5

The Avenger

The slaying of John Henry Tunstall profoundly affected Billy Bonney. Frank Coe recorded a revealing scene in a back room of the Tunstall store, as the dead man’s body was laid out on a table for embalming. “Kid walked up,” related Coe, “looked at him, and said, ‘I’ll get some of them before I die,’ and turned away.”1

Billy’s actions in the few days following the killing betrayed the depth of his feeling. No longer was he the unobtrusive bystander. Suddenly he displayed a boldness, a truculence, and an initiative that made him one of the more conspicuous of the men operating out of the McSween house during the cold February days after the murder. Although still a follower, he took the first steps toward leadership.

The top leader now was Alexander McSween. On the night of February 18, 1878, forty to fifty men had responded to Tunstall’s call. About midnight, however, Widenmann, Brewer, Middleton, Bonney, and Waite arrived with news of the Englishman’s fate, and the mantle passed to McSween.

The lawyer had no stomach for an armed contest with Dolan. He preferred legal stratagems. The district judge, the district attorney, and the county sheriff had already shown their partiality for Dolan, and McSween could expect no cooperation from them. But Lincoln contained other officers of the law: the justice of the peace and the town constable. John B. Wilson, an easily influenced, barely literate old man of marginal intelligence, served as justice of the peace. Atanacio Martínez, of firm enough fiber but skeptical of the role McSween marked out for him, was constable. McSween’s scheme was to obtain warrants for the arrest of Tunstall’s killers from “Squire” Wilson and use the men in the McSween house, acting under Martínez’s authority, as a posse to serve the warrants.2

Arrest warrants could not be issued unless supported by affidavits alleging crime. The next morning, therefore, McSween accompanied Dick Brewer, John Middleton, and Billy Bonney to Squire Wilson’s office. There the three men swore that on the day before William S. Morton, Jesse Evans, and a list of other offenders had “wounded & killed J. H. Tunstall contrary to the statute in such case made and provided and against the Peace & dignity of the Territory.” Named on the list of murderers were James J. Dolan, who in fact had remained with Mathews and other possemen at the Tunstall ranch, and the outlaw Frank Baker, whose worn-out horse had kept him out of the action.3

While at Wilson’s office, McSween prepared an affidavit of his own to support still another warrant. Brady’s continued occupation of the Tunstall store rankled, and the lawyer had found a clever way to strike back. The previous day, probably alarmed by the gathering of men at the McSween house, the sheriff had called on Captain George A. Purington, the commanding officer at Fort Stanton, for a detachment of soldiers to protect him from harm. Thoughtlessly, Brady then authorized his men in the Tunstall store to provide a small amount of hay for the troopers’ horses. The hay belonged to Tunstall, not the county, and McSween charged Brady and his men with larceny.4

While Wilson labored with the paperwork, Billy and as many as forty other McSween men found opportunity to express their rage. Sam Wortley, who ran a hotel and restaurant at the western edge of town, afforded a pretext for browbeating the occupiers of the Tunstall store. At noon on the nineteenth, he made his way down the street with dinner for the five men in the store. Billy Bonney and Fred Waite stepped forward to bar the way and ordered Wortley to return without delivering the meal. Seeing James Longwell watching from the door of the store, Billy then turned and threw down his Winchester on the posseman. “Turn loose you sons-of-bitches, we will give you a game,” shouted Billy. Longwell retreated inside, and he and his men barricaded the doors and windows. Billy and Fred, however, drew off without provoking a fight.5

Thanks to Justice Wilson’s helpful cooperation, Constable Martínez received warrants for the apprehension of five outlaws and twelve members of the Mathews posse for murder and of Sheriff Brady and the five men in the Tunstall store for larceny. The constable had some understandable reservations about the task assigned him, particularly the arrest of the county sheriff and twenty-two men acting under his legal authority as officers of the law. But McSween’s formidable and determined throng supplied a powerful impetus to cooperate.

