by Jon E. Lewis
John Clay, a Scotsman who managed several Wyoming ranches, described the ambience of the Cheyenne Club in his memoir, My Life on the Range:
It was a cosmopolitan place. Under its roof reticent Britisher, cautious Scot, exuberant Irishman, careful Yankee, confident Bostonian, worldly New Yorker, chivalrous Southerner and delightful Canadian, all found a welcome home . . . a motley group full of ginger and snap, with more energy than business sense.
There at the club they met and they fashioned it after eastern and foreign methods. The foreigner was caught up by the ease and luxury of its café and dining room. There was an atmosphere of success among its members. They spent money freely, for all along the line there was a swelling song of victory.
Fencing off Texas
The northern plains were not the only great range to be opened up for cattle in the bonanza years. There was also the Llanos Estacados, the Staked Plains of the Texas Panhandle, long the domain of the buffalo and the Comanche.
The man who opened up the Panhandle for ranching was the ubiquitous Charles Goodnight. The financial panic of 1873 had wiped his Colorado cattle enterprise “off the face of the earth,” obliging him to sell his property and most of his stock. From the wreckage of his empire he managed to salvage 1,800 head of cattle, and with veritable grit decided that he would start up a new cattle venture in a new land.
Thus in the fall of 1875 Goodnight began driving his remaining Longhorns south towards the unbroken grassland of the Panhandle, an area he knew from youthful service fighting Indians with the Texas Rangers. A volunteer assistant on the drive was Englishman James T. Hughes, the son of the author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Another was the Scot J. C. Johnston, later director of Murdo Mackenzie’s Matador Ranch. Both men had money, and invested it in Goodnight, buying a third of his herd.
As Goodnight’s outfit trailed their way southwards they found the army everywhere before them, fighting their final campaign against the Comanche of the Staked Plains. Wintering on the Canadian, Goodnight began to search for the exact place where he would build his new ranch. By chance a Mexican trader, Nicholas Martinez, drifted into Goodnight’s camp and told him of the Palo Duro Canyon, a fabulous grassy valley where Chief Lone Wolf had fought Mackenzie’s cavalry. Goodnight employed Martinez to lead him to the canyon. They wandered for days, Martinez seemingly lost, until Martinez gestured Goodnight to the brink of an enormous gash in the earth.
One glimpse over the edge was enough to convince the rancher he had found the place he sought. Buffalo grass carpeted the bottom of the Palo Duro, while its towering walls made it a natural enclosure. A creek – the headwaters of the Red River – ran through it, giving it a plentiful supply of water. Only a few feet wide in parts, in other places the canyon bulged out to form miles of broad range. To get the cattle in, Goodnight had to drive them in single file down an old buffalo trail. His beloved chuckwagon was taken apart and lowered down the cliffs by lariat.
In the valley, Goodnight and his men discovered thousands of buffalo, which they “choused” out by firing bullets near their feet. To prevent the buffalo returning a guard had to be mounted at the mouth of the canyon. Then, on a choice piece of green level ground near the creek, Goodnight built the log house of what he called the “Old Home Ranch”.
With the ranch house completed, Goodnight returned to Colorado to collect his wife, Mary Ann. On the journey he met the Irish financier John G. Adair, who proposed he back the cattleman in his venture. So was established the 1.25 million-acre “JA Ranch”, after Adair’s initials, which realized a profit of more than $500,000 in five years. Astutely, Goodnight upgraded his cattle by crossbreeding them. An experiment with shorthorned Durham bulls was a failure, but when in 1882 Goodnight tried white-faced Herefords he was immediately successful. The Hereford, as it developed, was the answer to the western livestock problem. It was hardy enough to survive the range, but produced plentiful, fatty meat.
Adair himself stayed in the East and left the ranching to Goodnight. When the Irishman died in 1885, however, his wife took to descending on the Palo Duro to check over the investment. A prominent Eastern socialite, Cornelia Wadsworth Adair always brought with her a vast train of maids, butlers and baggage.
