The war is raging now as fiercely as ever. The country is overrun by horse & cattle thieves & there is no law in force….1
—GODFREY GAUSS
IN KEEPING WITH an annual tradition Abraham Lincoln had started fourteen years earlier to soothe a country at war with itself, President Rutherford B. Hayes declared November 29, 1877, Thanksgiving Day.2 His decree included the entire nation, even all those souls, both lost and found, dwelling in rowdy New Mexico Territory.
Billy Bonney, who turned eighteen six days before the holiday, had plenty to be thankful for. First and foremost, he was not dead, crippled, or in jail. He had found steady work at John Tunstall’s ranch on the Rio Feliz. Although his English boss did not observe the American feast day, meaning he had no wild turkey stuffed with oysters shipped from afar or spicy mince pie, the Kid at least briefly was at ease. For the first time in a long while he had three square meals each day, a job of sorts, a warm bunk inside a crowded but cozy adobe, and a decent horse to ride. The wages he drew allowed him to procure a dime novel or two, a tin of pomade for slicking back his hair before a dance, and maybe even a slim grubstake for a game of three-card monte.
During this time the Kid often visited with George and Frank Coe, Ab Saunders, and the others he had met since coming back to New Mexico Territory. George Coe recalled:
Billy lost no time getting to know the other people in the valley. He was the center of attention everywhere he went, and though heavily armed, he seemed as gentlemanly as a college-bred youth. He quickly became acquainted with everybody, and because of his humorous and pleasing personality grew to be a community favorite.
In fact, Billy was so popular there wasn’t enough of him to go around. He had a beautiful voice and sang like a bird. One of our special amusements was to get together every few nights and have a singing. The thrill of those happy nights still lingers—a pleasant memory—and tonight I would give a lot to live through one again. Frank Coe and I played fiddles, and all of us danced, and here Billy, too, was in demand.3
The Kid spent a lot of his spare time with Coe’s nearest neighbors, Charlie Bowdre and his wife, Manuela, at their place on the upper Ruidoso. Through the Bowdres, the Kid met Josiah Gordon Scurlock, an Alabama native who supposedly had studied medicine in New Orleans, thus earning him the nickname Doc. Known to be quick-tempered and “a scrapping fool,” he took pleasure in scribbling poetry and reading the classics.4 Scurlock had drifted to Mexico at age twenty but relocated to New Mexico Territory the following year after he killed a man who had shot out Scurlock’s front teeth during a card game squabble. Scurlock was hired by John Chisum for a while, and in 1876 he married Manuela Bowdre’s sixteen-year-old half sister, Antonia Miguela Herrera, making him Charlie’s brother-in-law. Scurlock turned to farming in the Ruidoso Valley and raised a family that eventually numbered ten children.5
The Kid liked keeping company with his new friends, and the pleasure was mutual. For a bit of sport and some extra money, they hunted bear, turkey, and deer and sold or traded the meat at Fort Stanton. According to Coe, the Kid “became quite expert as a deer slayer” as well as a popular dancer at the local bailes and often said that he wished his mother were still alive to enjoy those high times with him.6
“He was a mighty nice dancer and what you call a ladies’ man,” said Coe. “He talked the Mexican language and was also liked by the women.” The Kid danced waltzes, polkas, and squares and almost always requested that the musicians play “Turkey in the Straw,” one of his favorite tunes. “He’d come over and say, ‘Don’t forget the gallina [hen],’” remembered Coe.7
One of the Kid’s preferred haunts was San Patricio, a small Lincoln County village on the Rio Ruidoso just above its junction with the Rio Bonito. Originally called Ruidoso, the name was changed in 1875 when a church named San Patricio, for the patron of Ireland, was built under the supervision of an Irish priest.8 The mostly Hispanic population embraced Billy Bonney, especially the young señoritas who looked forward to his appearances at the bailes.
