by Ron Hansen
The Regulators would seem to have been due some of the five thousand, but no transaction was ever made, possibly because the John H. Tunstall estate owed McSween more than six thousand dollars for the cattle, horses, and farms that were purchased to fulfill Harry’s grandiose plans.
Jailed as an accessory to murder, Jimmy Dolan was freed after L. G. Murphy furnished his bail. The Murphy & Company store had been reorganized as Jas. J. Dolan & Co., which McSween condemned as the loathsome “Irish firm.” But then even the House ceased doing business as Jimmy took the “extremely indisposed” Major Lawrence Gustave Murphy to Santa Fe for medical treatment at St. Vincent’s Hospital and Asylum. There, according to Franklin Coe, “The Sisters of Charity would not let him have whiskey and that cut his living off. He died in a short time and everybody rejoiced over it.” His obituary noted that the former officer and store owner, who was just forty-seven, was buried by the Masonic and Odd Fellows fraternities in their cemetery “in the presence of a large concourse of citizens”—all affiliates of the Santa Fe Ring.
* * *
The Regulators healed up in San Patricio or on their Rio Ruidoso farms, and aside from a few skirmishes there was relative calm for some time. Governor Axtell took credit for it, having signed a proclamation on May 28, 1878, that appointed as sheriff of Lincoln County George W. “Dad” Peppin, who misspelled his last name to disguise his French heritage and was called “Dolan’s affidavit man” because of his willingness to lie for Jimmy under oath. The governor also commanded “all men to disarm and return to their homes and their usual pursuits,” and he concluded, “I urge all good citizens to submit to the law, remembering that violence begets violence, and that they who take up the sword shall perish by the sword.”
And yet a gang of some twenty roughnecks calling themselves the Rio Grande Posse rode north to Lincoln from Seven Rivers and just hung around the Wortley Hotel and the House’s still-open post office for a week, ever on the lookout for Alexander McSween. Rustler and former Army sergeant John Kinney, who founded the Boys, was boss of this outfit, too. William Logan Rynerson, the freakishly tall district attorney who’d studied law with Governor Axtell, had sent Kinney there to help out Jimmy Dolan, who’d gotten Kinney sworn in as a deputy sheriff and promised him five hundred dollars for the assassination of McSween. Were the Rio Grande Posse themselves responsible for the killing, they’d get to divvy up Tunstall’s cattle.
Informers got word to the Regulators and the McSweens, who retreated far away from Lincoln, the lawyer and his wife staying in a campaign tent pitched next to a sinkhole at Bottomless Lake east of Roswell. Wearied of waiting, the roughnecks finally took their treachery south.
With the commencement of the torrential rains in late June, John Chisum offered the Regulators the haven of his South Spring hacienda, with its many rooms and fine furnishings, its fragrant orchard and garden, and the pretty, saucy, and alluring Sallie Chisum. The Kid overdressed in his fanciest, trying to cut a swell, as was said then, and Ash Upson later related that Kid Antrim let himself be recognized in the Roswell general store just so he could buy Sallie a box of Cadbury chocolates. Whether the girl was aware the Kid was romancing her isn’t certain.
* * *
On July 10, Sheriff Peppin, Jimmy Dolan and his ilk, and Deputy Sheriff John Kinney and his mercenaries were in San Patricio shaking down shopkeepers for information about the Tunstall faction, whom they denounced as “Modocs” after the famously rebellious Indian tribe.
Hearing details of it, Alex McSween left his hiding place for the South Spring ranch in order to write a report of the crimes and malfeasance for The Cimarron News & Press. And for those Regulators in the house who could not read, Alex stood in the dining room to proclaim his account aloud.
“Headed by Axtell’s sheriff and J. J. Dolan,” he announced, “the Rio Grande Posse killed and stole horses in San Patricio. They broke windows and doors, smashed boxes of fineries and robbed them of their contents, and from an old widow who was living alone they stole four hundred thirty-eight dollars! They tore the roof off the Dow Brothers Store, threw the dry goods out onto the street, and took for themselves whatever they wanted. With women they used the vilest language when not committing more unspeakable offenses. Citizens working in the fields were fired upon but made good their escape up the river. Kinney said in town that he was employed by the Governor and that he and his men would have to be paid three dollars fifty cents a day by the County, and that the sooner the people helped him arrest the Regulators, the sooner their County would be relieved of his expense. Dolan endorsed the speech.”
