20. Mesilla Valley Independent, September 22 and October 27, 1877; Frederick W. Nolan, ed., The Life and Death of John Henry Tunstall (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1965), 243–44. I have dealt with these events in High Noon in Lincoln, 333–34.
21. Tunstall’s acquisition of the Casey cattle and the beginnings of his ranch on the Feliz are detailed in Utley, High Noon in Lincoln, 27.
22. Adherents of the Upson-Jones-Ball story may wonder where Billy, horseless after his ordeal in the Guadalupes, acquired or stole a horse so quickly after his arrival at the Jones ranch.
23. Lily (Casey) Klasner, My Girlhood among Outlaws, ed. Eve Ball (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1972), 169–70. Lily Casey Klasner is a more reassuring historical source than the Jones brothers, and the student wishes that Eve Ball had been able to do as well by them as she did by Lily. Where susceptible to corroboration in other sources, Lily turns out to be unusually reliable. In addition, her memory of various personalities is acute, and she is indispensable in aiding the historian to get a feel for them as people rather than mere names. With Lily and the Joneses placing Billy here at this time, and Add remembering him here too (see n. 24), we may feel confident that Billy was indeed at the Jones ranch.
24. Ibid., 174; Robert A. Casey, interview with J. Evetts Haley, Picacho, N. Mex., June 25, 1937, HHC.
25. Not surprisingly, Lily says nothing about Tunstall’s cows or their recovery by Brewer. Tunstall, however, describes the episode in detail in a letter to his parents of November 29, 1877, in Nolan, ed., Life and Death of Tunstall, 248–49. See also Florencio Chavez, interview with J. Evetts Haley, Lincoln, N. Mex., August 15, 1927, HHC. Chavez was one of Brewer’s men. The Brewer mission, undertaken on October 20 or 21 and probably completed within ten days, allows us to place almost exact dates on the Caseys’ stay at the Jones ranch and thus on Billy Bonney’s presence there, which in turn ties in nicely with the documented presence of Evans and his henchmen at the nearby Beckwith ranch. In both the Casey and the Jones accounts, the time is vague.
26. Lily Casey Klasner placed Billy in Lincoln: My Girlhood among Outlaws, 174. So did Florencio Chavez: “I knew the Kid from the first time he first came to Lincoln with Jesse Evans, Frank Baker, . . . ” (italics mine), as quoted in Eugene Cunningham, “Fought with Billy the Kid,” Frontier Times 9 (March 1932): 244. And so did Francisco Trujillo, who later rode with the Kid, as cited below in n. 27.
Billy’s movements at this time are thinly documented. A few scattered scraps of evidence hint that he may have been arrested at Seven Rivers or Roswell for some offense and confined in the Lincoln jail himself. Released for want of evidence, possibly with the aid of Tunstall, he then went to work for Tunstall. The evidence behind this theory is not persuasive enough to warrant my substituting it for the account I present in the following paragraphs.
27. Francisco Trujillo, interview with Edith L. Crawford, San Patricio, N. Mex., May 10, 1937, translated by A. L. White, WPA Files, Folder 212, New Mexico State Records Center and Archives (hereafter NMSRCA), and printed in Robert F. Kadlec, ed., They “Knew” Billy the Kid: Interviews with Old-Time New Mexicans (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1987), 68. Trujillo later rode with Bonney in the Lincoln County War and knew him well. At first glance, this interview seems the incoherent rambling of a senile old man. Once the phonetically rendered names are accurately translated, however, and the framework of his narrative substantiated from other sources, the result is an important tool in reconstructing some key aspects of the Lincoln County War. Trujillo’s narrative of his encounter with Billy Bonney finds corroboration in a letter from Lincoln dated December 3, 1877, that appeared in the Mesilla Valley Independent, December 15, 1877: “On their way to the Feliz, they met Juan Trujillo, and borrowed his saddle, gun and pistol for Don Lucas Gallegos.” (Italics mine.) Gallegos, not part of the Evans gang, was the fifth prisoner liberated.
