“Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War”

Published in The End of the Trail: Western Stories, 2005.
Excerpts from letters to H. P. Lovecraft, January and February 1931, and July 1935,
selected, arranged and titled by the editor, from copies of original letters provided by Glenn Lord.

Cover from the collection The End of the Trail: Western Stories (2005).

How few people give any thought to the history of even their own locality! Why, it was from the Concho River, only about a hundred miles from here that John Chisum started to New Mexico in 1868, with his herd of ten thousand cattle, his caravan of waggons and his army of hard-bit Texas cowpunchers, yet his name is hardly known in this country. John Chisum was born in Tennessee and grew up in East Texas. He was an empire builder if one ever lived. To read New Mexican history of the ’70s it would seem that he supported the territory—people either worked for John Chisum or stole cattle from him! In the days of his greatest power his herd numbered more than a hundred thousand head. The Long-rail and the Jingle-bob were known from Border to Border. He always kept open house; there any man could stay and eat his fill as long as he wished and no questions were asked him. Breakfast, dinner and supper places were set for twenty-six at the table in his big adobe house and generally all places were full. He was a figure of really heroic proportions, a builder of empires, yet he was by instinct merely a hard headed business man. Nothing dramatic about John Chisum, and maybe that’s why history has slighted him in favor of fruitless but flashing characters who blazed vain trails of blood and slaughter across the West. John Chisum never even buckled a gun on his hip in his life; he was a builder, not a destroyer. He did not even take the war-path in that feud known as the bloody Lincoln County war. Have you ever read of it? There’s drama! There’s epic and saga and the red tides of slaughter! Heroism, reckless courage, brute ferocity, blind idealism and bestial greed. And the peak of red drama was touched that bloody night in the shuddering little mountain town of Lincoln, when Murphy’s henchmen crouched like tigers in the night behind the flaming walls of McSween’s ’dobe dwelling. Let me try to draw that picture as it has been told and re-told in song and story in the fierce annals of the Southwest—the greatest fight of them all.

The night is forked with leaping tongues of crimson flame; the bullet-riddled ’dobe walls have crumbled; the fire has devoured the west wing, the front part of the building, and now licks greedily at the last room remaining of the east wing. The walls are beginning to crumble, the roof is falling. Hidden behind wall and stable, eager and blood-maddened, crouch the Murphy men, rifles at the ready. For three days and nights they have waged a fruitless battle with the defenders; now since treachery has fired the adobe house, their turn has come at last. They keep their eyes and rifle muzzles fixed hard on the single door. Before that door, in the red glare of the climbing flames lie McSween, Harvey Morris, Semora, Romero and Salazar in pools of their own blood, where the bullets struck them down as they rushed from the burning house; four dead, one—Salazar—badly wounded. O’Folliard, Skurlock, Gonzalez and Chavez have made the dash and somehow raced through that rain of lead and escaped in the darkness. Now is the peak of red drama, for in that blazing snare still lurks one man. The watchers grip their rifles until their knuckles show white. McSween’s right hand man has yet to dare that lead tipped gantlet—Billy the Kid, that slim nineteen year-old boy, with the steel grey eyes, the gay smile, the soft voice and the deadliness of a rattler. The flames roar and toss; soon he must leap through that door if he would not be burned like a rat in a trap. Bob Beckwith, whose bullet struck down McSween, curses between his teeth and trembles like a tensed hunting hound in his eagerness. He and his comrades, hidden by wall and semi-darkness, are comparatively safe—but no foe of the Kid’s is safe within gun-shot range. Scarce ten yards away the soaring flames will etch their prey mercilessly in their rifle sights—how can the best marksmen of the Southwest miss at that range? Bob Beckwith curses and his eyes dance with madness. He killed McSween; now to his everlasting glory he must kill Billy the Kid, and wipe out the stain of Murphy blood—Morton, Baker—victims of the Kid’s unerring eye and steady hand. A shower of sparks—the roof falls in with a roar; as if the happening hurled him from the building, a figure leaps through the door into the red glare. A mad rattle of rifle-fire volleys and the air is filled with singing lead. Through that howling hail of death the Kid races and his own guns are spurting jets of fire. Bob Beckwith falls across the wall, stone dead. Two more of the posse bellow as the Kid’s bullets mark them for life. Slugs rip through the Kid’s hat and clothes; death sings in the air about him—but he clears the wall and vanishes in the darkness. His time is not yet come and there still remain further red chapters to write in that red life. The Murphy men come from their coverts to roar their triumph, and while fiddles are brought and set going, the victors drink and shout and dance among the corpses in the light of the flaming embers, in a wild debauch of primitive exultation. But the Kid is fleeing unharmed through the night and he wastes no time in cursing his luck; plans for swift and gory vengeance occupy his full thoughts.