After finishing his article, Alex McSween fell into a dining room chair as if flabbergasted by the indignities and injustice.
Sallie Chisum heard it all and seemed both faintish and excited by the upheaval, and she turned to the Regulators with wet, gleaming eyes as she theatrically inquired, “What say ye?”
All were silent until the Kid said with vehemence, “We need to end this!”
- 11 -
“THE FIRE BECAME PROMISCUOUS”
On Sunday, July 14, Sheriff Dad Peppin, Deputy Sheriff John Kinney, and the majority of his Rio Grande Posse were scouring the hills for their enemies, so they missed seeing Alex McSween’s partisans and the Regulators defiantly trotting into Lincoln from the east, now more than sixty in number, their shined ordnance on display, their spurs jingling, their horses nodding as if on parade, each of the Regulators hurrahing and shouting ridicule.
Seeking to control access to the town, Charlie Bowdre, Doc Scurlock, a wheezing John Middleton, and a half dozen others holed up in the easternmost store owned by Isaac Ellis, while George Coe and two others peeled off to domicile in the granary behind the Tunstall store.
About twenty Mexicans, including Martin Chaves, the Regulators’ leader pro tem, took over the Montaño house, just across from the castle keep of the Torreón, where five deputy sheriffs were on watch up top but chose to avoid their annihilation by sinking out of view and sharing their quart of Old Joel scamper juice.
Entering through the gate of the picket fence surrounding his property, Alex McSween saw Jimmy Dolan, who was on crutches because he broke a leg jumping from his horse when drunk. Watching McSween glumly from the front of the Wortley Hotel next door, Dolan seemed to be trying to slaughter him with his stare.
Alex shouted, “We have been out in the hills long enough. I have now returned and your ruffians shall not drive me away so long as I live.”
Dolan said, “Duly noted.”
The Kid took his and Alex’s horses to the fenced stable and corral behind the house, and he stole a flecked brown egg from the straw nest in a hot chicken coop where a lot of hens were roosting. Cracking the egg and eating it raw, he looked to see McSween’s two black servants, Sebrian Bates and George Washington, watching, but instead of scolding him for his thievery they silently waved him inside through the west wing’s unroofed kitchen.
It was a fairly new, twelve-room, U-shaped house with an interior patio separating the wings. It had formerly belonged to L. G. Murphy but was no longer essential to him after he’d constructed his huge House, so he’d deeded it to McSween in exchange for his steep legal fees. The east wing contained the rooms of Alex’s law partner, David Shield, and Shield’s wife, Elizabeth, Susan McSween’s older sister, as well as their three children, although David Shield was dealing with the legislature in Santa Fe. Alex and Susan, who were childless, occupied the west wing, and it was there that twelve in the McSween faction, half of them Mexican, including Billy’s cousin Yginio Salazar, were to hunker down for the civil war they foresaw. Slatted shutters were fastened over windows, sandbags were piled in front of the exterior doors, and high walls of adobe bricks were stacked on the sills to fill in all the street-facing plate-glass windows.
The Kid laid his California bedroll down in a sitting room with stacked chairs, a violet Biedermeier sofa, a Singer sewing machine, a Viennese “Regulator” clock, and a bookcase containing Little
Women, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, Farm Ballads, and Marjorie Daw. With Billy in the sitting room was Harvey Morris, a forty-year-old Kansan who’d ventured farther west in the hope of curing his galloping consumption and was now reading law in order to join the McSween & Shield partnership. With Billy, too, was Thomas O. Folliard, Jr., a red-haired Texan of Irish ancestry, six feet tall, twenty years old, and sixty pounds heavier than the Kid but otherwise similar enough to him in facial features that in an age of few photographs they were frequently mistaken for each other. There was a legend that Tom had just magically shown up in San Patricio, like a rebel angel fallen to earth, without a horse or gun or penny on him, and he told the Kid he wanted to hire on with the Regulators, that “I’m a motherless child and I’m so broke I can’t even pay attention.”
The Kid took to him instantly and said, “Well, I grew up with nothing and I still got most of it. Welcome to our fraternity.”