28. I have dealt with the escape in more detail in High Noon in Lincoln, 34–35 and notes. Each faction accused the other of aiding the escape, and the exact truth cannot be recovered. Principal sources are Tunstall’s account in Nolan, ed., Life and Death of Tunstall, 253–56; Mesilla Valley Independent, November 24 and December 13, 1877; and depositions of Alexander McSween and Juan Patrón, in Frank Warner Angel, “Report on the Death of John H. Tunstall,” File 44–4–8–3, RG 60, Records of the Department of Justice, NARA (hereafter cited as Angel Report). The case against Tunstall is best stated in “Cowboy” to Ed., Rio Pecos, April 8, 1878, Weekly New Mexican (Santa Fe), April 20, 1878; and the case against Dolan is best stated in McSween to Ed., Lincoln, April 27, 1878, which appeared in the Cimarron News and Press and is reproduced in Maurice G. Fulton, History of the Lincoln County War, ed. Robert N. Mullin (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1968), 189–92. Both Evans and Andrew Boyle, soon to become prominent in the anti-McSween forces, implicated McSween in the escape: Depositions of Evans and Boyle, Report of Inspector E. C. Watkins, Report no. 1981, June 27, 1878, RG 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Inspectors’ Reports, 1873–80, NARA (hereafter Watkins Report). This report concerns allegations made by McSween of fraudulent relations between Indian Agent Frederick C. Godfroy and Dolan & Co. Godfroy lost his job as a result.
4. THE RANCH HAND
1. George Coe wrote a book that has become a minor classic: Frontier Fighter: The Autobiography of George W. Coe, as related to Nan Hillary Harrison (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1934; 2d ed., Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1951; Lakeside Classics ed., ed. Doyce B. Nunis, Jr., Chicago: R. R. Donnelley and Co., 1984). The book suffered from the intervention of Harrison and is of limited value as source material. Far more valuable are interviews with both Frank and George conducted by J. Evetts Haley in the 1920s and 1930s, the notes and transcripts of which are now housed in the Haley History Center in Midland, Texas. Both also contributed articles and letters to newspapers. Frank and George had a poor memory for chronology, but they provide excellent local color and characterizations and good detail for certain events.
2. Frank Coe, “A Friend Comes to the Defense of Notorious Billy the Kid,” El Paso Times, September 16, 1923.
3. Ibid.
4. William Chisum, interview with Allen A. Erwin, Los Angeles, 1952, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson (hereafter AHS). This source consists of a dozen tapes recorded by Erwin in a series of conversations in Chisum’s Los Angeles home during August and September 1952. The son of James Chisum, Will was a nephew of John Simpson Chisum, for whom he worked at the South Spring ranch near Roswell beginning in December 1877. For frontier firearms in general, and Billy’s in particular, see Louis A. Garavaglia and Charles G. Worman, Firearms of the American West, 1866–1894 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985).
5. Coe, Frontier Fighter, 49. I have used the Lakeside Classics edition.
6. Frank Coe, interview with J. Evetts Haley, San Patricio, N. Mex., March 20, 1927, HHC.
7. William Wier, interview with J. Evetts Haley, Monument, N. Mex., June 22, 1937, Barker History Center, University of Texas. For a biographical sketch of Scurlock, see Philip J. Rasch, Joseph E. Buckbee, and Karl K. Klein, “Man of Many Parts,” English Westerners Brand Book 5 (January 1963): 9–12.
8. Coe, Frontier Fighter, 50. Quotation from Frank Coe, interviews with J. Evetts Haley, San Patricio, N. Mex., March 20, 1927, and February 20, 1928, HHC. The latter interview is penciled jottings on slips of paper and apparently was never transcribed and edited.
9. Frederick W. Nolan, ed., The Life and Death of John Henry Tunstall (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1965), 213.
10. Sue (McSween) Barber, interview with J. Evetts Haley, White Oaks, N. Mex., August 16, 1927, HHC.
11. Nolan, ed., Life and Death of Tunstall, 259.
12. Ibid., 249; New Mexico Biographical Notes, Mullin Collection, HHC.
13. Frank Coe, February 20, 1928, HHC; deposition of Henry Brown, Angel Report, NARA; New Mexico Biographical Notes, Mull
in Collection, HHC. Because of his later notoriety in Kansas, Brown has attracted more attention than other gunmen. Consult the following: Bill O’Neal, Henry Brown, the Outlaw Marshal (College Station, Texas: Creative Publishing Co., 1980); Colin W. Rickards, “Better for the World That He is Gone,” English Westerners Brand Book 2 (April 1960): 2–8; and Philip J. Rasch, “A Note on Henry Newton Brown,” Los Angeles Westerners Brand Book 5 (1953): 58–67. I cannot be sure that Brown worked for Tunstall. The above publications have him hiring on with John Chisum after the break with The House in December 1877. By his own testimony, however, as well as that of Godfrey Gauss, William Bonney, Jacob B. Mathews, and John Hurley (Angel Report, NARA), Brown was at the Tunstall ranch on February 13–18, 1878, at the time of the attachment proceedings that led to Tunstall’s death, treated below. His deposition does not indicate whom he worked for after leaving Murphy, but his presence at the Tunstall ranch and his subsequent career as one of the Regulators lead me to think that he went to work for Tunstall at about the same time as Bonney. In any event, these associations seem inconsistent with employment on the Chisum ranch, more than fifty miles to the east.
