The Lincoln County War is a complicated and murky conflict in many ways, but at its core, it was a clashing of two factions’ greed, violence, and personal hatreds.
 
On one side was “the House,” led by Lawrence Gustave Murphy and his violent business partner, James J. Dolan.  By 1877, the House had had an economic and political monopoly on Lincoln County for years.  The House ran a store which extended lines of credit no one could repay, permanently indebting purchasers.  The firm also had control of the government contracts to supply beef to the Mescalero Apaches.  The amount of beef the House told the government it supplied and the amount it actually supplied differed immensely, and always in the firm’s favor.  The House of Murphy and Dolan was also intimately connected with the Santa Fe Ring, a group of corrupt politicians who ruled New Mexico.

On the other side were three influential men.  One was young Englishman John Tunstall who came to New Mexico planning to get rich by taking control of the county from the House.  He wanted to take over economic power and began to do so by opening his own store and a bank.  His associate in the bank was lawyer Alexander McSween who had earlier fallen into the House’s bad graces by embezzling a life insurance policy payout that the House had hoped to get their hands on first.  When McSween met Tunstall, he saw someone who could fund his own schemes and persuaded the young Tunstall to go into competition with the House.  The third man, also an associate in the bank was famous cattle baron John Chisum who was hated by many Murphy/Dolan supporters.

When the House could not get payment from Alexander McSween for the life insurance policy, they used dubious legal tactics to attempt to attach livestock from John Tunstall, operating on the premise that Tunstall and McSween were business partners (although the livestock was entirely Tunstall’s, not McSween’s).  After many legal maneuverings on both sides and heated confrontations, a killing resulted.   On February 18, 1878 a posse of about 40 Murphy/Dolan men hunted down and killed the 24-year-old John Tunstall.  This murder touched off the Lincoln County War.

Billy the Kid was on the Tunstall/McSween side of the war.  He was one of about 50 men who called themselves the “Regulators” as they intended to regulate justice to those who had murdered Tunstall.  Billy was not the leader of the Regulators, although he was present at all the key gunfights of the war.  After the war was over, the men who had been sympathetic to Murphy and Dolan needed a scapegoat; someone they could punish, and they chose Billy, partly because Billy was one of the few Regulators who had remained in the area.  Billy was charged and convicted of the murder of Sheriff William Brady, the sheriff Jimmy Dolan had had in his pocket.  There is no evidence to support Billy’s conviction – on the day Brady was killed, there were six men doing the shooting.  Billy was one of them, but it is more likely that Billy was firing at Sheriff’s Deputy Billy Mathews, whom the Kid hated.  Whatever the case, Billy was sentenced to death.  On April 28, 1881, Billy the Kid made a daring escape from custody in Lincoln.  During this escape, the Kid shot and killed Deputy Bob Olinger, a notorious bully who had previously tormented the Kid and threatened his life.  Billy rode out of the town and straight into legend.  He was killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett on July 14, 1881.

© 2009 Elise Gomber

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