Despite her customary scandalously late hour of rising, Cornelia Wadsworth Adair proved a canny rancher and by 1890 the JA Ranch grazed 100,000 cattle, many of them Herefords, which were given their own special JJ brand. But, ever restless, Goodnight decided to withdraw from the JA. Once again, he started up a new ranch, this time along the Fort Worth & Denver Railroad. Fuelled by a diet of black coffee, meat and a box of cigars a day, Goodnight also found time to develop a safe sidesaddle for women, and breed a cross between cows and buffalo which he called cattaloes.
He also spent many hours on the affairs of the Panhandle Stock Association of Texas, of which he was a prominent member. Although the cattlemen liked to surround themselves with an aura of individualism, the bonanza years saw them band together in powerful oligarchical association. The Cheyenne Club, behind its façade of carefree opulence, was the headquarters of the hardnosed Wyoming Stock Growers Association, who would achieve infamy with their range war in Johnson County in 1892.
The livestock associations offered many advantages to the established rancher: they supervised round-ups, registered brands and ran down rustlers. Above all, they sought to protect the wealth and advantage of the big cattle raiser by denying latecomer ranchers – pejoratively termed “range pirates” – and farmers access to the free grass.
Barbed wire was one means of doing this. Invented in 1873 by Illinois farmer Joseph F. Glidden, the coiled barb had initially been looked on with suspicion by the beef barons, who feared it would cut their cattle. When Glidden demonstrated to them that it would not, they bought roll upon roll of it, fencing off huge areas of grassland, even public highways. The XIT spread in Texas employed so much barbed wire that the staples needed to attach it to posts had to be shipped in by the freight-car load.
As more and more of the open range was closed to small stockmen and farmers, they began to take countermeasures. Letters of protest were sent to Washington. They formed masked, night-riding groups which cut the ranchers’ wire. The barons responded in kind, trampling down farmers’ crops and cutting their wire. Violence and murder were the result. To stop the bloodshed, Congress enacted a law in 1885 which forbade fencing on the public domain.
This brought a sort of peace to range country, but only the peace which precedes the storm. Overstocking, range wars and blizzards were about to bring the beef bonanza crashing down.
Billy the Kid
Before the cattle kingdom fell, a curtain-raiser was played out on the vast plains of New Mexico. The Lincoln County War of 1878 was the first of the great range wars. It also created a legend in one of its dramatis personae, Billy the Kid.
Trouble began with the attempt of ex-Californian army officer Lawrence G. Murphy and his business associate James J. Dolan to turn Lincoln County into their private economic empire, based on the mercantile store and bank they operated in the county seat, also known as Lincoln. This empire – known to all as “the House”, after Murphy and Dolan’s imposing store building – was thoroughly corrupt, had much of the local political-legal machine in its pocket, and derived a principal source of its income from rustling the Long Rail cattle of John Simpson Chisum, which were then sold by government contract to the Mescalero Apache Reservation and Fort Stanton. Chisum, the so-called “cattle king of New Mexico,” had been the pioneer rancher on the Pecos Plains; by the mid-1870s he had carved out a range of grama grass 200 miles long, and lived in palatial splendour in his adobe ranch set within irrigated orchards and shady cottonwoods.
By 1876 local discontent with the House’s monopoly and high prices was rising, but found no practical expression until the arrival of patrician, tweed-wearing Englishman John Henry Tunstall in Lincoln County. Tunstall bought a small ranch on the Rio Feliz – and also opened a new store in Lincoln. H
is partners in this enterprise were the town’s only lawyer, Alexander McSween, and John Chisum who opened a bank in the rear of the store. Patrons flocked to the Tunstall–McSween store, to the considerable irritation of the House. Matters were exacerbated when Murphy accused McSween of embezzling the estate of a former partner. As a precautionary measure against any sequestering, the lawyer transferred his property to Tunstall.
Such was the simmering country into which William H. Bonney, Billy the Kid, rode in September 1877.
The Kid
Born Henry McCarty in the immigrant Irish slums of New York in 1859, the Kid moved west to Kansas during the Civil War. After the Kid’s father died in Coffeyville, his tubercular laundress mother moved on to the healthier, drier climes of Colorado. The first time the Kid entered the official records was on 1 March 1873. On that day Henry McCarty stood in Santa Fe’s First Presbyterian Church with his brother Joseph, as witnesses to the marriage of their mother, Catherine McCarty, to one William Henry Harrison Antrim, a sometime prospector and barkeep.