Truly the bloody Lincoln County war is the saga of the Southwest; glory and shame and murder and courage and cruelty and hate flaming into raw, red primitive drama, while through all stalked the gigantic shadow-shape of Billy the Kid, dominating all—as if that crimson feud were but the stage set for his brief stellar role—his star that flamed suddenly up and was as suddenly extinguished.

• • •

The Lincoln County war began in a cattle row. Thieves were stealing John Chisum’s cows and being acquitted in the courts. Dolan, Reilly and Murphy were merchants in the town of Lincoln and all-powerful. Murphy ordered his lawyer, McSween, to defend certain rustlers against the charge brought against them by Chisum. McSween refused and Murphy fired him. McSween was engaged by Chisum, prosecuted the rustlers and sent them up the river. Then McSween, Chisum and an Englishman named Tunstall went into partnership and McSween opened a big general store in Lincoln. He grabbed most of the trade and Murphy saw he was being ruined. McSween won a suit against him and for reasons too complicated and lengthy to narrate here, Murphy got out a writ of attachment against McSween’s store and Tunstall’s ranch—the last an obviously illegal movement, since Tunstall owned his ranch apart from the partnership and had nothing to do with the law suit. A posse of some twenty men rode over to attach Tunstall’s ranch. They overtook him in the mountains, shot him down in cold blood, beat out his brains with a jagged rock and left him lying beside his dead horse. That was the beginning of the Bloody Lincoln County War.

Billy the Kid was working for Tunstall as a cowboy. The Kid’s real name was William Bonney; he was born in the slums of New York, the son of Irish emigrants. He was brought west when a very young baby and raised in Kansas and New Mexico—mainly the latter. Pancho Villa killed his first man when he was fourteen; Billy went him one better; he was only twelve when he stabbed a big blacksmith to death in Silver City, New Mexico. That started him on the wild life. When he drifted into the Lincoln County country, he already had eleven or twelve killings to his name, though only nineteen years old—that isn’t counting Mexicans and Indians. No white man of that age who had any pretensions to gun-fame counted any but the regal warriors of his own race and color. The Kid had probably killed ten or fifteen men of brown and red skins, but he never considered them worthy of mention, though he was considerably proud of his white record.

The Kid was a small man—five feet eight inches, 140 pounds, perhaps—but he was very strong. But it was in his quickness of eye and hand, his perfect co-ordination that made him terrible. There was never a man more perfectly fitted for his trade.

The Kid had been living by gambling and rustling until he started working for Tunstall. At the time of the latter’s brutal murder, he was making an honest living as top-hand on the Rio Feliz rancho. Had the Englishman lived, the redder phase of the Kid’s life might well have never been written, for Billy liked Tunstall almost well enough to go straight for him.

But the murder of his friend drove him on the red trail of vengeance. McSween organized a posse to arrest the murderers, and had Dick Brewer, foreman of the murdered Englishman, sworn in as a special constable. They rode out after the killers and caught two of them in the Pecos Valley—Morton and Baker—former friends of the Kid. On the way back to Lincoln the Kid killed both of them, supposedly when they tried to escape. One of the posse, an old buffalo hunter named McCloskey, was killed by Frank McNab when he tried to protect the victims.

The next victim was a Murphy man named “Buckshot” Roberts, a Texas man whom it had once taken twenty-five Rangers to arrest. He was so full of lead that he couldn’t lift his rifle shoulder high, but shot from the hip. Thirteen McSween men cornered him at Blazer’s Mill on the Tularosa river, led by Dick Brewer and the Kid. Bowdre, the Kid’s closest friend, shot Roberts through and through, but before the old Texan fell he wounded Bowdre, John Middleton and George Coe, and as he lay dying he shot off the top of Dick Brewer’s skull.