Unexpectedly, Rob Widenmann came to the rescue. He had ridden to Fort Stanton to break the news of Tunstall’s death. During the night of the nineteenth someone brought word to the fort that Jesse Evans was thought to be in Lincoln. Still a deputy U.S. marshal and still bearing the federal warrants for Evans and others for stealing Indian horses, Widenmann thought he could now make a better showing than he had at the Tunstall ranch on the thirteenth. Captain Purington had standing orders to furnish military aid for this purpose if Widenmann asked for it. Before dawn on the twentieth, therefore, Rob showed up in Lincoln with Lieutenant Millard F. Goodwin and a posse of thirty black cavalrymen.6

Martínez had meanwhile already organized his own posse from among the men at the McSween house. It numbered at least eighteen, including Bonney, Brewer, Waite, Middleton, and the Coe cousins.7

Widenmann’s little army provided a convenient screen for Martínez’s posse. Before dawn on the twentieth, looking for Evans, the soldiers invaded the Dolan store and conducted a thorough search. Martínez and his men followed and carried out their own search. Finding nothing, the two posses proceeded down the street to the Tunstall store to repeat the operation.

Alerted by a commotion in front of the store, Jim Longwell looked out to see both soldiers and civilians gathering in the predawn gloom. He noticed Widenmann, rapped on the window to catch his attention, and asked what was up.

“You will find out damn quick,” Rob replied.

Longwell then recognized Lieutenant Goodwin, leaned his Winchester against the wall, and went outside. The officer explained that the soldiers had come to town to help the deputy U.S. marshal find Jesse Evans and his cohorts, who were thought to be hiding in the Tunstall store. Longwell denied that Evans had been in the store and invited Goodwin to search it. The search turned up no sign of Evans.

As the soldiers filed out of the store, Martínez and his men burst in. Surprised, facing an imposing array of Winchesters pointed at them, Longwell’s men quickly surrendered. Martínez produced his larceny warrant, had the prisoners disarmed, and marched them down the street to the cellar jail. Later, after Brady had arrived from his home east of town, the posse seized him too and hauled all six before Justice Wilson for arraignment. Wilson discharged Longwell and his companions but bound over Brady for appearance before the district court, with bond set at two hundred dollars. The McSween forces now had possession of the Tunstall store, and they never relinquished it.8

Sometime during the twentieth, Captain Purington rode down from Fort Stanton to investigate the crisis in Lincoln. A huge man with white hair and mustache that made him look two decades older than his thirty-nine years, he was a plodding mediocrity. He talked with McSween and Brady and quickly sized up the McSween crowd as a mob, maddened by the killing of Tunstall and unrestrained by legal niceties in seeking vengeance. The lives of Brady, Dolan, and Riley, he decided, “would not be worth a farthing if turned over to the McSween party.” As he admitted the next day in a letter to Judge Warren Bristol, “I hardly know what to do.” He left Lieutenant Goodwin and his troopers in Lincoln with the delicate mission of trying to keep the peace without interfering with the civil authorities.9

Goodwin, who also regarded the Martínez posse as no better than a mob, felt that he had been duped into using his soldiers for an improper purpose. He complained bitterly to Widenmann, who apologized. Goodwin also reproached Martínez, who replied, according to the lieutenant, that he did not want to serve the warrants, “but was told by Antrim ‘Kid’ and others at McSween’s house that if he did not serve them they would kill him.”10

Dolan, Mathews, and others whose names appeared on Martínez’s murder warrant had gathered with Brady in the Dolan store. Caught up in the frenzy, Widenmann asked Goodwin to take his soldiers back to the fort and let the two sides fight it out. Goodwin refused. Widenmann then inquired what the lieutenant would do if an attempt were made to arrest the culprits in the Dolan store. Goodwin answered that he could not interfere with civil authorities but that he considered McSween’s followers a mob whose actions would lead to bloodshed. Therefore, he would have to post his soldiers between the two factions, which he did by deploying them at the Dolan store.11

