6

The Assassin

Unlike most of the young bravos locked in combat for supremacy in Lincoln County, William Brady was a mature man of forty-eight. He had lived a full and useful life. Born in Ireland, he had emigrated at age twenty and, in common with many countrymen, adapted to his new nationality in the hard school of the regular army. During the 1850s he had put in two five-year enlistments in the Regiment of Mounted Riflemen, rising to the rank of sergeant and becoming an experienced Indian fighter on the frontiers of Texas and New Mexico. Discharged in 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, he had promptly won a commission in the New Mexico Volunteers. His wartime service, chiefly against Indians, revealed him to be a firm, seasoned, able combat leader, and he was mustered out in 1866 as a captain with a brevet of major.1

A tour of duty at Fort Stanton had introduced Brady to the Bonito country, and he returned to homestead a farm east of Lincoln, then called La Placita del Rio Bonito. Over the next decade he emerged as one of the valley’s most respected citizens, a family man and a leader in building the fledgling community. He served variously as sheriff, U.S. commissioner, and first elected representative of Lincoln County in the territorial legislature. He also became a close friend and associate of Lawrence G. Murphy’s; they were both Irish immigrants, both former sergeants in the regular army, both wartime officers in the volunteers, and both prominent citizens of Lincoln County. To cement the connection, for years Brady was heavily in debt to Murphy. Understandably, the relationship with Murphy predisposed Brady to favor Dolan in the troubles that broke out early in 1878.

As county sheriff, Brady dispensed a brand of law enforcement typical of first-generation frontier communities all over the West. Personal, pragmatic, capricious, physical, and final, it expressed the fine points of the law less than the instincts of the man behind the badge. Because of vast distances and nonexistent transportation, it prevailed mainly in the county seat and the immediate vicinity, and only there when Brady came to town from his farm three miles down the valley. Ash Upson sized up the sheriff of Lincoln County with acute insight:

Major Brady was an excellent citizen and a brave and honest man. He was a good officer too, and endeavored to do his duty with impartiality. The objections made against Sheriff Brady were that he was strongly prejudiced in favor of the Murphy-Dolan faction—those gentlemen being his warm friends—and that he was lax in the discharge of his duty through fear of giving offense to one party or the other.2

Except for pressing the attachment process to absurd extremes, Brady had in truth pursued McSween with a laxity that probably irritated Dolan. Occasionally Brady even let slip a word of sympathy for the beleaguered attorney. His pocket contained a writ of attachment signed by Judge Bristol, yet he did nothing to recapture the Tunstall store after being evicted by the Martínez posse on February 20. His pocket also contained an arrest warrant signed by Judge Bristol, yet he showed little disposition to track down McSween and throw him in the cellar jail. Brady’s seeming lethargy probably signified an inclination simply to procrastinate until district court met and settled the issues one way or another.

To McSween, however, Brady was almost as villainous as Dolan. His handling of the attachment had enraged the lawyer, and the very existence of the arrest warrant in the sheriff’s possession kept McSween on the run. If he had to spend any time in the Lincoln jail awaiting the opening of court, he was certain that Brady would look the other way while Dolan brought in Jesse Evans to “do his part.” Some of McSween’s followers, moreover, had special reasons for hating Brady. He had physically mistreated George Coe and Charley Bowdre, and he had “cursed and abused” Bonney and Waite, held them prisoner for thirty hours, and then turned them loose without giving back their arms.

Lincoln, New Mexico, in 1878

Throughout the last three weeks of March, the Regulators lay low. Most of them probably remained quietly in their homes. Bonney and Waite seem to have passed the time in the congenial surroundings of San Patricio. Late in March, however, Billy, Fred, and the rest of the faithful gathered for a meeting with McSween. His wife, Sue, had returned from the East, and the two had been living at John Chisum’s South Spring ranch.