During the ten short weeks he worked for Tunstall, the Kid treated his employer respectfully, but the two men were not particularly close. None of the many letters that Tunstall wrote to family in England mentioned Billy Bonney by name. Tunstall frequently was away from the ranch on business trips or tending his store in Lincoln and had more on his mind than a teenage cattle hand.9
For someone often described as innocent and idealistic, Tunstall could be just as Machiavellian and greedy as his enemies at The House and others in the brotherhood of the Santa Fe Ring. When the Tunstall outfit hired Bonney, it was clear that Tunstall’s employees, besides possessing competent ranching abilities, had to handle firearms skillfully. The Kid prized his Winchester ’73 rifle, and he carried several kinds of pistols, but the compact .41-caliber Colt double-action Thunderer, was his favorite. It was a gun that did not have to be manually cocked and could be fired rapidly.10 That was just fine with Tunstall, who wanted nothing but capable gunmen riding for him, even if keeping them was expensive. “It cost a lot of money,” Tunstall complained in a letter to his family in England, “for men expect to be well-paid for going on the war path.”11
Francisco Gomez, a resident of Lincoln County for seventy-five years and a former McSween employee, spoke many years later of the Kid’s know-how with a gun and his competence as a horseman. “He used to practice target shooting a lot,” said Gomez. “He would throw up a can and would twirl his six-gun on his finger and he could hit the can six times before it hit the ground. He rode a big roan horse about ten or twelve hands high all that winter and when that horse was out in the pasture Billy would go to the gate and whistle and the horse would come up to the gate to him. That horse would follow Billy and mind him like a dog. He was a very fast horse and could out run most of the other horses around here.”12
Although he was well known by many people throughout the county, Bonney was most drawn to the fellows working for Tunstall, who became his best pals. They included a few that the Kid had little in common with, such as Rob Widenmann. A hanger-on with some family connections back East, Widenmann drifted to New Mexico Territory, struck up a friendship with Tunstall, and in the process wrangled a commission as a U.S. deputy marshal. Mostly remembered as a speculator with an appalling reputation, he was described by one writer as “acting the role of friend, valet, and general handy man” for Tunstall and by the Santa Fe New Mexican, an instrument of the Santa Fe Ring, as “a first class liar and fraud.”13
In the evening after supper the Kid listened to the tales of fighting Indians and cattle stampedes told by Godfrey Gauss, an old German employed as camp cook and ranch helper.14 Billy also grew especially close to other hired hands nearer his own age. There was Fred Waite, a part Chickasaw cowboy from Indian Territory, called Dash by his saddle mates. Waite and Bonney became constant companions and were even talking about operating a spread on the Peñasco someday. Henry Brown, a former buffalo hunter who had worked for both The House and Chisum, also was a close friend of the Kid’s. After the Lincoln County War, Brown left the territory and became a lawman in Tascosa, Texas.15 John Middleton, described by Tunstall as “about the most desperate looking man I’ve ever seen,” was yet another of the Kid’s pals. When the shooting started with The House, Middleton was indicted in the killings of Sheriff Brady and Andrew “Buckshot” Roberts. That was when he “cleared out” of Lincoln County and became a grocer in Kansas.16
Dick Brewer, the ranch foreman for Tunstall, had hired Billy despite the Kid’s former but brief affiliation with the Boys. A powerfully built man from St. Albans, Vermont, Brewer had settled in the Peñasco Valley in 1870 and eventually bought the old Horrell Ranch on the Ruidoso.17 He was a close friend and supporter of Tunstall, with whom he shared an interest in breeding horses and a hatred of The House. He also became a kind of big brother figure to the Kid, but only for a short time. “After he [the Kid] got in with Tunstall, he paid his way, and was a different man altogether,” Add Casey told an interviewer in 1937. “He had more sweethearts on the creek than a little.”18
It would seem the Kid’s luck had turned for the better. Early in 1878 the fierce competition, aggravated by legal squabbles between Tunstall and McSween and the gang at The House, reached fever pitch. Besides the business rivalry, there was an ongoing dispute over the settlement of a life insurance policy that pushed Dolan and Riley to the edge. In late January, money got so tight Tunstall was forced to mortgage his store and everything in it, including the land it stood on, and he and McSween had to turn over all their livestock to Tom Catron, the boss they answered to in Santa Fe. Catron’s brother-in-law, Edgar Walz, who had just arrived from Minnesota to oversee Catron’s interests at the Dolan store, witnessed the transaction.19