The next episode took place in the town of Lincoln. Judge Bristol dared not open the regular session of court there and sent word for Sheriff Brady—a Murphy man—to open court and adjourn it as a matter of routine. On his way down the street to the courthouse, the Sheriff and his deputies were ambushed from an adobe wall by the Kid, Bowdre, O’Folliard—a Texas man—, Jim French, Frank McNab and Fred Wayte; and Sheriff Brady and Deputy Sheriff Hindman were killed. McSween was enraged by this cold blooded murder and threatened to prosecute Billy, which he probably would have done had events allowed. A very religious man was McSween and no more fitted for the role in which Fate had cast him, than a rabbit is fit to lead a pack of wolves. However, he felt that he was in the right, and did his best. Following the murder of the Sheriff, he elected—by force of his gunmen—a fellow named Copeland to the office. Murphy appealed to Governor Axtell, who removed Copeland and appointed George Peppin in his place.

Peppin immediately organized a posse and rode out after McSween’s men, killing Frank McNab. Then followed the famous battle of the McSween House. The clans met in Lincoln and in the fighting that followed, Morris, Romero, Semora, and McSween were killed on the McSween side, and Salazar and Gonzalez were wounded, while on the Murphy side, Crawford was killed by Fernando Herrera, and Lucio Montoya was wounded by the same man. Bob Beckwith was killed by the Kid who also wounded two others.

That was the end of the Lincoln County war, proper. Murphy had died, a broken man, a crownless monarch, and the rest were ready to throw down their guns and call it a draw. All except the Kid and his immediate followers. But from that point, Billy’s career was not that of an avenger, fighting a blood-feud. He reverted to his earlier days and became simply a gunman and an outlaw, subsisting by cattle-rustling. There was one other incident of the war, after peace had been declared; one George Chapman, a lawyer from Las Vegas, hired by Mrs. McSween, was murdered wantonly and in cold blood by a Murphy man, one Richardson, a Texan.

Emigration to that part of New Mexico had just about ceased. The tale of the Kid’s reign of terror spread clear back east of the Mississippi. President Hayes took the governorship away from Axtell and gave it to Wallace—who, by the way, while writing “Ben Hur” had to keep his shutters close drawn lest a bullet from the Kid’s six-shooter put a sudden termination to both book and author. John Chisum, the Kid’s former friend, and others got together and elected Pat Garrett Sheriff. Garrett was a friend of the Kid’s and knew his gang and his ways. He, himself, was Alabama born, Texas raised—a man of grim determination and cold steel nerves.

Meanwhile the Kid went his ways, rustling cattle and horses. One Joe Bernstein, clerk at the Mescalero agency, made the mistake of arguing with the Kid over some horses Billy was about to drive off. A Jew can be very offensive in dispute. Billy shot him down in cold blood, remarking casually that the fellow was only a Jew.

Several times Garrett and his man-hunters thought they had their hands on Billy but he eluded them. Once they cornered him at a roadhouse, but he killed Deputy Sheriff Jim Carlisle—again in cold blood—and escaped. At Fort Sumner he killed one Joe Grant, a Texas bad man who was after the reward offered for the Kid. But Garrett was on his trail unceasingly. The Kid’s best friends were Bowdre and O’Folliard. At Fort Sumner Garrett killed O’Folliard and at Tivan Arroyo, or Stinking Spring, he killed Bowdre and captured the Kid.

Billy was tried in Mesilla and sentenced to be hanged for the murder of Brady and Hindman. He was confined in Lincoln and kept chained, watched day and night by Deputy Sheriffs Bell and Ollinger. He killed them both and got clean away. But love for a Mexican girl drew him back to Fort Sumner when he might have gotten clean away into Old Mexico—