From that meeting sprang a plot to rid the county of William Brady. Whether McSween stated that he wanted Brady out of the way, implied it, or unintentionally left that impression with his listeners is not known. At least one heard him offer a reward to anyone who killed the sheriff. In any event, as they rode up the trail to Lincoln the Regulators laid plans for assassinating Brady. On the Blackwater the party split, the Anglos sending the Hispanics off to San Patricio because their sensibilities might be injured by the slaying of a man who had a Hispanic wife.3

That McSween could have urged such a foolish act seems preposterous. It would undermine his contention to be acting in behalf of the law, and almost certainly it would offend the substantial body of public opinion that had so far supported him. Moreover, Brady himself visited the Chisum ranch on March 28, about the same time as the Regulators, and let it be known that he felt confident of McSween’s appearance at court and would not try to find and arrest him.4

But McSween had no confidence in Brady’s assurances. Court convened on April 1, and McSween feared that before he could even reach the courthouse Brady would arrest him if given the chance. In Brady’s jail, McSween felt certain, the arrest warrant would turn out to be a death warrant.5

McSween’s state of mind may well have produced such fevered imaginings. The civil suit, the criminal charge, the murder of Tunstall, the crisis in his finances, and his plight as a fugitive from the law had left him demoralized and distraught, possibly muddying his thinking and impairing his judgment. Sue McSween, a tough and determined woman, may also have urged forceful measures.

During the night of March 31, the assassins prepared their ambush. Six Regulators posted themselves in the corral behind the Tunstall store. An adobe wall with a gate for wagons projected eastward from the rear of the building, hiding the corral from the street. The executioners were Billy Bonney, Frank McNab, John Middleton, Fred Waite, Jim French, and Henry Brown. Rob Widenmann would come out the back door shortly before the fatal moment—to feed Tunstall’s dog, as he later explained. Most people believed that he was part of the group too, and anti-McSween newspapers later contemptuously labeled him “the dog-feeder.”

About nine o’clock on the morning of April 1, Sheriff Brady walked down the street from the Dolan store, accompanied by deputies Billy Mathews, George Hindman, George Peppin, and John Long. Mathews, of course, had headed the attachment posse, and Hindman had ridden with Morton’s subposse. Peppin was one of the men who had occupied the Tunstall store in February. Reverend Ealy and his family, living temporarily in the McSween house, watched the party make its way down the street. Brady paused to talk briefly with a woman, then hurried to catch up with his companions.6

The sheriff and his aides were going to the courthouse to post notice that a clerical error had fixed the wrong day for the convening of district court. The appointed day was not April 1, as had been announced, but April 8. After accomplishing this purpose, Brady and the deputies turned back up the street to the west and headed for the Dolan store.7

When the lawmen drew opposite the Tunstall corral, the concealed gunmen rose from behind the wall, leveled their Winchesters, and opened a rapid fire. A storm of bullets swept the street, striking down Brady and, behind him, George Hindman. At least a dozen bullets ripped through the sheriff. One struck Hindman, who fell wounded and crying for water. As Mathews, Peppin, and Long raced for the cover of a house across the street, Ike Stockton emerged from his saloon, pulled Hindman to his feet, and started to help him to safety. Another bullet finished the deputy. Still farther across the street, Justice of the Peace Wilson lay hurt and bewildered in his garden. While hoeing onions, he had caught a wild round through the fleshy part of both buttocks.

After a few moments of silence, Billy Bonney and Jim French leaped the corral wall and sprinted into the street. Backed by French, Bonney stooped over Brady and picked up his Winchester rifle. At this moment Billy Mathews, watching from the window of the Cisneros house beyond, took aim and fired. The bullet punched through Billy’s thigh and zipped through French’s thigh as well. The Kid dropped the rifle, and the two hobbled back to the protection of the corral.

This reckless deed has usually been seen as no more than an attempt to steal Brady’s rifle. That may indeed have been part of the purpose, for Billy would have wanted to retrieve the rifle Brady had taken from him on February 20 or at least get a replacement. More likely, considering McSween’s preoccupation with the arrest warrant and attachment writ, the daring dash was aimed mainly at recovering these documents. Frank Coe later declared that the Kid “ran to get the papers from Brady.” If so, Mathews’s bullet intervened, and the papers remained in the sheriff’s pocket.8

Although the firing alerted the entire town, an eerie solitude fell over the scene. Citizens cowered in their homes while the assassins and the deputies remained warily behind cover. Carlota Baca, the young daughter of Saturnino Baca, had been playing with dolls on the top floor of the torreon. She looked into the street below, then hurried next door to tell her mother.

“Oh God, run and see, it may be papa,” screamed Juanita Baca.

Carlota darted into the street and bent over Sheriff Brady, probably the first to venture into the open after the shooting.9

Billy’s wound did not immobilize him, but Jim French’s was serious enough to require medical attention. Reverend Ealy was not only a preacher but also a doctor—a “medical missionary,” as he styled himself. French therefore slipped out of the back of the corral and made his way next door to the McSween house, where the Ealys admitted him.