Much of the conflict stemmed from court maneuverings in Mesilla that favored The House when they filed a civil suit for ten thousand dollars against their chief rivals, McSween and Tunstall. For security purposes, Judge Warren Bristol issued writs for the seizure of property and livestock belonging to McSween and Tunstall. In Lincoln, Sheriff William Brady happily confiscated McSween’s property, Tunstall’s store, and put together a posse to serve an attachment writ on Tunstall’s livestock at the ranch.20 “Tunstall and McSween didn’t stand a chance against The House,” explained Jack Rigney, former manager of the Lincoln State Monument. “They were in way over their heads. New Mexico was the last haven for lawlessness, and both camps hired renegade men who killed at the drop of a hat and without any real reason.”21
In February 1878, the Kid and Tunstall’s other hands were involved with riders for The House in several confrontations stemming from the recent legal actions. After the Dolan faction raised a gang of almost fifty men from the Seven Rivers area along with some of Jesse Evans’s gunmen, the Tunstall forces were on constant alert for raids on their cattle and horse herds as well as attacks on themselves.22
After breakfast on February 18, Tunstall, accompanied by Bonney, Brewer, Waite, Brown, Middleton, and Widenmann, left the ranch bound for Lincoln.23 The group drove a herd of nine horses whose ownership was in dispute, including six that supposedly had been exempted from seizure by Brady and a mare that by some accounts the Kid had stolen. As Tunstall and his men headed to Lincoln, a posse deputized by Sheriff William Brady and led by Jimmy Dolan and Billy Mathews, a silent partner in The House, rode to Tunstall’s ranch, clutching writs of attachment to seize livestock as ordered by the court.24 Finding only Gauss and another old-timer at the Feliz ranch, Dolan and Mathews decided that the nine horses being trailed to Lincoln had to be included in the attachment even though the horses had been specifically exempted. A band of riders from the posse was dispatched to track the Tunstall party. Buck Morton led the force, which included Jesse Evans, Tom Hill, and Frank Baker. Late that afternoon they caught up with Tunstall’s men, who had scattered in pursuit of a flock of wild turkeys, leaving Tunstall alone with the herd.25
Some of Tunstall’s hands yelled for him to run for cover, but instead he approached the posse as if to parley. It was a fatal mistake. When Tunstall drew near, Buck Morton leveled his rifle and shot the Englishman through the upper chest. Tunstall tumbled from his horse to the ground. As the gravely wounded man thrashed about, Tom Hill dismounted, picked up Tunstall’s pistol, and shot him pointblank in the back of the head. Hill then shot and killed Tunstall’s prized bay horse.26
“Hill had Tunstall’s revolver, with two chambers empty, in his hand, and it was passed around the members of the posse and then replaced in the dead man’s scabbard,” Nolan writes in his biography of Tunstall. “His body was neatly covered with a blanket, and the bloody head was pillowed on his folded overcoat. As a wry and macabre joke on Tunstall’s great affection for horses, the dead bay’s head was then pillowed on his hat.”27
Deciding against an attack on the hilltop defenses of Tunstall’s men, the posse rode off with the herd of horses and returned to the Feliz ranch. Stunned by the sudden assault, the Kid and the men concealed themselves among the rocks and trees. They never forgot John Middleton’s words: “Boys, they have killed Tunstall.”28 Most historians maintain that the cold-blooded execution of Tunstall in a patch of scrub oak marked the official start of the Lincoln County War. Technically, they are right. Yet in some ways, the war started long before that solitary act of violence. The endless battles and acts of cruelty waged for so many years before and the series of catastrophes and crimes of vengeance all merged into one war, without glory or purpose.
It was a war fought in Lincoln County in the late nineteenth century, but it had been spawned long before in Ireland and England, in boardrooms and court chambers, in saloons and places of worship. It was a war of race and religion and class, Protestant and Catholic, Anglo and Hispanic, rich and poor. It was a war fought for years and years by Texans, soldiers, ranchers, merchants, Indians, Mexicans, politicians, judges, lawyers, and a legion of the unnamed who died hard and with the passage of time were forgotten. It was a war described as a “sagebrush passion play” featuring private armies of paid killers.29 As always, the end product of the war was widows, orphans, the homeless, and mothers burying their sons.
“Truly, the Lincoln County War was a war without heroes,” writes Robert Utley, the former chief historian and assistant director of the National Park Service. Utley is right. It was a war without heroes, and that included Billy the Kid.30 “Yet it was a significant war,” according to Utley. “It captured the thought and behavior of a range of frontier personalities. It dramatized economic forces that underlay most frontier conflicts. It demonstrated the immensity and varieties of frontier crime and violence. And it gave the world Billy the Kid, a figure of towering significance, not for the part he played in the war, but for the standing he achieved in American folklore.”
