Billy the Kid

by Robert M. Utley

  To further his ambitions, Tunstall had allied himself with Lincoln’s only lawyer, Alexander McSween, a Scotsman ten years older than he. “Mac” harbored his own visions of wealth, and he plunged zealously into his associate’s schemes. A mild-mannered, asthmatic man with an Oriental mustache framing his chin, he would engage in all manner of legal trickery to advance his fortunes, but his temperament did not equip him for a contest in which blood might flow. He was a man of peace who abhorred violence and never carried a gun.

  Mac’s wife, Sue, had a firmer grasp on reality and a better understanding of Jimmy Dolan. “I told Tunstall and Mr. McSween they would be murdered if they went into the store business,” she later declared. “I did my best to keep McSween from entering the business, but he went in against my will.”10

  Sue McSween had accurately gauged the enemy. Discharged from the army at Fort Stanton eight years earlier, Dolan had clerked for Lawrence Murphy and absorbed from him all the crooked and devious ways of getting ahead on the frontier. In the spring of 1877, at the age of twenty-nine, he had inherited the Murphy mantle and, with Johnny Riley as partner, assumed the management of The House. Hot-tempered, quick-witted, and entirely unscrupulous, he could be expected to meet Tunstall’s challenge with every weapon at his command, including violence and even murder if necessary.

  Tunstall shared McSween’s aversion to violence, but if he had to fight with guns, he would. By October 1877 he had begun to understand how deadly a game he had started. Thus he commissioned his foreman, Dick Brewer, to hire a small corps of men to work as hands on the Feliz ranch but also, if the need arose, to use their guns in the service of John Henry Tunstall. “It has cost a lot of money,” the Englishman complained to his parents, “for men expect to be well-paid for going on the war path.”11

  By early December 1877, Brewer had recruited Billy Bonney. Legend portrays the Englishman and the youthful drifter as intimates, Tunstall taking a special interest in the Kid’s latent qualities and the Kid repaying the effort with worshipful respect and intense loyalty. In his ten weeks as a Tunstall hand, however, Billy could not have spent much time with his employer. The store in Lincoln, a journey to Mesilla, and other concerns kept Tunstall away from the ranch most of the time. His letters to England never mentioned Billy.

  Even so, Billy almost certainly formed an admiration and respect for Tunstall. Working for a man of such affluence, education, manners, and stature in the community was a new experience. It afforded a glimpse of a life unimagined in the world of Jesse Evans, Windy Cahill, or even William Henry Harrison Antrim. Even from a distance, and probably even unconsciously, Tunstall provided a powerful example for young Billy and added another dimension to his developing personality.

  Rather than Tunstall, Billy’s friends were his daily companions—Brewer and those he had recruited. Foremost among them was John Middleton. A beefy drifter off the Texas cattle trails, twenty-three years old, Middleton had a dark complexion, black eyes, black hair, and a huge black mustache. Though reserved and soft-spoken, he was fearless. He shot well, especially with the pistol. Tunstall, who thought Middleton “about the most desperate looking man I ever set eyes on,” credited him with the pugnacious resolve that backed down the Casey cowboys and averted a gunfight over Tunstall’s cattle.12

  Blue-eyed, with sandy hair and mustache and a slim, wiry build, Henry N. Brown was only nineteen, a year older than Billy. He had been a buffalo hide hunter in Texas before coming to New Mexico and signing on at Lawrence Murphy’s ranch thirty miles west of Lincoln. In December 1877, after eighteen months as a Murphy cowhand, Brown quit in an acrimonious dispute over wages. At once he went to work for Tunstall. He had killed a man on the buffalo range, knew how to use guns, and, some thought, resorted to them too readily. “Nervy,” judged Frank Coe, “but not smart like Kid.”13

  Frederick T. Waite had wandered into New Mexico from the Indian Territory. He was part Indian, boasting a distinguished Chickasaw lineage together with a prosperous father back home in Paul’s Valley and an education that included some time in college. At twenty-five, he was considerably older than Brown and Bonney. An “OK lad,” pronounced Frank Coe.14 Billy liked Fred immensely, and the two soon became inseparable companions.

