To Hell on a Fast Horse
Page 6
Evans came to New Mexico Territory in 1872 and worked with cattle king John S. Chisum on the Pecos. That consisted primarily of stealing horses from the Mescalero Apaches and delivering them up to Chisum. It only got worse from there. By the time he and the Kid crossed paths, Evans had become one of the most hated desperadoes in southern New Mexico. Teaming up with the equally despised Mesilla Valley “rancher” John Kinney, he headed a gang of horse and cattle thieves numbering, at times, as many as thirty men. A cold-blooded killer and accomplished gunman, Evans was used to doing as he pleased with little fear of the law or anyone else. When his harshest critic, Mesilla Valley Independent editor Albert J. Fountain, urged the local citizenry to capture and lynch Evans and his gang, Evans threatened Fountain’s life (more than once), saying he would give the editor a “free pass to hell.” It was no idle threat.
The Boys, including the Kid, made their way across the playas, mountains, and deserts of southern New Mexico, freely taking the best delicacies, or what passed for delicacies, that each saloon or stopping place had to offer, ordering their nervous hosts to “chalk it up.” At Mesilla, Kid Antrim stole a splendid little racing mare that just happened to belong to the daughter of the county sheriff. The Boys continued eastward from the Mesilla Valley, traveling over San Augustin Pass, across the White Sands, and to the village of Tularosa, which they terrorized one evening with their carousing and the firing off of their ample supply of guns. The desperadoes next crossed the Sacramento Mountains and finally ended up at the Seven Rivers settlement in the Pecos Valley, approximately 250 miles from Mesilla. By this point, the Kid was no longer with them, having separated from the main party under Evans.
Hardly more than a spot on the road, Seven Rivers consisted of a single flat-roofed adobe of several rooms, one of which contained a well-stocked store. Out back were several gravestones; close by, between low dirt banks, flowed the Pecos River. The “settlement” was actually a hodgepodge of scattered ranches and homesteads, surrounded by miles and miles of the finest grazing land in the Southwest, most notably the Chisum Range on the east side of the Pecos. Named for John S. Chisum, the range stretched from Seven Rivers north to the mouth of the Hondo, a distance of approximately sixty miles. Over the last few years, it had supported between twenty thousand and sixty thousand head of cattle, beef that went to fill government contracts at military posts and Indian reservations in New Mexico and Arizona. It had also supported some of Chisum’s Seven Rivers neighbors, who were not above helping themselves to his beeves, a situation that had erupted into the short-lived Pecos War earlier in the year.
The Seven Rivers store was owned by small-time rancher Heiskell Jones, and this is where the Kid turned up by mid-October 1877, possibly horseless after a run-in with Apache Indians in the Guadalupe Mountains—at least that is the story Antrim told. He was no longer Henry Antrim or even Kid Antrim. Now he was William H. Bonney. Some have speculated that he settled on Bonney because his father was not Michael McCarty at all, and his real father was a former husband or lover of his mother’s whose last name was Bonney. Regardless of what the Kid called himself, Heiskell’s wife, Barbara, took the gun-toting boy in. Known affectionately up and down the Pecos as “Ma’am Jones,” Barbara had a large family of her own to care for (between 1855 and 1878, she would have a total of nine boys and one daughter), yet she was famous for feeding, doctoring, and sheltering neighbors and strangers alike.
As related time and again by those who knew him, William H. Bonney had a charm or magnetism that was irresistible to the ladies; they wanted to mother him or take him for a roll in the hay. Ma’am wanted to mother him. “My mother loved him,” recalled Sam Jones. “He was always courteous and deferential to her. She said he had the nicest manners of any young man in the country. She never could bear to hear anyone speak ill of him.” And both Sam and Frank Jones agreed that if “Billy had been a bad boy, Mother would not have wanted him around. And she was a pretty good judge of men.” Heiskell Jones freighted his own goods from Las Vegas to Seven Rivers, and the Kid went with Heiskell on one or more of these long trips. Billy also developed a close friendship with twenty-four-year-old John Jones, the eldest of the brothers. The Kid’s time at the Jones place may have lasted as few as three weeks or as long as three months. However long he stayed, it was plenty of time to make the Jones family loyal Billy the Kid supporters (and Pat Garrett haters) for the rest of their lives.
