and let’s get out of here.”

  Beer bottles had been thrown in a mound against the wall. The three men leaped to the top of the pile, then vaulted over the wall and ran to the river.24

  Billy and the other escapees made their way down the river and crossed to the Ellis store.

  “For God’s sake, get out of here,” said Ike Ellis, who had sampled enough danger and excitement for one day.

  “Keep your shirt on,” replied George Coe. “We have got out of something worse than this.”

  One of the family rustled some grub for the hungry men, and they left. Sleeping on a hilltop near town, they walked down the valley the next morning and stopped at the home of a Hispanic farmer for coffee. He balked, protesting that the other side would kill him. “We told him he would die just a little sooner if he did not get us some coffee,” related Coe. He did. All the Regulators rendezvoused at the ranch of Frank Coe on the Hondo.25

  None of the principals in the Five-Day Battle for Lincoln could find much to boast about. It was not an especially mismanaged battle but rather an almost altogether unmanaged battle. Having sought a decisive test at arms, both sides then lost their nerve and let it run its course without direction.

  Sheriff Peppin provided virtually no leadership. He spent the first four days indecisively idle in the Wortley Hotel and the fifth day observing from the top of the torreon. His sole contribution to the course of events was to order the McSween house set afire, a task then accomplished on the initiative of others.

  Jimmy Dolan played an even smaller role. Still slowed by his broken leg, he watched the attack on the McSween house from one of the little adobe residences across the street.

  Of all the factors influencing the outcome of the battle, Colonel Dudley’s mindless combination of action and inaction proved most decisive. He came to Lincoln to protect women and children, then refused to take the only action that would have protected women and children—stop the fighting and let the courts decide. Simply by entering Lincoln he had disobeyed orders; to have gone a step farther in behalf of humanity could not have brough
t him any more censure. As Sue McSween’s tirade made clear to him, the McSween house itself contained three women and five children, and still he would not interfere. Yet his handling of the artillery, combined with his very presence in town, changed the equation of the battle and ensured Peppin’s victory.

  And finally, the Regulator leadership failed. McSween came to Lincoln with a stubborn resolve and a formidable army but with no plan of how to use it. Scattered among several strongholds around town, it lost the advantage of numbers and was fatally crippled by an inability to communicate.

  Far worse, the men in the Montaño and Ellis stores allowed themselves to be stampeded by Colonel Dudley’s bluster and ran from battle without firing a shot. Doc Scurlock, the Regulator captain, faltered badly. With forty men at his command, he made one halfhearted effort to relieve the McSween house but turned tail when a scattering of rifle shots came his way. The most charitable explanation is that these men feared getting into a fight with Dudley’s soldiers. Their timidity left McSween and his men to their fate.

  The escape from McSween’s blazing home gave Billy Bonney a modest notoriety in New Mexico. The territorial newspapers named him as one of the defenders of the McSween house and at first reported him among the dead. So far, however, neither the public nor the press perceived him in any larger dimensions than warranted by strict fact. He was simply one of about a dozen faceless Regulators who got their names in the papers whenever they fought a skirmish or shot one of the opposition. He had done nothing to give him any more prominence in the public eye than the men with whom he rode and fought. Even the daring breakout, which he probably engineered, was successfully shared with three other men. However highly regarded by his comrades, Billy had yet to gain a public reputation.