If Bonney had died along with Tunstall, there still would have been a Lincoln County War but there would not have been a Billy the Kid. He emerged from the ashes and the blood, riding a wave of illusion and deception created by the true perpetrators of both sides of the war. The truth was neatly covered up through sleight of hand with historical facts by a host of dime novelists, journalists, and hacks. What was left was the lone figure, all at once romantic and daring but also dark and lethal. He was no longer Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim, Billy Bonney, or even just the Kid. He had become Billy the Kid—both outlaw myth and mythical hero. He was then and forever after a mirage.
With Tunstall’s death and the events that quickly followed, the die was suddenly cast for the Kid. While news of the murder spread throughout Lincoln County and farther, the young Englishman’s body was recovered and laid on a table in the parlor of his former partner McSween. The Kid, sombrero in hand, came to pay his respects. Frank Coe was there and remembered that the “Kid walked up, looked at him [Tunstall] and said, ‘I’ll get some of them before I die,’ and turned away.”31
McSween became the leader of those opposed to Dolan and his gang. Instead of turning loose the “40 men armed in full fighting trim” who were angrily plotting revenge in his home, the lawyer, a man with little patience for or interest in violence, devised a scheme using the law.32 He bypassed the district judge, district attorney, and county sheriff—all on the enemy side—and obtained warrants for the arrest of Tunstall’s killers from John B. Wilson, the local justice of the peace. Besides murder warrants for five outlaws and a dozen members of the Mathews posse, Wilson issued warrants for Sheriff Brady and others for larceny at the Tunstall store.33
As the newly deputized Bonney and Fred Waite, accompanied by a reluctant Constable Atanacio Martinez, trooped to the Dolan store to serve the warrants, they were greeted by Brady and several others, their guns at the ready. Instead of placing Brady and his associates in custody, the Kid and his companions were marched down the street to the jail.34 There is little doubt that this action contributed to Brady’s own death several weeks later since the Kid and Waite were jailed just long enough to miss Tunstall’s funeral on February 21. Tunstall was buried behind his store in Lincoln. The Reverend Taylor Ealy, a Presbyterian minister who had arrived in town just two days earlier, preached the sermon, which Squire Wilson translated for the many Hispanic townspeople in attendance. Hymns were sung, and although Susan McSween was out of town, her organ was carried to the gravesite for the preacher’s wife to play during the solemn ceremony.35
In response to the Tunstall killing and the belligerence that followed, McSween and Widenmann carried out a letter-writing campaign in hopes of convincing credible authorities to investigate the dire situation in Lincoln County. When Widenmann claimed that the Dolan faction had tried to poison him and the threat of more violence increased, McSween wrote out his will and fled with his wife to a refuge in the mountains.36
Dick Brewer, Tunstall’s capable and aggressive foreman, stepped forward and on March 1 was appointed “special constable” by Squire Wilson with the power to make arrests.37 Brewer immediately formed the Regulators, a term some say may have come from the Kid’s reading of dime novels.38 Captain Brewer’s deputized posse included Billy Bonney, Charlie Bowdre, Fred Waite, Doc Scurlock, the Coe cousins, Henry Brown, John Middleton, Jim French, Frank McNab, Sam Smith, and John Scroggins. The number of these active Regulators varied from as few as ten to as many as sixty, including Hispanics sympathetic to the cause. The core group was about twelve Anglos, each bound by an oath they called the “iron clad.” The essence of the oath was that members were never to divulge any information about their activities or bear witness against the other Regulators.39
For the next five months, operating only with the promise of four dollars a day in pay, the Regulators considered themselves a lawful posse, not vigilantes, as they set out to avenge the Tunstall slaying.40 The Kid was singled out as one of the most loyal Regulators faithfully taking part in every armed engagement.