By this time, the Kid had become obsessed with guns and was impressive in his handling of them. Lily Casey, no fan of Billy’s, saw the Kid during this period and remembered that he “was active and graceful as a cat. At Seven Rivers he practiced continually with pistol or rifle, often riding at a run and dodging behind the side of his mount to fire, as the Apaches did. He was very proud of his ability to pick up a handkerchief or other objects from the ground while riding at a run.” Lily’s mother, the widow Ellen Casey, was bound for Texas with a herd of cattle and Billy hit her up for a job. But Mrs. Casey sensed, as her daughter later remarked, that Billy “was not addicted to regular work.” Lily and her brother, Robert, considered the Kid little more than a bum—he did not get the job.
Sometime that fall, Billy Bonney appeared at Frank Coe’s ranch on the upper Rio Ruidoso, looking for work. Coe was known to be both handy with a gun and quick to use one. But the Kid looked so young that Coe had a hard time taking him seriously. “I invited him to stop with us until he could find something to do,” Frank recalled. “There wasn’t much entertainment those days, except to hunt.” But there was entertainment in watching Billy play with his shootin’ irons: “He spent all his spare time cleaning his six-shooter and practicing shooting. He could take two six-shooters, loaded and cocked, one on each hand, his fore-finger between the trigger and guard, and twirl one in one direction and the other in the other direction, at the same time.”
Billy soon found something to do. A short time earlier, on October 17, Jesse Evans and three of The Boys had been corralled by a posse under Lincoln County sheriff William Brady. Now they were being held in a miserable hole in the ground known as the Lincoln County jail. Completed that same month, the jail cells were in a dugout ten feet deep, its walls lined with square-hewn timber. The ceiling was made from logs chinked with mud and covered with dirt, and the only entrance was a single door. Prisoners were forced to climb down a ladder, which was then withdrawn and the door shut tight. Pat Garrett condemned the jail as “unfit for a dog-kennel.” Evans and the other prisoners whiled away the time playing cards and boasting that their friends would soon come to break them out. And sure enough, by mid-November, several of The Boys, among them Billy Bonney, had a plan to rescue their leader from the Lincoln hellhole.
IF ANY SINGLE CHUNK of land embodied the American West, it was Lincoln County. The largest county in the United States at that time (nearly thirty thousand square miles), it spilled across the entire southeast section of New Mexico Territory. Stark plains rolled away to the horizon in its eastern half, bisected by slivers of water with evocative names like the Pecos and Rio Hondo. To the west, its rugged Sacramento, Capitan, and Guadalupe mountain ranges rose to nearly twelve thousand feet at their highest point. There were very few settlements, except for several ranching operations and the occasional Hispanic village or placita. The county’s human population numbered approximately two thousand; cattle numbered in the tens of thousands. A sole military post, Fort Stanton, was located just nine miles west of the county seat, also named Lincoln, and was there to keep watch over the still-wild Mescalero Apaches.
Nestled in the Rio Bonito Valley, the town of Lincoln was like other territorial settlements. Several adobe homes and stores, their thick mud-brick walls serving as a perfect insulation against the wearying heat of summer and the biting cold of winter, were scattered for a mile on both sides of a hard-packed dirt road. In the heart of the village, on the north side of this one and only street, stood the torreón, a three-story tower of rock and adobe constructed by residents years before as t
heir main defense against plundering Indians. The town saw a fairly steady stream of settlers, who came to register land transactions or conduct business with the courts, at the same time purchasing supplies, picking up mail, and hearing the latest news.
The Hispanic citizens of Lincoln, who made up the majority of the town’s population, irrigated small fields on the Bonito, tended sheep flocks, and worked where they could as day laborers. Fort Stanton offered both civilian job opportunities and a market for livestock and produce. A few Lincoln families were involved in the overland freighting business; Hispanos were famed arrieros (muleteers) dating back to Spanish colonial times. To outsiders, this place was a world both exotic and backward.