Widenmann probably came up with the solution to this dilemma: attempt the arrest without the backing of the “mob.” If only Martínez and a couple of men entered the Dolan store, the soldiers could not meddle without opening themselves to charges of obstructing a civil officer in the discharge of his duty. The constable could not have had much enthusiasm for this daring scheme, but once again threats against his life probably spurred him to his duty, as suggested by his deputizing Billy Bonney and Fred Waite to accompany him into the enemy’s lair. The presence of soldiers outside the store could be expected to restrain Brady and his men from extreme measures, but even so, considering the temper of both sides on this day, the plan bordered on the foolhardy. It shows how staunch was the Kid’s determination to avenge the death of Tunstall.

Fearlessly, Martínez and his two deputies barged into the Dolan store. Inside, they confronted the same spectacle that had greeted Longwell and his men at the Tunstall store earlier in the day: a battery of Winchester rifles trained on their chests. Relieving the invaders of their arms, Brady asked their business. Martínez pulled out his warrant and began to read it. The sheriff interrupted to declare that the men named happened to be his posse, that no one was going to arrest them, and that anyway he did not recognize the authority of Justice Wilson to issue arrest warrants. Thereupon the men in the store “cursed and abused” the three interlopers. After a few hours they released the constable and, without returning his arms, sent him away. But Bonney and Waite remained prisoners. Widenmann’s grand design had collapsed, as he might have expected.12

With the Dolan forces holding two of McSween’s men, tensions remained high through the night and into the next day. But the presence of Lieutenant Goodwin and his cavalrymen kept the conflict from exploding. Even so, during the night someone fired a shot that killed a cavalry horse. The next day, Captain Purington sent an infantry detachment to Lincoln to bolster the cavalry.13

February 21 passed quietly, as the townspeople gathered to bury John Henry Tunstall in the vacant lot east of his store. Reverend Taylor F. Ealy, a Presbyterian divine who had arrived only two days earlier to bring the true word to heathens and Catholics, preached the funeral sermon. Squire Wilson translated for the Hispanics. In the absence of Sue McSween, who was in the East, Mrs. Ealy played Sue’s organ, carried to the gravesite for the occasion.

After the funeral, the citizens gathered in a public meeting to discuss the tribulations that had overtaken their community. Probate Judge Florencio Gonzalez headed a committee of four charged with calling on Sheriff Brady to learn why he had seized Martínez, Bonney, and Waite without legal process and to see if some way could be found to end the law’s harassment of McSween. At once, the four men trooped down the street to the Dolan store and confronted Brady, who had no difficulty recognizing them as spokesmen for the other side. Curtly, the sheriff dismissed the question about the constable and his two aides with the answer that he had taken them prisoner because he had the power. The committeemen, who included merchants José Montaño and Isaac Ellis, then offered their own property in an amount double the bond specified by the court if Brady would call off the attachment that had produced the crisis. Brady refused, but after they left he did free Billy Bonney and Fred Waite, after thirty hours of imprisonment, though without returning their arms. Billy would not quickly forget, or forgive, his humiliation at the hands of Brady and his associates.14

The attachment process, a civil action, was the least of McSween’s troubles. The criminal charge of embezzlement underlay a much more immediate danger. Judge Bristol had required him to post bond for his appearance at the spring term of district court to answer the charge. But District Attorney William L. Rynerson, a friend and ally of Dolan’s, refused to accept McSween’s bondsmen on the spurious ground that they were not worth the amounts pledged. The plot, of course, was to force McSween to spend six weeks in Brady’s jail while awaiting his court hearing. Once there, as a report that reached Mac on February 24 indicated, Dolan would bring in Jesse Evans “to do his part.” Plainly a fugitive from the law after Rynerson sent back his bond disapproved, McSween made out his will and fled Lincoln.15