The Kid handed on his artistry with guns, stole a horse for Tom, and made the recruit a warrior, and it was said that Tom Folliard idolized Billy like a canine, and if there were señoritas who still wanted to dance, Tom would stand outside the salón de baile and hold the Kid’s horse without noticing if the dancing went on for fifteen more minutes or a few hours.
And now Mrs. Susan Ellen Hummer McSween walked into the sitting room with a tray of glasses and a pitcher of sweet tea. Seeing her regal entrance, Tom and Billy jumped up like schoolboys, swiping off their sombreros to introduce themselves.
She glared at the Kid. “You were one of those hotheads who assassinated Sheriff Brady.”
He shied from her scorn and looked at the hooked rug on the floor. “Yes’m.”
“Well, you just made matters worse. We had the town on our side up till then. And now we’re embattled.” She turned from him and strode out.
She was a haughty, handsome woman of thirty-two whose grandparents had been German royalty, or so she said, and even though she was Church of the Brethren, she lied that she’d been raised in a Catholic convent. Even when she married, she gave her maiden name as Homer instead of Hummer, as if she were hiding something, and rather than confess that she and Alex had fled to New Mexico because of their Kansas debts and his fiduciary misconduct, she said they’d sought the climate for his health. She dressed in elegance, clapped her hands when she wanted a servant, and wore an Antilles perfume called Flaming Hibiscus. When he felt a foreboding about his fate in late February, Dick Brewer had made her executrix of his estate. All the Regulators were just as in awe of Mrs. McSween. But William H. Bonney was loathsome to Susan, who later wrote, “I never liked the Kid, and didn’t approve of his career. He was too much like Jimmy Dolan and did not think it amounted to much to take another’s life.”
* * *
Sheriff Dad Peppin and the Rio Grande Posse got back to Lincoln on Sunday night and aimed gunshots at the house across the street just because. Regulators in the house and stores fired back, but nobody on either side was much afoot and only a dray horse was accidentally killed. Like a bad penny, Jesse Evans showed up, freed on bail by Judge Bristol until he could stand trial for the murder of John Henry Tunstall. Also joining Dad Peppin were many of the others in the posse Sheriff Brady had sent to chase down the Englishman.
Some guns went off on July 15 but in a lazy kind of way, like an old cuss in a rocking chair spitting sunflower seeds. Because of overcrowding, Susan McSween sent away the servants Sebrian Bates and George Washington, and that Monday night she entertained her houseguests on the parlor organ with “Dear Old Pals,” “Early in de Mornin,” and “Time Was When Love and I Were Well Acquainted.” Tom Folliard hunched beside her on the bench and she taught him to play “Chopsticks,” laughing with gaiety and saying, “Isn’t that fun? It was composed in England by a girl just your age.”
With some jealousy over Susan’s attentions, the Kid later noted that Tom had gotten a haircut.
“Yes, I did.”
“You do it yourself? With a bowl and scissors?”
“No, a barber fella helped me.”
“Oh, Tom,” the Kid said. “He was no help at all.”
Folliard went to find a mirror as the Kid stayed up late with Alex McSween, who sipped from a snifter of brandy as he ruminated on their situation. “These are the ruthless devils we’re dealing with. The lackeys and foot soldiers of Thomas B. Catron. He became an expert in property law and saw his iniquitous opportunity while looking into the old Spanish and Mexican land grants, held by families for generations. With his former law partner Stephen Elkins, a member of Congress, and himself the United States Attorney for New Mexico, Catron could rule that those land grants were fraudulently platted and were without a clear conveyance of title. Whereby he could steal thirty-four magnificent properties for himself, three million acres! Connecticut is only slightly bigger. And the Mexicans lost their farms, their homes, their ancestry. That is why so many of them have affiliated themselves with us. We are redressing a grave injustice in a West where judgments of legality go to the highest bidder or at the insistence of a gun.”
The Kid nodded and said in a headstrong way, “We belong to the grievance committee.”
“Well put.”
The Kid asked, “Would you like me to find a six-shooter for you?”
The former candidate for the ministry seemed to find his misunderstanding repellent. “I cannot conceive of a circumstance in which I would intentionally harm another human being.”