  The other men in Tunstall’s little army were noncombatants. One was Godfrey Gauss, the gentle, fatherly old chuck wrangler who tended the kitchen at the ranch headquarters on the Feliz. “Dutch Martin” Martz and “Old Man” William McCloskey, an experienced Texas stockman, rounded out the crew. They had been temporarily engaged to brand Tunstall’s herd.

  Billy surely understood that he and the others had been hired as much for their shooting skills as for their mastery of cowpunching. They spent some time at the ranch on the Feliz, where the only building, a rude two-room adobe, afforded meager shelter and no comforts. They also appeared in Lincoln and wherever else Tunstall had chores to be performed.

  A place that became Billy’s favorite resort was San Patricio, a tiny village of about fifteen adobe dwellings lining a single street beside the Ruidoso just above its junction with the Bonito. The residents, almost entirely Hispanic, liked Billy, and he liked them, especially their young women. Years after his death, one remembered: “The Keed was gone, but many Spanish girls mourned for him.”15

  None of Billy’s new comrades were models of rectitude. Like other friends such as Charley Bowdre and Frank and George Coe, they sometimes strayed into unlawful pursuits. Even Dick Brewer, usually thought to be a law-abiding citizen, may have dabbled in stolen cattle.16 But they did not present themselves openly as outlaws who, like Jesse Evans and his followers, regarded the public contemptuously as “our oyster.” With Tunstall, they had a steady job for which they drew regular wages.

  Billy’s new associations, and especially the model of Tunstall, exposed new sides of his character. Probably for the first time in his young life, he began to think of settling into an honest vocation and building a decent life for himself. By February 1878, he and Fred Waite had begun to lay plans for claiming a spread on the upper Peñasco and founding a farming and ranching enterprise of their own.17

  Add Casey noted the difference in the Kid when Casey returned from Texas. The “bum” he had met at Seven Rivers in October 1877 had become a “gentleman.” “After he got in with Tunstall he paid his way, and was a different man altogether,” recalled Casey. “He had more sweethearts on the creek than a little.”18

  But Billy Bonney was still “the Kid,” an eighteen-year-old without a clear adult persona. The shift from Evans to Tunstall had brought new and more appealing traits to the surface but had also showed how impressionable he remained, how susceptible he was to the influences surrounding him. Like his new friends, he had sampled both the lawful and the unlawful. Like them, he harbored the potential to turn either way—to honest toil or open outlawry. The Lincoln County War pointed some of its warriors in one direction, some in the other.

  Billy Bonney almost certainly had little knowledge or understanding of the complicated legal maneuvers that moved the struggle between Tunstall and Dolan toward open war. They centered on the proceeds of a life insurance policy that McSween had been engaged to collect more than a year earlier. He had succeeded, but had then withheld the money from the heirs until he could be certain of receiving his fee. Dolan, who thought he could get his hands on the money if McSween released it, persuaded one of the heirs to charge the lawyer with the criminal offense of embezzlement and to bring civil suit for recovery of the money. The drama reached a climax in Mesilla early in February 1878, with McSween and Tunstall present as well as Dolan and some friends. McSween managed to get the criminal trial postponed until the spring session of district court in Lincoln. But the civil proceedings required surety in the amount of the suit, ten thousand dollars. Unknown to McSween and Tunstall, who had already left for home, Judge Warren Bristol issued a writ for the attachment of enough of McSween’s property to cover the amount.19

  Billy Bonney and Fred Waite happen
ed to be in Lincoln to observe what happened next. With the writ in his pocket, Dolan raced across mountain and desert to Lincoln, arriving on February 8, two days before McSween and Tunstall. At once, Sheriff Brady formed a posse and invaded McSween’s office and home to inventory and value the furnishings. Not content with that, he moved on to the Tunstall store next door and began to list all the merchandise. Like everyone else, he erroneously assumed McSween and Tunstall to be partners and the contents of the store to be the property of both.