Lincoln, New Mexico Territory.
Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico
Most Anglos in the territory held strongly racist views toward Hispanos (and vice versa). Certainly, one could find affluent Hispanos in the territorial government and, more commonly, in county positions. But it was painfully clear to Hispanos what their place was expected to be. On October 10, 1875, Lincoln farmer Gregorio Balenzuela made the mistake of calling Alexander “Ham” Mills a gringo. Mills pulled out his gun and shot the man dead, after which Mills rode out of town unmolested. A year later, the New Mexico governor pardoned Mills for the murder. No wonder the Spanish-speaking Billy the Kid, who defied the gringo laws and humiliated the sheriffs and their posses, who rode like an Apache and kicked up his heels as gracefully as any vaquero, became, if not a favorite, certainly a sympathetic figure to native New Mexicans. To them, he was simply Billito or el Chivato.
IN THE EARLY-MORNING HOURS of November 17, 1877, the dark figures of more than twenty horsemen passed quietly into Lincoln. It was The Boys, including Billy, and they rode straight to the county jail. At the jail, ten men dismounted and slipped through the main door, which was curiously unlocked. The jailer was asleep inside, but he soon awoke to a gun barrel pointed at his head. It was 3:00 A.M., and the jailer watched as The Boys went to work on the trapdoor to the jail cells. The gunmen had brought heavy, rock-filled sacks, and they used these to bust through the wooden door to the dungeonlike cells below. Jesse Evans and the other gang members were waiting for them. A confederate had been able to get files and wood augurs to the prisoners, and Jesse and his pals had been busily working on their shackles in preparation for the breakout. Jesse and the others climbed up the ladder lowered to them, some with their leg braces still attached. It was still dark and tranquil when the bunch rode out of town; most of Lincoln’s citizens did not get the news of the brazen escape until well after sunup.
For Evans and The Boys, it was now back to business as usual, stealing livestock and making death threats, with little to fear from the law. Not so for Billy—the law nabbed him a month later at Seven Rivers, where he was apprehended with a pair of horses that belonged to English rancher John Henry Tunstall. The Kid may have stolen the horses himself or traded with one of The Boys, but regardless, it was now his turn to spend some time in the subterranean Lincoln jail, and he did not like it one bit. He apparently requested a meeting with Tunstall, which must have gone well, because the Englishman had the Kid released and gave him a job on his Rio Feliz ranch.
Billy may have promised to testify against his friends in exchange for his freedom. The relationship between the Kid and Evans had been strained ever since Billy stole the little racing mare back in Mesilla. The mare had been Sheriff Mariano Barela’s daughter’s favorite, and the sheriff, Billy discovered a little too late, was a crony of Evans’s. Billy also may have been ticked off that none of The Boys came to his rescue in Lincoln like he had done for them. Whatever Billy’s reasons, by joining Tunstall he had officially taken sides in one of the most famous and bitter feuds in the American West, an ugly struggle for profits and economic dominance that became known as the Lincoln County War.
For years, the mercantile firm of L. G. Murphy & Co. and its successor, J. J. Dolan & Co., commonly known as “The House,” had the upper hand in just about every moneymaking venture in the region. It operated for a time as the post trader at Fort Stanton and received numerous government contracts for beef, corn, flour, and other provisions. In Lincoln, The House maintained a brewery, saloon, and restaurant, as well as a large store. It also performed, on a limited basis, the services of a bank. Yet The House’s unashamed greed (even though many of its business practices were not unusual for the time), its long reach into local government, and its connection to territorial power brokers in New Mexico’s capital—the infamous “Santa Fe Ring”—earned it considerable ill will among the locals.
“Only those who have experienced it can realize the extent to which Murphy & Co. dominated the country and controlled its people, economy, and politics,” remembered one county resident. “All Lincoln County was cowed and intimidated by them. To oppose them was to court disaster.” Three men—John Henry Tunstall, Alexander A. McSween, and John S. Chisum—did oppose The House’s regional supremacy, and it cost two of them their lives.