McSween thus relinquished control of his little army. Neither he nor Martínez had managed it very well anyway. If it were to function at all, it demanded more aggressive leadership. A new chief materialized in the person of Dick Brewer. When Martínez returned his warrant unserved on February 22, Justice Wilson wrote out a new warrant, appointed Brewer a “special constable,” and empowered him to arrest the men named as Tunstall’s murderers.16

Under the captaincy of Dick Brewer, the Martínez posse emerged as the “Regulators.” For the next five months, claiming the sanction of the law, they fought McSween’s battles. Tunstall had promised them four dollars a day to ride in his cause. McSween could pay nothing; by February 1878, he was as bankrupt as Dolan and Riley. But the lawyer held forth the prospect of monetary reward by Tunstall’s father, and he seems occasionally to have provided food and ammunition. Thus the Regulators were not mere mercenaries. Although they hoped to be paid, they also felt genuine outrage over the slaying of Tunstall and the tyrannies of The House. With an odd mix of sincerity and cynicism, they portrayed themselves as an arm of the law contending with other arms of the law that had been corrupted.

Although regulator was another word for vigilante, McSween’s men were not typical vigilantes. Like vigilantes, they saw themselves as a force organized to “regulate,” or set right, an intolerable situation. Like vigilantes, also, they elected their officers and bound themselves by an oath. Unlike vigilantes, however, they had not formed in the absence or breakdown of the regular law enforcement and judicial machinery. The machinery had not broken down but rather had been captured by the other side. The McSween Regulators presented themselves as agents of the law—the justice of the peace court—and not as extralegal friends of the law. Although displaying some characteristics of typical vigilantes, the Lincoln County Regulators did not ride in the mainstream of the American vigilante tradition.17

The strength of the Regulators ranged in number from ten to about thirty, and in the big shootout in Lincoln in July it reached sixty. Sometimes Hispanics rode with the Regulators, but the core group consisted of about a dozen Anglos. Billy Bonney served faithfully and participated in every major operation and armed encounter. Other former Tunstall hands who signed up were John Middleton, Fred Waite, and Henry Brown. Billy’s old friends Charley Bowdre and Frank and George Coe were members, as was Doc Scurlock. A particularly formidable warrior, recently on Chisum’s payroll, was “Big Jim” French. Others of the faithful included John Scroggins, Steve Stanley, and Sam Smith.

Still another Regulator was Frank McNab, a “cattle detective” from the Texas Panhandle who now worked for Hunter, Evans & Co. John Chisum had sold all his herds to this firm but continued to manage them in behalf of the company. Thus McNab’s interest focused on the rustlers who preyed on the former Chisum holdings. Since the rustlers were chiefly Seven Rivers stockmen, including Dolan’s hands on the Pecos, the Regulators offered McNab a way of pursuing his mission. His ties to Chisum, of course, made him anathema to the Seven Rivers crowd.18

In time the dozen Anglos who formed the heart of the Regulator force forged close personal bonds and took on a powerful sense of mission. They subscribed to an oath they called the “iron clad.” It bound each, if caught, not to bear witness against any of the others or to divulge any of their activities.19

Thus the factions that fought the Lincoln County War both claimed to be instruments of the law. On the one side stood the county sheriff, backed by the district judge and the district attorney. The sheriff’s posse consisted chiefly of men who worked for Jimmy Dolan or had strong reasons for supporting him. On occasion the Dolanites were joined by Seven Rivers cowboys, who favored Dolan because John Chisum had lent his name to the Tunstall-McSween cause. On the other side stood the Regulators, led by a “special constable” appointed by the justice of the peace and carrying an arrest warrant issued by his court. Under color of law, both sides were about to engage in a great deal of unlawful activity.