  Tunstall had left the store in the charge of Robert A. Widenmann, a young man roughly his own age whom he had met in Santa Fe and invited to share his Lincoln adventures. A pompous blusterer, disliked by almost everyone, Rob Widenmann shouted protests and threats at Brady, to no avail. Methodically, the sheriff went about his task until his list contained property worth four times the amount stipulated in the writ.20

  If this turn of events chagrined McSween, it infuriated Tunstall, who characteristically felt sympathy for no one but himself. He did not like Brady anyway, regarding him as a “slave of whiskey” and a tool of The House. That Brady had the gall to attach his property and to hold his store night and day like an occupying army outraged the Englishman. The day after reaching Lincoln, February 11, he and Widenmann summoned Bonney and Waite and headed for the store. While Billy and Fred stood menacingly in the door, Tunstall and Widenmann barged in and confronted Brady and his men. With pistols conspicuously displayed, they berated the lawmen and warned that all would suffer if the inventory continued. To give point to the threats, Billy and Fred brandished their Winchester rifles. Brady relented enough to release six horses and two mules from impoundment, but he continued to hold the store as if it were a fortress.21

  That very day, Tunstall started Gauss, Middleton, and McCloskey to the ranch with part of the animals, and that night Widenmann, accompanied by Bonney and Waite, followed with the rest. The two boys planned to ride on to the Peñasco and begin to put their ranching plans into effect. Whether they meant to leave Tunstall’s employ is not clear; probably they intended, like Brewer, to divide their time between Tunstall’s interests and their own enterprise. Arriving at the ranch on the morning of the twelfth, they spent the day and night at the Tunstall ranch building. Present now were all the Tunstall employees: Widenmann, Brewer, Middleton, Bonney, Waite, Brown, Martz, and McCloskey.22

  Bonney and Waite apparently deferred their plan to go to the Peñasco because they thought they might be needed at the Tunstall ranch. On February 9 Sheriff Brady had decided to include the cattle on the Feliz in the attachment. As with the store merchandise, he assumed that they belonged to McSween and Tunstall as partners. Brady had therefore dispatched a posse on this mission. Widenmann and the others who drove the stock to the ranch had probably learned of the threat before leaving Lincoln, and they found that the men at the ranch had also been alerted by a passerby, who had warned that the posse came with intent to kill if necessary. Determined to defend themselves, Widenmann and Brewer had the men punch firing ports in the walls and barricade the doors with grain sacks filled with earth.23

  To lead the posse, Brady had deputized Jacob B. “Billy” Mathews, a silent partner in Dolan & Co. With two House employees, John Hurley and Manuel Segovia (also known as “Indian”), Mathews first rode to the Indian agency and Blazer’s Mills, where Dolan kept a branch store and where Mathews added two more House employees, George Hindman and Andrew L. “Buckshot” Roberts.24

  Here too Mathews chanced across Jesse Evans and one of his henchmen, Tom Hill. Since his break from the Lincoln jail, Evans had been down to the Beckwith ranch on the Pecos and had then ridden to the far western edge of his domain. On January 19, 1878, he and two of his gang stole some horses on the Mimbres River south of Silver City. A posse overtook the thieves and in an exchange of gunfire put a bullet in Evans’s groin. Two weeks later, he turned up near Mesilla and joined Jimmy Dolan, fresh from his legal coup against McSween. Still hurting from his wound, Evans persuaded Dolan to let him ride in his carriage as far as Blazer’s Mills. There, on February 10 or 11, he learned of Mathews’s assignment, doubtless from Mathews himself.25

  From Blazer’s Mills Mathews and his men rode up the south fork of the Tularosa and crossed to the upper Peñasco to camp at the ranch of W. W. Paul. Five miles from Blazer’s Mills, Evans and Hill overtook the posse, and at Paul’s ranch two more of The Boys, Frank Baker and Frank Rivers, appeared. Evans announced that he intended to accompany Mathews because he had loaned Billy Bonney some horses and wanted to get them back. If Mathews protested the presence of avowed outlaws in a sheriff’s posse, he did so perfunctorily.26

  Early on the morning of February 13, the Tunstall hands spotted the possemen and their bandit companions approaching from the south. Backed by Billy and the others with guns at the ready, Widenmann commanded the party to halt fifty yards short of the house. Mathews advanced alone, read the attachment writ, and declared that he had come to impound McSween’s cattle. Widenmann answered that McSween had no cattle on the Feliz. A considerable discussion followed, in which Brewer sought to find some compromise and Widenmann stubbornly insisted that if Mathews wanted the cattle he would have to fight for them. Confused, hesitant, and probably intimidated by the firepower facing him, Mathews lamely concluded that he would have to return to Lincoln for new instructions.27

  Brewer invited Mathews and his men to have breakfast, and while they were riding forward and caring for their horses the officious Widenmann tried to enlist his comrades in a deadly venture. Somehow, he had persuaded John Sherman, U.S. marshal for New Mexico, to give him a deputy’s commission and entrust him with a warrant for the arrest of Evans, Baker, and Hill on the federal charge of stealing stock from the Indian reservation. Now Widenmann asked Brewer and the others to help him serve the warrant. With some injury to the truth, Brewer replied that all were peaceful ranchmen, and if they aided in the arrest of Evans they would all, sooner or later, be shot down in their homes by Dolan gunmen.