In the raw mining settlement of Silver City the Antrims built themselves a log cabin home near the bridge which spanned Big Ditch. The Kid had an ordinary boyhood. His teacher, Miss Mary Richards, remembered him as being “no more a problem in school than any other boy.” Among his favourite pastimes were singing and dancing, and with other boys he formed a minstrel troupe which played to appreciative audiences at Morrill’s Opera House. His other passion was reading. In the few years left to him, the Kid would read voraciously.
On 16 September 1874 Catherine Antrim succumbed finally to the tuberculosis mining into her. Henry was 14. With the removal of parental discipline, the Kid began to err towards petty crime. One dark night, the Kid accompanied a local thief, Sombrero Jack, on a raid on the local Chinese laundry. The duo absconded with a bundle of washing. Henry’s part in the deed was soon discovered and Sheriff Harvey W. Whitehill locked the Kid up. Displaying the cunning that would distinguish his later career, the Kid persuaded the sheriff to let him have use of the corridor outside his cell. Left unguarded for half an hour, the Kid squeezed up a chimney and out of gaol. In what would be the first of the Kid’s many press notices, the escape was related by the local newspaper, Grant County Herald, with some sarcasm:
Henry McCarty, who was arrested on Thursday and committed to jail to await the action of the grand jury, upon charge of stealing clothes from Charley Sun and Sam Chung, celestials, sans cue, sans Joss sticks, escaped from prison yesterday through the chimney. It’s believed that Henry was simply the tool of “Sombrero Jack”, who done the stealing whilst Henry done the hiding. Jack has skinned out.
The Kid also “skinned out”. At 15 he was now officially a fugitive from the law. Alone, he struck a course towards Mount Graham, Arizona, where he worked as a teamster and cowboy. These occupations equipped him with the necessary lore for life on the violent frontier, including the handling of a pistol and rifle. The Kid’s tender years, though, did not properly allow him to do a man’s work on a ranch. So, on being discharged as a cowpoke, he drifted into cattle rustling and horse theft. On 17 November 1876 the Kid stole a horse too many, the mount of a cavalry sergeant. He was tracked down and placed in Camp Grant’s guardhouse. The army, like Sheriff Whitehill before it, discovered that the Kid was hard to imprison. He escaped on the same day he was confined, 25 March 1877.
By high summer the Kid was back in the Camp Grant area. According to a ranch acquaintance who saw him arrive, the Kid was “dressed like a ‘country jake’, with ‘store pants’ on and shoes instead of boots. He wore a six gun stuffed in his trousers.”
If the Kid had the air of a strutting youth looking for trouble, he soon found it. Frank P. Cahill was a civilian blacksmith attached to Camp Grant, who was nicknamed “Windy” because of his overbearing manner. Windy Cahill used to delight in tormenting the Kid, ruffling his hair, and slapping his face. After a card game on 17 August 1877, the Kid and Windy became involved in a quarrel, with Windy calling the Kid “a pimp” and the Kid replying that Windy was “a sonofabitch”. Cahill wrestled the Kid down, whereupon the Kid pulled Cahill’s gun and shot him through the stomach. Windy Cahill died the next day.
A coroner’s inquest decided that the killing of Frank P. Cahill “was criminal and unjustifiable, and that Henry Antrim, alias Kid, is guilty thereof.”
The Kid was arrested as he ate breakfast at his hotel. Before he could be brought for trial, he escaped.
The Kid returned to the New Mexico he had fled two years previously as a juvenile thief. By the time of his return the Kid, now 17, had taken on the physique and personality that he would retain until the end of his short life. Wiry and lithe, he weighed 135 pounds and stood 5 feet 7 inches tall. Everyone noticed his blue eyes and wavy brown hair, while most found his buck-teeth attractive rather than ugly. From the hands of the ranches around Camp Grant he had learned the Code of the West, how to use a firearm, the carousing lifestyle of the cowboy (the Kid, although only a modest imbiber of tobacco and drink, was an inveterate card player, singer and girl-chaser), and gunmanship. He was an accomplished rustler, and somewhere along the line had picked up fluent Spanish.
