The Lincoln County War and Billy the Kid

On the afternoon of February eighteenth, eighteen seventy-eight, a twenty-four-year-old English rancher named John Tunstall was riding home along a draw in Lincoln County when a posse intercepted him and shot him dead. Tunstall had been trying to break a business monopoly run by a political machine known in New Mexico as the Santa Fe Ring. His murder started a war.

Lincoln County in the eighteen seventies was enormous, roughly the size of South Carolina, and largely lawless. Two factions had been fighting for control of its commerce and county government for years. On one side stood James Dolan and the heirs of Lawrence Murphy, who ran the only general store in the region and held lucrative Army contracts for beef and supplies.

On the other stood Tunstall, his lawyer Alexander McSween, and the cattle baron John Chisum, who wanted to break the monopoly. After Tunstall's death, his employees organized themselves into a vigilante group called the Regulators. Among them was a nineteen-year-old drifter from the streets of New York named William Henry Bonney, Billy the Kid.

The Regulators killed several of the men responsible for Tunstall's death, then assassinated Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady in broad daylight on April first, eighteen seventy-eight. The Lincoln County War culminated in a five-day siege in July that left Alexander McSween dead and the town of Lincoln in ashes. Billy the Kid was eventually tracked down by the newly elected sheriff Pat Garrett and shot dead at Fort Sumner on July fourteenth, eighteen eighty-one.

He was twenty-one years old. The facts of his life were already being embroidered into legend before he was buried. He had reportedly killed as many as twenty-one men, though historians put the actual number at eight or nine.

None of that mattered much to the storytellers. New Mexico had its outlaw, and the story has never stopped being told.