I think the very night must have ceased to breathe as the Kid came from Saval Gutierrez’s house through the shadows. Surely the nightwind ceased to rustle the pinon leaves and a breathless stillness, pregnant with doom lay over the shadowy mountains and the dim deserts beneath the stars. Surely the quivering mesquites, the sleeping lizards, the blind cactus, the winds whispering down the canyons and the ’dobe walls that glimmered in the starlight, surely they sensed the passing of a figure already legendary and heroic. Aye, surely the night was hushed and brooding as the Southwest’s most famous son went blind to his doom. He crossed the yard, came onto the porch of Pete Maxwell’s house. He was going after beef, for Celsa Gutierrez to cook for a midnight supper. His butcher knife was in his hand, his gun in his scabbard. Pete Maxwell was his friend; he expected no foes. On the porch he met one of Garrett’s deputies, but neither recognized the other. The Kid, wary as a wolf, flashed his gun, though, and backed into Pete’s room which opened on the porch. There he halted short—in the shadows he made out vaguely a dim form that should not be there—someone he knew instinctively was neither Pete nor one of Pete’s servants. Where was that steel trap will of the Kid’s that had gotten him out of so many desperate places? Why did he hold his fire then, he who was so quick to shoot at the least hint of suspicion? Azrael’s hand was on him and his hour was come. He made his last mistake, leaping back into the doorway where he was clearly limned against the sky. He snapped a fierce enquiry—and then Death bellowed in the dark from the jaws of Pat Garrett’s six-shooter. They carried the Kid into a vacant carpenter shop and laid him on a bench, while the Mexican women screamed and tore their long black hair and flung their white arms wildly against the night, and the Mexican men gathered in scowling, fiercely muttering groups.

The Kid was twenty-one when he was killed, and he had killed twenty-one white men. He was left handed and used, mainly, a forty-one caliber Colt double action six shooter, though he was a crack shot with a rifle, too. That he was a cold blooded murderer there is no doubt, but he was loyal to his friends, honest in his way, truthful, possessed of a refinement in thought and conversation rare even in these days, and no man ever lived who was braver than he. He belonged in an older, wilder age of blood-feud and rapine and war.

• • •

Of Lincoln Walter Noble Burns, author of “The Saga of Billy the Kid” has said: “The village went to sleep at the close of the Lincoln County war and has never awakened again. If a railroad never comes to link it with the faraway world, it may slumber on for a thousand years. You will find Lincoln now just as it was when Murphy and McSween and Billy the Kid knew it. The village is an anachronism; a sort of mummy town. . . .”

I can offer no better description. A mummy town. Nowhere have I ever come face to face with the past more vividly; nowhere has that past become so realistic, so understandable. It was like stepping out of my own age, into the fragment of an elder age, that had somehow survived. In Lincoln I felt the Past, not as dusty, meaningless names, and the outworn repetition of moldy heroisms, but as a living, breathing reality; it was as if a mythical giant, thought dead and forgotten, had suddenly reared his awesome head and titan shoulders above the surrounding mountains and looked at us with living eyes.

Lincoln is a haunted place; it is a dead town; yet it lives with a life that died fifty years ago.

It stands on a lap of land jutting from the base of the mountains that form the right wall of the Bonito Valley. To the left the Rio Bonito ripples along the canyon floor. The ground slopes down from the site of the town, to the river bed. Down that slope Billy the Kid dropped, with his guns blazing death, on that red summer night in 1878, when the flames of McSween’s burning house shone crimson on the bodies of its owner and his friends where they had fallen before the bullet-raked door.

The houses, adobe mostly, straggle on either side of the long, crooked street. Our entrance into the town was peculiarly undramatic. Straggling clumps of trees hid it from our view until we had entered the eastern end of the street. We drove on, slowly, past the reconstructed torreon—the ancient round tower where the early settlers fought off the Apaches—past the old Montana House dance hall—adorned by a sign which stated that “Billy the Kid Cut His Initials on This House”—past the garage which is Lincoln’s one reflection of modernity—past the stores where descendants of the Kid’s friends and enemies lounged in the growing heat of the day—past the tavern which stands where the McSween house stood—we were both looking for one thing—the old courthouse whence Billy made the most dramatic escape ever made in the Southwest. We rounded a crook in the meandering street and it burst upon us like the impact of a physical blow. There was no mistaking it. We did not—at least I did not—need the sight of the sign upon it to identify it. I had seen its picture—how many times I do not know. I do not know how many times, and in what myriad different ways and occasions I have heard the tale of Billy’s escape. It is the most often repeated, the most dramatic of all the tales of Southwestern folk-lore. When you hear a story long enough and often enough, it becomes like a legend. Yet I will not say that the sight of that old house was like meeting a legend face to face; there was nothing fabulous or legendary about the actuality. The realism was too potent, too indisputable to admit any feeling of mythology. If the Kid himself had stepped out of that old house, it would not have surprized me at all.