“He came walking into our back door,” Ealy remembered. “The ball passed through his left thigh. I drew a silk handkerchief through the wound, bound it up and he was taken charge of by Sam Corbet [Tunstall’s former clerk].”10

The Regulators seemed in no hurry to leave town, and Brady’s deputies showed little interest in provoking a gun battle. Finally the murderers rode leisurely off to the hills while the deputies loosed a long-range fire at them. Almost nonchalantly, John Middleton dismounted, seated himself on the ground, took deliberate aim with his elbow resting on his knee, and returned the fire.11

With the departure of the Regulators, the deputies grew bolder. George Peppin took charge and, hardly knowing what to expect, sent an appeal for help to Captain Purington, who showed up in the afternoon with a cavalry detachment.

Meantime, Peppin and his men followed a trail of blood to McSween’s back door. Three times they searched the house without finding Jim French. As Reverend Ealy later explained, “I learned that Sam Corbet had sawed a hole through the floor under a bed and as there was not any cellar under the house laid him on a blanket on his back with 2 revolvers in his hands.”12 That night, after the excitement died down, French slipped out of town, possibly with Billy’s help.

Lincoln boiled with shock and excitement. Adding to the turmoil, shortly after the shooting, Mac and Sue McSween arrived, as expected, with John Chisum in his carriage. Learning that he was a week early for court, McSween went to the home of Isaac Ellis, at his store on the eastern edge of town. There, backed by a squad of soldiers, Peppin produced the arrest warrant that Brady had carried. More fearful than ever of falling into the toils of county lawmen, McSween answered that Brady’s death deprived Peppin of his authority as a deputy. Finally, however, McSween agreed to place himself in military rather than county custody, and the officer with Peppin, Lieutenant George W. Smith, assented. Later, Captain Purington proved less anxious to interfere with Peppin, but at length, possibly perceiving that McSween would not survive for a week in the Lincoln jail, he agreed to hold McSween at Fort Stanton until court convened.13

Whatever had led to the Brady assassination—McSween’s wishes, a Regulator plot, simply an opportunity of the moment—the deed could hardly have been more damaging to McSween’s interests. The code sanctioned killing for cause, but here there seemed insufficient cause. To gun down a generally respected lawman from ambush disgusted people inclined to tolerate almost any measure of violence or homicide that could be rationalized. Heretofore, public opinion had largely favored McSween. Now, it held both sides to be equally evil, lawless, and murderous.

In the Brady slaying, Billy Bonney again demonstrated the daring and aggressiveness that had marked his part in the exploits of the Martínez posse on February 20. Tradition credits Billy with taking the lead in firing on Brady, whereas McNab is generally thought to have put the first bullet into Hindman, against whom he supposedly bore a grudge. The second and fatal shot to Hindman almost certainly was fired by Fred Waite.14 Though unprovable, the tradition, so far as it touches Billy, is consistent with his rash bolt into the street to Brady’s body. Despite an occasional flamboyant feat of this kind, however, he remained essentially one of a group of rugged, heedless warriors—by now a peer but hardly a chieftain.

Following on the execution of Morton, Baker, and McCloskey, the slaying of Brady revealed another truth about Billy and his friends: they were willing to take human life in circumstances that violated even the lax ethical code of the time and place. Even more than the killing of Morton, Baker, and McCloskey, even more indeed than the slaying of Tunstall, Brady’s death was cold-blooded murder.

Yet the assassins looked on themselves as soldiers in a righteous war and on the slaying as justified by the code of war rather than the code of the frontier. Years later Eugene Manlove Rhodes, a gifted writer who traced his origins to the New Mexico frontier, perceived the distinction. “It has at last penetrated my thick old head that the Lincoln County War was WAR,” he wrote. “Ghastly but no worse than any war.” Billy the Kid and his friends had gunned down Brady and Hindman from ambush. “In war this would have been brilliant strategy, generalship, fame-building.” All war, he noted, was murder. “Chisum and Murphy men were doing exactly what the Allies and the Germans did; what the damyanks and johnnyrebs did—nothing more or less.”15

Although overstated, the parallel captures the state of mind with which Billy and his comrades approached both the ambush of Brady and their further campaigns against the enemy.