14. Frank Coe, February 20, 1928, HHC; New Mexico Biographical Notes, Mullin Collection, HHC. The latter consist mainly of some useful correspondence Maurice G. Fulton conducted with people who knew Waite in Paul’s Valley, Oklahoma.
15. Carlota Baca Brent, interview with Frances E. Totty, December 6, 1937, WPA Files, Folder 212, NMSRCA.
16. Deposition of Andrew Boyle, June 17, 1878, Watkins Report, NARA.
17. Depositions of William H. Bonney and Robert A. Widenmann, Angel Report, NARA.
18. Robert A. Casey, interview with J. Evetts Haley, Picacho, N. Mex., June 25, 1937, HHC.
19. I have dealt with these events in greater detail in High Noon in Lincoln: Violence on the Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 38–43.
20. Deposition of Robert A. Widenmann, Angel Report, NARA; Brady to Rynerson, March 5, 1878, in Mesilla Valley Independent, March 30, 1878. The inventories are in Lincoln County, District Court, Docket Book F, NMSRCA.
21. Nolan, ed., Life and Death of Tunstall, 252; depositions of Bonney, Widenmann, and James Longwell (a posseman in the store), Angel Report, NARA.
22. Depositions of Widenmann, Bonney, Mathews, and Hurley, Angel Report, NARA. The sources also mention one McCormick, who is otherwise unidentified.
23. Depositions of Gauss and Bonney, Angel Report, NARA. According to Gauss, “It was reported by Alex Rudder that the posse was agoing to kill us.” Since Gauss later says that Brewer sent Rudder on to the Peñasco to get a load of corn, I assume Rudder (known locally as “Crazy Alex”) gave this information at the ranch rather than in Lincoln. Bonney says, “Having been informed that said deputy sheriff and posse were going to round up all the cattle and drive them off and kill the persons at the ranch, the persons at the ranch cut portholes in the walls of the house and filled sacks with earth so that they. . . could defend themselves.” Widenmann also tells of these defensive measures, and they were noted by a member of the second posse on February 18: depositions of Widenmann and Pantaleón Gallegos, Angel Report, NARA.
24. Deposition of Mathews, Angel Report, NARA.
25. The Mimbres raid is reported in the Mesilla Valley Independent, January 26, 1878. The meeting with Dolan is covered in the deposition of Dolan, Angel Report, NARA. The Dolan and the McSween-Tunstall parties met at Shedd’s Ranch in San Augustín Pass east of Mesilla. With Evans looking on, Dolan tried to provoke Tunstall into a shootout, but the Englishman refused to go for his gun.
26. Depositions of Mathews and Hurley, Angel Report, NARA. Evans’s explanation may have been genuine, or it may have been a screen for other purposes. As will become apparent, Billy did have a spare horse, and it could have been borrowed from Evans. In any event, the explanation, whether truthful or not, establishes a prior relationship between the two that could have occurred only since the killing of Cahill. As suggested in chapter 3, I believe that Bonney rode with the Evans gang in October and helped spring Evans from the Lincoln jail in November. Mathews identifies Evans’s companion at Blazer’s Mills as Rivers rather than Hill. Hurley names Hill. Because Evans and Hill were especially close, I favor Hurley’s memory. In any event, all four were present at Paul’s ranch.
27. Those present who later gave depositions for the Angel Report were Mathews, Hurley, Middleton, Widenmann, Bonney, and Gauss. Brown’s deposition dealt only with the events of February 18.
28. Depositions of Widenmann, Bonney, and Gauss, Angel Report, NARA. Evans, Baker, Hill, and two others had been indicted for larceny by a federal grand jury on November 21, 1877; this was the basis for the warrant Widenmann carried. U.S. District Court, Third Judicial District, Record Book, 1871–79, pp. 659 and 663, RG 21, Records of the District Court of the United States, Territory of New Mexico, NARA, Denver Federal Records Center (hereafter DFRG).