A twenty-four-year-old Englishman with plenty of gumption—and capital to go with it—John Henry Tunstall first arrived in Lincoln County in November 1876, determined to carve out his own modest empire from its vast lands. He was also a sure enough dude, complete with tailored suits (he had a penchant for Harris tweed), riding out-fits, and top boots. His hair was sandy colored and wavy, though well groomed, and he sported chin whiskers and a pencil-thin mustache. In photographs, he appears as stiff and aristocratic as the man on the Prince Albert tobacco tins, but those close to the young Englishman thought he was good-looking and personable. He was a prolific letter writer, expounding at length to his father in England (his chief financial backer) on the Wild West and predicting that he would make a fortune there. His plans could just as easily have been written by a member of The House: “I propose to confine my operations to Lincoln County, but I intend to handle it in such a way as to get the half of every dollar that is made in the county by anyone, and with our means we could get things into that shape in three years, if we only used two thirds of our capital in the undertaking.”
John Henry Tunstall.
Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico
Tunstall had focused his sights on southeastern New Mexico because of a chance meeting with Lincoln attorney Alexander A. McSween at a Santa Fe hotel. McSween, a Scotsman ten years Tunstall’s senior, was new to the Territory as well, having arrived with his wife, Susan, in March 1875. With a drooping mustache as thick as his Scottish brogue, McSween had initially worked as a lawyer for The House, where he got an insider’s look into the firm’s many business dealings. Within a few months, McSween had used this privileged information to help Tunstall buy a cattle ranch and open a mercantile store in Lincoln. The pair also established a bank; cattleman John S. Chisum served as the bank’s president. Chisum had his own grievances against The House, whose loose policy when buying beef for its government contracts had served as an open invitation for rustlers to steal from Chisum’s herds on the Pecos.
The carefully plotted competition from Tunstall and McSween came at a time when The House was financially on its knees (the principals were not the best businessmen). And the fact that Tunstall was an upper-class English Protestant, while The House hothead, Jimmy Dolan, and his partner, John Riley, were both Irish Catholic, made this even worse. Born in County Galway, Ireland, in 1848, Dolan had emigrated to the United States at age six. During the Civil War, he had been a drummer boy for one of the colorful Zouave regiments from New York State, and it was as a U.S. infantryman that he had come to Lincoln County. He was short, just five feet, two and one-half inches tall, and his temper was even shorter.
Alexander McSween.
Robert G. McCubbin Collection
Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico
James “Jimmy” Dolan.
Robert G. McCubbin Collection
Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico<
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By early February 1878, both sides had spread vicious rumors about the other; both had attacked each other publicly in the territorial press; and both had spewed out a few choice personal threats. Both had also put men on their payrolls who knew the inner workings of a Colt six-shooter and a Winchester repeater. The House, what with its cozy relationship with the district court, had orchestrated criminal charges (embezzlement) and a civil suit against McSween. But Dolan’s legal shenanigans achieved their finest moment on February 7, when he secured a writ of attachment against McSween. Dolan turned the writ over to Sheriff William Brady, another House tool, who happily attached any and all property of both McSween and Tunstall: store, lands, cattle, horses—even such personal items as portraits of Tunstall’s parents.
The first blood spilled in the Lincoln County War came just eleven days later at approximately 5:30 P.M. Tunstall and four of his men, including the Kid, were on their way to Lincoln with a small herd of horses. Tunstall’s party, strung out over a distance of a few hundred yards, had just crested a divide and was descending through the rugged hills above the Ruidoso Valley when they flushed a flock of wild turkeys. Two of Tunstall’s men started after the dusky birds; moments later, shots rang out on their back trail. Billy and John Middleton, who had been bringing up the rear, came forward at a gallop. Behind them, riding hard, was a party of nearly twenty mounted men, members of a posse sent to gather up Tunstall’s horses, except it was obvious that this posse was bent on more than simply attaching livestock. Middleton raced toward Tunstall, who had remained near the horse herd, and shouted at him to flee. Agitated and confused by the gunfire and commotion, Tunstall did nothing.