The most wanted man named on the warrant in Dick Brewer’s pocket was Billy Morton, head of the subposse that had cut down Tunstall and one of the three men who had fired the fatal shots. Twenty-two years old, the offspring of a prominent southern family, Morton boasted a quick mind and a good education. A sister remembered him as “wild and reckless, but brave, tender and generous.” He had worked for Dolan for a year or more, and as foreman of the Seven Rivers cow camp his principal mission was to enlarge the Dolan herds by converting the long rail brand of John Chisum into the arrow brand of Jimmy Dolan.20

The first important operation of the Regulators was therefore to ride down to the Pecos and look for Billy Morton. On March 6 they spotted him in a group of five horsemen about six miles up the Peñasco from the Pecos. A stirring chase followed. The pursued split, but the Regulators kept after two men who turned out to be Morton and Frank Baker. As a Jesse Evans henchman, Baker’s name also occupied a prominent place on the arrest warrant, although he had taken no part in the Tunstall slaying.

For five miles Brewer and his men raced in pursuit, firing some one hundred shots in a vain attempt to bring down the quarry. At almost the same moment, the horses of Morton and Baker gave out from exhaustion, and the two men took cover in a prairie depression. A shouted parley ended in Brewer’s promise to guarantee their safety, and they yielded their arms and surrendered. “There was one man in the party who wanted to kill me after I had surrendered,” Morton wrote two days later, “and was restrained with the greatest difficulty by others of the party.” This man was probably Billy Bonney.21

With their prisoners, the Regulators made their way up the Pecos to John Chisum’s South Spring ranch. En route, they fell in with William McCloskey, Tunstall’s former employee at the Feliz ranch and a friend of Morton’s. Brewer distrusted McCloskey. He had been altogether too close to Mathews’s possemen and in fact had even ridden with Morton’s subposse. Only a tired horse had kept him from the scene of Tunstall’s killing.

Morton feared that he would never see Lincoln. He had good reason for anxiety. Aside from the Regulators’ appetite for vengeance, what to do with the captives posed a problem for Brewer and his men. Already, rumors reached them that Dolan was forming a rescue party, and even if they made their way safely to Lincoln, Sheriff Brady could hardly be trusted to ensure that the prisoners remained in custody until court convened, especially since he denied the validity of Justice Wilson’s warrant. Brewer had betrayed his misgivings at the time of the surrender. “The constable himself said he was sorry we gave up,” wrote Morton, “as he had not wished to take us alive.”22

On March 8 the party stopped at John Chisum’s South Spring ranch. Here Billy fell in with Will Chisum, John’s fourteen-year-old nephew, who was tending the ranch’s milk cows. Billy asked if Will had any fishhooks. Will said he did and got out his fishing gear. The two went to the banks of the South Spring River and, as Will remembered, “hauled them in.”23

While the two boys hauled them in, Billy Morton penned a letter to a friend in Richmond, Virginia. He described his predicament, recounted his capture, speculated that he might be murdered en route to Lincoln, and asked that if his fears proved correct the circumstances be investigated.

The next morning, March 9, the Regulators rode over to Roswell and reined in at Captain Lea’s store, which also housed the post office. Morton entrusted his letter to Postmaster Ash Upson. McCloskey, who shared Morton’s fears, told Upson that he had decided to stick with his friend. Threats had been made to kill the prisoners, he said, but it would not be done as long as he lived.24

Upson provided a glimpse of Frank Baker at this time. “His countenance was the strongest argument that could be produced in favor of the Darwinian theory,” he wrote to his niece a few days later. “Brutish in feature and expression, he looked a veritable gorilla.”25

That evening a traveler arrived in Roswell with word that the Brewer party had left the main road and taken the little-used trail up Blackwater Creek and through the Capitan foothills. This tended to reinforce the foreboding Morton had expressed, although it could also have signified a tactic to avoid tangling with a Dolan rescue party.