When the Kid first entered Lincoln County, he hired himself out to whichever side in the growing conflict was willing to pay him. Usually he rode with “The Boys”, a gang led by ex-Chisum hand Jesse Evans, the speciality of which was raiding Chisum’s scattered herds on behalf of Lawrence Murphy. Tiring of “The Boys”, the Kid – who now used the alias “William H. Bonney” – left their ranks and took a job working on Frank Coe’s small ranch on the Ruidoso. Frank Coe noted his easy charm and his preoccupation with guns. “He spent all his spare time cleaning his six-shooter and practising shooting,” recalled Coe years later. “He could take two six-shooters, loaded and cocked, one in each hand . . . and twirl one in one direction and the other in the other direction, at the same time.”
Among the Coes’ neighbours on the Ruidoso was Dick Brewer. As well as managing his own spread, Brewer acted as ranch foreman to John Tunstall. It was probably through Brewer that the Kid was introduced to Tunstall, and hired by him as one of his cowboys-cum-gunslingers. Although Tunstall personally abhorred violence he was realistic enough to see that gunplay might be necessary in the feud with the House. Employing cowboy-gunfighters proved expensive. “It has cost a lot of money,” Tunstall wrote in a letter to his munificent London parents, “for men expect to be well-paid for going on the war path.”
The Kid was recruited to the Tunstall war party in late January 1878, and formed a deep liking for the cultured Englishman. “He was the only man,” said the Kid of Tunstall, “that ever treated me like I was free-born and white.” The Kid’s idolization of Tunstall would be a key factor in the blood-spilling that led to the Lincoln County War.
The Lincoln County War
The War was initiated at first light on the morning of 18 February 1878, when a posse led by pro-Murphy sheriff William Brady swept into Tunstall’s ranch. Brady had an order to retrieve in cattle what Murphy considered was owed him in the embezzlement case. The posse included several bandits specially recruited for the occasion, one of whom was Jesse Evans.
Finding Tunstall absent, the posse decided to hunt him down. That evening, as dusk was falling, the posse caught up with Tunstall and several of his men on the Lincoln road. Tunstall’s party were ambushed as they breached a hill on the road. The Englishman was killed by a rifle round to the chest in some scrub just off the trail.
The official version of the killing, as reported by Sheriff Brady, was that the Englishman had been shot resisting arrest. Billy the Kid, along with the other Tunstall men, watching from the side of the trail, saw the killing as murder.
The Kid was deeply affected by Tunstall’s death, telling Frank Coe: “I never expect to let up until I kill the last man who helped kill Tunstall, or die in the act myself.”
McSween, to whom leadership of the Tunstall faction now fell, had little appetite for an arm
ed fight with Murphy. Initially, therefore, McSween tried to have Tunstall’s murderers dealt with by legal means. Little cooperation could be expected from Sheriff Brady, so McSween persuaded a Lincoln justice of the peace, John B. Wilson, to issue warrants for the arrest of the killers. On 20 February Atancio Martinez, the town constable, accompanied by a conspicuously pistolled Billy Bonney and another Tunstall hand, Fred Waite, went to the Murphy store to serve warrants on Billy Morton and Jesse Evans for the murder of the Englishman. Sheriff Brady, by chance in the store, refused to let Martinez serve the warrants. Instead Brady arbitrarily and arrogantly arrested the Kid and Waite (“Because I had the power,” he told complainants). After several days the prisoners were released, but the Kid would never forgive or forget the humiliation he received at Brady’s hands.
McSween, meanwhile, departed town. Sheriff Brady’s action had shown the futility of the lawyer’s approach. Almost all the law enforcement machinery in Lincoln and its environs was in the pay of the Murphy faction.
With McSween’s departure, a number of Tunstall men, led by Dick Brewer and Billy Bonney, declared themselves the “Regulators”. Bound together by a loyalty oath they called the “iron-clad”, the Regulators were a voluntary vigilante organization determined to serve the warrants – forcibly, if necessary – against Tunstall’s killers.
