The Lincoln County War and Billy the Kid
Near Ruidoso, New Mexico
A short drive east of Ruidoso is the small town of Lincoln, and its single dusty main street was once the deadliest place in the American West. In the eighteen seventies, two factions fought for control of the county's cattle and dry-goods trade. On one side stood the entrenched merchants Lawrence Murphy and James Dolan, whose operation was known simply as the House.
On the other stood a young English rancher named John Tunstall and the lawyer Alexander McSween. On February eighteenth, eighteen seventy-eight, Tunstall was shot and killed on his own land by a posse tied to the House. That murder lit the fuse.
A group of Tunstall's men, calling themselves the Regulators, swore vengeance, and among them rode a slight, quick teenager named William Bonney, remembered by the world as Billy the Kid. The fighting climaxed in July of eighteen seventy-eight in a five-day battle right here in Lincoln, gunfire pouring through the streets until the McSween house was set ablaze. Before it was over, roughly nineteen people had been killed.
Much of Lincoln survives almost untouched, and walking it today is as close as you can come to standing inside the story.