In early March 1878, while searching the countryside for Dolan men, the Regulators came upon some horsemen at a crossing on the Peñasco. A chase ensued, and eventually the posse captured Buck Morton, leader of the riders who had killed Tunstall, along with Frank Baker, one of Jesse Evans’s boys. While heading up the Pecos for John Chisum’s South Spring Ranch with their two prisoners, the Regulators encountered William McCloskey, a former Tunstall hand. Brewer and the others distrusted McCloskey, known to be one of Morton’s friends, but he was allowed to ride with them back to Lincoln.41
McCloskey, Morton, and Baker did not survive the ride back. The three were shot and killed in what the Regulators claimed was an aborted escape attempt by Morton and Baker, who were gunned down after they had supposedly killed McCloskey. The trio was more than likely executed by the Regulators, who feared if they were returned to Lincoln alive, Sheriff Brady would release them or permit them to “escape.”42
On the same day the Regulators disposed of McCloskey, Morton, and Baker, a concerned governor Samuel Axtell arrived in Lincoln to investigate the stories of lawlessness that pervaded New Mexico Territory. His visit resulted from Sheriff Brady’s asking for help in Lincoln County. “Anarchy is the only word which would truthfully describe the situation here for the past month,” Brady had written in a letter to U.S. Attorney Tom Catron that was then passed on to Axtell.43 A summary was sent to Washington, and President Hayes was asked to authorize the use of army troops to assist the local law enforcement officers. Hayes agreed, and the commanding officer at Fort Stanton was put on alert.
Axtell’s visit to Lincoln was brief but damaging for the McSween forces. Accompanied by the Santa Fe Ring allies Jimmy Dolan and John Riley, the governor was in town a mere three hours before he canceled Squire Wilson’s appointment as justice of the peace and revoked Rob Widenmann’s appointment as deputy U.S. marshal.44 With a single stroke of Axtell’s pen, the Regulators went from lawmen to outlaws.
Over the next few weeks there were no serious confrontations except for a couple of shooting exchanges that produced no casualties. For the most part, the Regulators lay low and bided their time at their homes or hung around friendly San Patricio. Late in March the time had come to exact more revenge. Some of the Regulators, including the Kid and Fred Waite, got together with McSween, who with his wife was staying at Chisum’s ranch.45 At that meeting they hatched a plot to take out Sheriff Brady once and for all. On the night of March 31, six Regulators—Billy Bonney, Fred Waite, Frank McNab, Jim French, Henry Brown, and John Middleton—slipped into Lincoln and took up positions behind the Tunstall store in a corral hidden by a ten-foot-high adobe wall.46 They waited for daybreak.
Around nine o’clock on the morning of April 1, Sheriff Brady left the Dolan store accompanied by deputies George Hindman, Billy Mathews, John Long, and George Peppin. They walked down the street, muddy after a recent rain, to the courthouse, where they posted legal notices, then started back to the store. After pausing to exchange a few friendly words with a woman in her yard, Brady hurried to catch up with his men. Just as the lawmen drew opposite the Tunstall corral, the six Regulators rose as one, poked their Winchesters through gunports carved in the adobe wall, and cut loose with a steady stream of fire.47
At least a dozen rounds tore through Brady, the main target. Sitting in the middle of the road, Brady groaned, “Oh, Lord,” as he attempted to get to his feet. A second volley of shots struck him dead. The deputies rushed for cover, but one bullet hit Hindman, who lay on the street crying. Ike Stockton rushed from his saloon and tried to pull the wounded man to safety, but Hindman was struck again and died. Squire Wilson, only recently relieved of his post as justice of the peace and hoeing onions in his backyard across the road from the Tunstall store, survived a stray bullet in his buttocks.48
When the shooting stopped, only the barking of the village dogs could be heard. The Kid and Jim French jumped over the wall and ran to Brady’s lifeless body in the road. It is not clear if the Kid was trying to find warrants or trying to recover the Winchester that Brady had taken when he’d jailed Billy in February. As the Kid bent over the lifeless Brady, a bullet fired by Billy Mathews from his position at the nearby Cisneros house ripped through the Kid’s thigh and then struck French in his leg. The Kid dropped the rifle, and the two of them hobbled away. They later escaped with the other Regulators.49
The ambush slayings of Brady and his deputy had a devastating impact on the Regulators. The community became even more fragmented. Many people who had earlier sympathized with the Regulators viewed the killings as cold-blooded and no different from the brutal murder of Tunstall. Public opinion no longer favored the McSween faction. Both sides in the war were now considered equally nefarious and bloodthirsty.
A few days after the Brady and Hindman killings in Lincoln, the Regulators, including Bonney and French who were recovering from their gunshot wounds, picked up new recruits in the San Patricio area. They all then rode up the Ruidoso into the mountains and headed down the Tularosa Creek canyon to Blazer’s Mill on the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation.50 Several of the men involved in Tunstall’s murder were reportedly in the area. Although the arrest warrants Brewer carried as well as his commission as special constable had been ruled invalid, the Regulator captain was intent on hunting down anyone who had had anything to do with the demise of Tunstall.