At dusk the next evening, March 1, Frank McNab rode into Roswell with a report of what had happened. On the Blackwater, Morton had suddenly leaned over, grabbed McCloskey’s pistol from its holster, and shot him dead. “Although mounted on a poor slow horse, he put him to his best speed closely followed by Frank Baker,” said McNab. “They were speedily overtaken and killed.” At the same time, in Lincoln, Brewer told the same story to McSween.26

McSween happened to be in Lincoln because he had decided to come out of hiding and face whatever Sheriff Brady might offer. He had arrived on the afternoon of March 9, however, to find his cause a shambles. Only hours earlier, New Mexico Governor Samuel B. Axtell had been in Lincoln to investigate the troubles. His visit attested to Dolan’s continuing success at outmaneuvering his opponents. Dolan enjoyed cordial relations with most of Santa Fe’s political and business establishment, most notably United States District Attorney Thomas B. Catron, the most powerful man in the territory. Catron, in fact, held a mortgage on The House and all its property, which gave him a stake in the Lincoln County War. Axtell thus came predisposed to Dolan and remained deaf to all explanations by the other side.

The governor’s three-hour stay in Lincoln shredded McSween’s blueprint. In a formal proclamation, Axtell declared Squire Wilson to be occupying the office of justice of the peace illegally and named Judge Bristol and Sheriff Brady as the only instruments of the law in the county. With a few strokes of the pen, Axtell knocked the supports from McSween’s strategy. Without the authority of the justice of the peace, McSween and the Regulators could not claim to be enforcing the law.27

In addition, as McSween had to explain to Dick Brewer the next day, if Wilson’s tenure had been illegal all along, that meant that his arrest warrants and his appointment of a special constable were likewise illegal. If the Regulators had never had any authority to act as officers of the law, they opened themselves to charges of false arrest and, however the killings on the Blackwater happened, murder as well. Already, according to McSween, Dolan had taken steps to have the Regulators run down and arrested. The only solution seemed to be for the Regulators and McSween alike to take to the hills and hide until district court convened and untangled the legal snarl.28

When the killings of Morton, Baker, and McCloskey became known, the Dolan forces hurled the charge of murder back on their opponents. As with the slaying of Tunstall, the only witnesses were the killers themselves. No one could dispute the official version, but as Ash Upson observed, “This tale was too attenuated. Listeners did not believe it.”29 They did not think that Morton could have been so foolhardy as to attempt a break or that he would have killed the only friend he had in the group. That the bodies of both Morton and Baker each bore eleven bullet holes, one for each Regulator, looked suspiciously like deliberate assassination.

And such it probably was. Although no participant ever admitted to any but the official version, just as plausibly the Regulators could have agreed among themselves to do away with their captives. When McCloskey objected, one of the group simply blew him off his horse. The shot signaled Morton and Baker to attempt a desperate break, and they were indeed gunned down while attempting to escape. The exact truth can never be known, but the holes in the official story are big enough to entitle one to believe that Morton, Baker, and McCloskey were as surely murdered as was John Henry Tunstall.30

The Blackwater shootings gave Billy Bonney his second recorded experience with homicide. In his first, he alone had shot and killed Windy Cahill. In his second, he had shared the deed with others. Although Ash Upson credited Billy with the marksmanship that dropped both Morton and Baker, who fired the fatal rounds cannot be known. For a virtual certainty, however, at least one of Billy’s bullets wound up in Morton and one in Baker.

For Billy Bonney, alias Kid Antrim, the three weeks following the death of Tunstall were packed with action and adventure and replete with new experiences. For the first time, he had a cause to which he could dedicate himself wholeheartedly—revenge for Tunstall. In the Regulators he had congenial comrades with whom to share adventures, hardships, and dangers; men he liked and respected and learned from; men who must have given him a richer sense of belonging and mission than did the shallow, shoddy, and evil thugs who made up the Jesse Evans gang. By their example and the task they had set for themselves, the Regulators lifted Billy Bonney from anonymity and provided the conditions and opportunity for his progress toward adulthood. In the confused maneuvers that marked the days after the slaying of Tunstall, Billy showed himself among the most willing, daring, and brave of the McSween followers. If not yet officer caliber, he had grown into a tough, energetic soldier with plenty of potential for leadership.

As George Coe remarked, “Billy the Kid wasn’t known then as a warrior. We just knew him as a smart young lad and we named him Kid. But he grew bigger and bigger.”31