  Evans added to Widenmann’s humiliation by taunting him. Swinging his Winchester on the lever and catching it at full cock aimed at the “marshal,” Evans asked if Widenmann carried an arrest warrant for him. That was his business, Widenmann bravely replied. If he ever tried to serve a warrant, Evans warned, he would catch the first bullet fired. Two could play at that game, Widenmann replied. Meantime, Frank Baker methodically spun his pistol on his trigger finger, stopping it at full cock pointed at Widenmann. Despite the tension, Widenmann’s associates must have enjoyed a secret chuckle at the discomfiture of the posturing busybody.28

  Widenmann too felt the need for fresh instructions. Accompanied again by Bonney and Waite, he rode with the Mathews party to Lincoln. Evans and his men, together with Buckshot Roberts, remained behind and soon started back to the Peñasco. That night, as Mathews worked out the next move with Sheriff Brady, Widenmann met with Tunstall and McSween. Billy and Fred probably sat in the room listening to the conversation. Widenmann had seen and heard enough to convince him that Mathews would return with a stronger posse and try to take the cattle by force. Full of indignation, Tunstall did not intend to give in without a fight. Early the next morning Widenmann and his two companions started back to the Feliz to mobilize the defenses.29

  Brady did not intend to back down either. While Mathews signed up more men in Lincoln, a messenger rode down to the Pecos with orders for William B. “Billy” Morton, boss of Dolan’s cow camp, to recruit some of the Seven Rivers stockmen and bring them up the Peñasco to Paul’s ranch. By the evening of February 17, the Lincoln and Seven Rivers contingents had rendezvoused at Paul’s ranch. Altogether, Mathews commanded twenty-two men, including Jimmy Dolan himself. Also on hand, not surprisingly, were Evans, Baker, Hill, and another gang member, George Davis. Evans had still not recovered his horses from Billy Bonney.30

  By this time, February 17, Tunstall had succumbed to doubts about his defiant course. As late as the sixteenth, he had ridden the countryside enlisting men to
help him in a fight with Dolan, and that night he had cursed and threatened James Longwell, Brady’s chief deputy in the store. Later that night, however, Lincoln’s premier gossip, the black handyman George Washington, had brought Tunstall a lurid tale of Mathews’s activities. There were now forty-three possemen, Washington said, and they intended to decoy Tunstall’s men out of their defenses, kill them all, and make off with the cattle. Picturing his men overrun and slaughtered, Tunstall decided that the ranch was not the place for a showdown. Without waiting for daylight, he set forth for the Feliz.31

  The next evening, in the little house on the Feliz, Tunstall outlined his new plan. McCloskey, who had close friends in the posse, would leave at once for the Peñasco and inform Mathews that no resistance would be offered to the attachment. McCloskey was also to find “Dutch Martin” Martz, who was skilled at counting cows, and have him come with Mathews to tally the herd on behalf of Tunstall. Tunstall and the rest of his hands would pull out early the next morning, leaving harmless old Godfrey Gauss to confront the posse.32

  At first light on February 18, the Tunstall party breakfasted and hit the road for Lincoln. They drove nine horses; six were those released by Brady on the eleventh, two belonged to Brewer, and the last was Billy Bonney’s or, possibly, Jesse Evans’s. Whomever that horse belonged to, it furnished the pretext for the continued presence of the outlaws with the posse. After a mile, Henry Brown, for unknown reasons, left the group and turned south to the Peñasco, en route exchanging greetings with the posse. Ten miles out, the horsemen and the horse herd veered off on a trail that afforded a mountainous shortcut to the Ruidoso while Fred Waite, driving a buckboard, continued on the road.