* * *
Jimmy Dolan, a former corporal there, rode southwest to Fort Stanton on Tuesday morning to lobby Lieutenant Colonel Dudley, the post commander, for his intervention in the “uprising.” At an inquiry later both would lie under oath saying the conversation never occurred.
But that Tuesday evening, some Regulators on McSween’s flat roof shot at “a colored man” riding in from the west on the Fort Stanton Road. Although he only fell from his horse in dodging the gunfire, he was a federal, a courier with the segregated 9th Cavalry Regiment, on his way to give a message conveying the post commander’s promise of assistance to the sheriff.
Lieutenant Colonel Dudley thought the failed shooting was “an infamous outrage.” Calling for an investigation of the incident, on Wednesday he sent three officers, including the post surgeon, Major Daniel M. Appel, who’d conducted the postmortem on John Henry Tunstall and doctored the gunshot injuries of Jesse Evans, John Middleton, and George Coe. Major Appel would report that “everything is closed in Lincoln, every home shut up, no one is in the street. In the east end of town there is a faction of men and in the foothills to the south there is another and these worthies are keeping up a persistent and continuous exchange of gunfire.”
Also on that Wednesday, Doc Scurlock’s bored father-in-law, Fernando Herrera, accepted the challenge to try to nail one of the Boys on the southern hill that was called Chichi because it resembled a woman’s breast. Even with a Sharps rifle, it was an impossible distance. The Iowan “Lallycooler” Crawford was no more than an iota up there in the scraggle near the hill’s nipple, but Herrera managed to shatter Crawford’s spine, paralyzing him with what Herrera’s congratulating chums called “among the great examples of marksmanship.” And when the Army surgeon and his soldier aides floundered up the steep hillside to rescue the fatally injured Crawford, Regulators stupidly shot at them, too. Major Appel reported, “We thought the shots came from the Montaño house, judging from the loud whistling of bullets within a few feet of us.”
In June 1878, Congress had forbidden the use of the military in a civil affair unless it seemed an insurrection. The post commander now felt that was the case. Lieutenant Colonel Nathan A. M. Dudley was a monocled, fifty-three-year-old bachelor and alcoholic with a gray whisk broom of a mustache and a Prussian officer’s fierce and fixed ideas. Earlier he’d been court-martialed for disobedience, conduct unbecoming, and drunkenness on duty, but received only a verdict of forfeiture in pay and a short suspension due to the skillful lawyering of Thomas B. Catron. So Dudley wa
s yet another who was beholden to the Santa Fe Ring and inclined to benefit a friend when he read the note from Jimmy Dolan (but signed by the illiterate Sheriff Peppin) stating:
If it is within your power to loan me one of your howitzers, you would confer a great favor on the majority of the people of this County, who are being persecuted by a lawless mob.
Ever consistent in his bad judgment, Lieutenant Colonel Dudley, four officers, and a caravan of the 9th Cavalry Colored Regiment entered Lincoln around noon on Friday, July 19, with horse teams pulling a Gatling gun served by a feed of two thousand rounds, as well as a field howitzer cannon that fired a twelve-pound shell. Establishing his camp in midtown and frankly heralding whose side he was on, Lieutenant Colonel Dudley ordered the howitzer trained on the José Montaño store and house where the Mexican Regulators who’d shot at the post surgeon were on a cautious watch. And then he smoked a cigar in relaxation on a folding canvas chair as Dolan’s men jockeyed for position in hiding places around McSween’s house, including the horse stables of his backyard.
Seeing the cannon aimed at them and anticipating their obliteration, the Mexican Regulators waited only a few minutes before they scurried from the Montaño house to Isaac Ellis’s store in the east. But the artillery officer merely redirected the howitzer. Soon both groups of McSween men were hurrying out to their horses and racking off for the foothills across the Rio Bonito. The Gatling gun traced each of them in their retreat, a sergeant saying “Pow pow pow” as he pretended to mow them down, his lieutenant having wisely denied him permission to shoot.
Alex McSween found relaxation only in work, so that Friday he wrote a carefree note to Postmaster Ash Upson in Roswell, requesting he send postage stamps and promising to help with establishing a school; then he sent a check to Scribner’s Monthly, renewing his subscription.