Dr. Joseph Blazer, a former dentist who had started the small settlement of Blazer’s Mill in 1869, leased a two-story adobe just upstream from the sawmill and gristmill to the federal government as housing for Indian agent Frederick Godfroy and his family. Godfroy took in lodgers and his wife prepared meals for travelers.51
Around noon on April 4, 1878, the Regulators reined in their horses at Blazer’s Mill and tramped into the big house for one of Clara Godfroy’s celebrated dinners. While the posse wolfed down hot vittles, Buckshot Roberts, who sometimes went by the alias Bill Williams, arrived at Blazer’s Mill astride a mule and leading a packhorse.52 Although he had had no direct hand in Tunstall’s death, Roberts had ridden with the posse that swooped down on the Tunstall ranch on the day the Englishman was killed. Unfortunately for Roberts, one of the warrants in Brewer’s pocket had his name on it.
Frank Coe, who was acquainted with Roberts, tried to convince him that given the odds, the best course was to surrender. Buckshot could not be budged. He refused to give up his weapons and told Coe that he would not be taken alive.53 A fierce gun battle ensued. “Bowdre had the drop on Roberts, as the latter had to raise his gun from his lap,” recalled George Coe. “With his refusal to throw up his hands, they then fired simultaneously. Bowdre’s bullet entered Roberts right through the middle, while Roberts’s ball glanced off Bowdre’s cartridge belt, and with my usual luck, I arrived just in time to stop the bullet with my right hand. It knocked the gun out of my hand, took off my trigger finger, and shattered my hand which still bears record of the fight…. I ran right in front of Roberts. He shot once at John Middleton, and the bullet entered his breast. He fired three times at me, but missed.”54
Mortally wounded but with some fight still in him, Roberts grabbed an old Springfield rifle from the wall and used a mattress as a breastwork. The shooting continued. A frustrated and angry Brewer, with several of his Regulators wounded, dashed across a footbridge and took up a shooting position behind a pile of logs.55 At a range of about 125 yards he got off one shot at Roberts in the doorway of the house. The bullet missed its mark and smashed into the wall. Seeing the puff of gun smoke, Roberts could tell where the shot came from. When Brewer lifted his head over the logs again, Roberts cut loose with the Springfield. The bullet crashed into Brewer’s left eye and blew out the back of his head.56
Stunned by Brewer’s death, the Regulators lost their taste for further battle that day. They knew that Buckshot Roberts, so desperate with pain that two men had to hold him down, was done for even though he did not die until the following day. In a macabre twist, Brewer and Buckshot were buried in the same grave, some said next to each other in the same coffin.57
The Blazer’s Mill episode did not endear the McSween faction to the local populace. Despite the death of Brewer, a well-liked and sympathetic figure whom McSween called “nature’s nobleman,” the public generally disapproved of the circumstances of Buckshot Roberts’s death. Many people, particularly those who appreciated marksmanship, admired the way Roberts put up a gutsy fight against overwhelming odds.
The rest of April brought little joy to the Regulators. The Kid and some of the others nursed their wounds in San Patricio, where the town constable Jose Chavez y Chavez, long simpatico to their cause, joined the Regulators. In Lincoln, Judge Bristol appointed John Copeland, the post butcher at Fort Stanton, as acting sheriff, and a short time later the county commissioners gave him the job permanently. Bristol had picked Copeland because he was thought to be neutral. The assumption proved wrong. Copeland was susceptible to McSween’s influence and sympathetic to the cause of the Regulators. Other than the Copeland appointment, there was little else for the “iron clads” to cheer about.58
A few indictments, including one against Jesse Evans, were handed down in the Tunstall killing. The spring term of the grand jury also indicted William H. Bonney, John Middleton, and Henry Brown for Brady’s murder and Fred Waite for Hindman’s. Indictments in the slaying of Buckshot Roberts were returned against the same four, only in this instance Bonney was listed as “Henry Antrim, alias Kid.”59 Also indicted for the murder of Roberts were Charlie Bowdre, Doc Scurlock, Steve Stevens, John Scroggins, and George Coe. No one questioned the fact that Joseph Blazer, the foreman chosen from the ten men constituting the grand jury, had witnessed the shootout at Blazer’s Mill and had given testimony during the grand jury proceedings.60
The Regulators often congregated at the home of McSween, who came back to town with his wife once the charge against him of embezzling money from the estate of Emil Fritz had been dismissed.61 Frank McNab, a former cattle detective, was elected captain of the Regulators to take the slain Brewer’s place.62 When in town, the Regulators enjoyed carousing, often with the new sheriff, who had arrest warrants for several of them but somehow never remembered to serve them.