29. In his Angel Report deposition, McSween, whose dates were usually imprecise, says that Widenmann came in “on or about” February 14 and that Tunstall had already decided not to fight. Because Tunstall was still behaving belligerently three days later, however, I infer a similar attitude in the meeting on the night of February 13.
30. For the organization and movement of the expanded posse, see depositions of Mathews, Hurley, Gallegos, and Samuel R. Perry, Angel Report, NARA. The Lincoln possemen were Mathews, Hurley, Gallegos, George Hindman, Andrew Roberts, Manuel Segovia, Alexander Hamilton Mills, Thomas Moore, Ramón Montoya, E. H. Wakefield, Felipe Mes, and Pablo Pino y Pino. From Seven Rivers were Billy Morton, Perry, Charles Wolz, Charles Kruling, Charles Marshall, John Wallace Olinger, Robert W. Beckwith, Thomas Green, Thomas Cochran, and George Kitt.
31. Depositions of Longwell and McSween, Angel Report, NARA.
32. Depositions of McSween, Widenmann, Bonney, Middleton, and Gauss, Angel Report, NARA.
33. The scene at the ranch is described in the depositions of Dolan, Mathews, Gauss, Gallegos, Perry, and Kruling, Angel Report, NARA. Perry and Gallegos tell of the exchange with Evans. The Morton quotation is from Gauss. The subposse consisted of Morton, Gallegos, Perry, Kruling, Hurley, Segovia (“Indian”), Hindman, Olinger, Beckwith, Montoya, Green, Cochran, Kitt, and Marshall. Perry and Dolan both mention meeting Henry Brown on the approach from the Peñasco, and Brown’s deposition also describes the meeting. Perry notes that Bonney had a horse of Evans’s, whereas all the rest refer to more than one.
34. The experiences of the Tunstall party are reconstructed from the depositions of Widenmann, Middleton, and Bonney, Angel Report, NARA; from an undated Widenmann draft on stationery of Tunstall’s Lincoln County Bank, HHC; and from Widenmann’s testimony before Judge Bristol as reported in the Mesilla News, July 6,1878.
35. Deposition of Middleton, Angel Report, NARA.
36. The experiences of Morton’s subposse are reconstructed from the depositions of Perry, Cochran, Beckwith, Olinger, Gallegos, Hurley, and Kruling, Angel Report, NARA.
37. Evans’s testimony in a hearing before Judge Bristol is reported in the Mesilla News, July 6,1878.
38. Longwell, still holding the Tunstall store next door for Brady, testified that these men had gathered well before word arrived of Tunstall’s death. Therefore, they must have come in response to Tunstall’s daylong ride through the countryside on February 16. Deposition of Longwell, Angel Report, NARA.
5. THE AVENGER
1. Frank Coe, interview with J. Evetts Haley, San Patricio, N. Mex., August 14, 1927, HHC.
2. My reconstruction of the events of February 18–23, based chiefly on depositions in the Angel Report, differs from previous chronologies. I have also dealt with the sequence in High Noon in Lincoln: Violence on the Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 52–56 and notes.
3. An affidavit of Middleton, and another of Brewer and Bonney, February 19, 1878, together with an explanatory affidavit of Justice Wilson, Aug
ust 31, 1878, are Exhibits 10a and 13 appended to McSween’s deposition in the Angel Report, NARA. Middleton’s affidavit named only Hindman. The Brewer-Bonney affidavit named Dolan, Baker, Evans, Davis, Mills, Morton, Moore, Hindman, Frank Rivers (another Evans associate), and Gallegos. Curiously, Wilson issued warrants for the arrest, as a copyist took the names from his docket book the following August, of “John [James] J. Dolan, J. Conovar [Thomas Cochran?], Frank Baker, Jessie Evans, Tom Hill, George Davis, O.[A.] L. Roberts, P. Gallegos, T. Green, J. Awley [John Hurley?], ‘Dutch Charley’ proper name unknown [Kruling], R. W. Beckwith, William Morton, George Harmon [Hindman], J. B. Mathews and others.” Considering Wilson’s execrable handwriting, the confused rendering of the names is understandable. In addition to Dolan, others of those named were at the ranch on the Feliz rather than with the Morton subposse.
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