The Kid, never attracted to strong drink, preferred the evenings in the McSweens’ parlor, where Mary Ealy, the preacher’s wife, banged away on Sue McSween’s piano. Those who were willing, like Billy Bonney, sang their hearts out. “And how they did sing,” recalled Mary. “They stood behind me with their guns and belts full of cartridges; I suppose I was off tune as often as on it as I felt very nervous, though they were nice and polite.”63
Meanwhile, Dolan, on the verge of shutting down his store and itching for more bloodshed, sent George W. “Dad” Peppin and Billy Mathews, former deputies under the late Sheriff Brady, to the Seven Rivers country to form yet another posse.64 Peppin and Mathews, who went without Sheriff Copeland’s approval, had little trouble rounding up recruits. Many of the Pecos ranchers were angry with the Regulators and Captain McNab, who had let it be known that any further rustling of John Chisum’s cattle had to stop at once or there would be hell to pay. Among the more than twenty men, most from Seven Rivers, who signed up were William Johnson, Buck Powell, Marion Turner, Bob and John Beckwith, Wallace and Bob Olinger, Charles “Dutch Charlie” Kruling, and Manuel “Indian” Segovia.
On April 29 the freshly formed group, dubbed the Seven Rivers posse, rode off for Lincoln to bolster the Dolan forces. That afternoon they stopped for a rest at the Charles Fritz ranch on the Rio Bonito, just nine miles outside Lincoln.65 There they learned from the Fritz family that in a few hours Frank Coe and two other Regulators would be stopping to water their horses on their way back to Coe’s place on the Hondo. After taking up concealed positions, all the posse had to do was wait for their quarry to appear.
Riding with Coe was his brother-in-law Ab Saunders and Regulator Captain Frank McNab. As the trio approached the spring at the Fritz place, Coe’s racing pony took the lead, putting him a hundred yards ahead of his two companions. Coe was allowed to pass unmolested, but when McNab and Saunders drew near, the hidden gunmen opened fire. In the melee that followed, McNab’s horse bucked him off. McNab jumped to his feet and ran up a ravine, where several of his pursuers shot him dead. Saunders’s horse was killed in the first volley of shots, and when he attempted to escape on foot, he was shot in the hip and captured.66 That left only Coe.
“Several of them began shooting at me,” Coe related many years later. “Someone shot from the Fritz house and killed my horse. A bullet hit her right in the back of the head. She stumbled along for thirty feet and fell.”67
Unable to retrieve his Winchester and armed with just a six-gun, Coe exchanged only a few shots with the posse before he wisely surrendered. It was then that he learned that his brother-in-law was badly wounded. The Seven Rivers posse took up positions on the edge of Lincoln and in the surrounding foothills. A few of them, with Coe in custody, slipped into town and found refuge in the Dolan store.68
At the McSween house, some of the Regulators and Sheriff Copeland learned that the posse’s mission was to assist the sheriff in arresting the Kid and the others under indictment for murder. The Regulators scattered throughout Lincoln, and gunfire erupted. While his captors were occupied, Frank Coe simply walked away and rejoined his friends. Both sides traded shots most of the day, but there were few casualties.69
At Sheriff Copeland’s request, the army finally arrived. Lieutenant Colonel Nathan A. M. Dudley, a contentious career officer who had only recently taken command at Fort Stanton, sent a detachment of buffalo soldiers to Lincoln along with orders for the sheriff to arrest responsible parties on both sides.70 At least thirty men surrendered to the sheriff and were taken back to Fort Stanton. After a few days Copeland asked that the detainees be released to his custody. Unable to control the unruly bunch of toughs, the sheriff soon turned them loose with their guns, and orders to return to Seven Rivers and stop fighting.71
That of course was not to be. The forces behind the Dolan faction had no intention of quitting the battle. As far as the Kid and his pals were concerned, the murder of another leader of their “iron clads” ensured that the war was a long way from being over. Neither side knew that in one way the conflict was rapidly concluding, and yet it was also a war that would never end, except for those who perished in it.