We explored the exterior, found it locked, and went across the street to the La Paloma saloon, which bears a sign that claims existence in the Kid’s day. The owner is one Ramon Maes, grandson of Lucio Montoya, “Murphyfs sharpshooter” as he told us with pride—a supple, well-built man, tall for a Mexican and broad-shouldered, with a thin-nostrilled Mountain Indian look about his face. The name of Montoya is woven into the Kid’s saga. He took part in the three-day fight in which McSween was killed; he lay on the mountain that commanded the Montana House, with Crawford, firing from behind a boulder. Fernando Herrera, firing from the Montana House with a buffalo gun, killed Crawford, and broke Montoya’s leg. The range was nine hundred yards, but Herrera was a crack shot. All day Montoya lay in the glare of the sun, with his splintered leg, until, when night fell, his friends dared a sortie to get him. I did not speak of this to his grandson. To him the feud seemed like something that happened yesterday. He was very courteous and eager to point out interesting spots, and answer our questions, but when he spoke of the fighting and the killing, a red flame came into his eyes. The descendants of old enemies live peacefully side by side in the little village; yet I found myself wondering if the old feud were really dead, or if the embers only smoldered, and might be blown to flame by a careless breath. Maes gave us the key to the old courthouse, which once was Murphy’s store. It is used as a storeplace for junk now, and there is talk, we were told, of tearing it down to build a community hall. It should be preserved. When it is torn down one of the landmarks of Southwestern history will be gone. We wandered about the old building, entered the room where the Kid was confined—they knew no jail would hold him, so they kept him imprisoned in the courthouse itself. Strange how familiar everything seemed to me, though I had never been within one hundred miles of Lincoln before. Yet it seemed to me that I was going over territory traversed a hundred times before. We tried to re-create the situation that April morning in 1881 when the Kid, tricking his captor, J. Bell, off-guard by a game of monte, snatched his pistol and fought his way to liberty. We followed the route through the rooms and hallway by which Billy marched his prisoner, intending to lock him into the armory. We saw the stair where Bell made his desperate break, and the hole in the wall at the foot where the Kid’s bullet had lodged, after tearing its way through Bell’s heart. Bell was a Texas man, by the way—Dallas County. We stood at the window from which the Kid watched Bob Ollinger run across the street at the sound of the shot; the same window from which he poured eighteen buckshot into Ollinger’s breast from the man’s own shotgun. Then we went out onto the balcony from which Billy hurled the fragments of the gun with a curse at the corpse of his victim—and I could close my eyes and imagine that scene, the livid, snarling, flame-eyed figure of the killer, tense with the hate that then broke its bounds of iron control for the first and only time in his whole life—the crumpled corpse sprawled in the dust at the corner of the house, the stiffening fingers spread like claws and digging into the earth with their last convulsion—the men on the porch of the saloon and of the hotel, standing frozen, silent and motionless as statues, like spectators watching a play. Something, too, like men watching a blood-mad tiger and fearful to draw a deep breath lest the dripping fangs and talons strike in their direction. Presently, glancing away along the dusty road, it would not have seemed at all strange had we seen a lithe, pantherish figure on a mustang, in the garb of other days, with fetters still on his ankles and a rifle in each hand, riding westward toward Bacca Canyon—so close-linked in Lincoln seem Yesterday and Today.

From the old courthouse we went to the inn, which stands on the site of the old McSween house. There everything is changed. I could not recreate in my mind the climax of that three-day battle. The only thing that is as it was then is the slope of the land from the edge of the yard down to the river—and on that slope the thickets which sheltered the Kid as he ran are gone. But we learned that the bodies of McSween and most of his companions lie close to where they fell; behind a stable now, unmarked, trampled over by burros and cattle.

I have never felt anywhere the exact sensations Lincoln aroused in me—a sort of horror predominating. If there is a haunted spot on this hemisphere, then Lincoln is haunted. I felt that if I slept the night there, the ghosts of the slain would stalk through my dreams. The town itself seemed like a bleached, grinning skull. There was a feel of skeletons in the earth underfoot. And that, I understand, is no flight of fancy. Every now and then somebody ploughs up a human skull. So many men died in Lincoln. Stand with me a moment on the balcony of the old courthouse. Yonder, to the east, stands the old tower about which, in the past, waves of painted braves washed like a red tide. Their bodies littered the earth like bright-colored leaves when that tide broke. Not once but many times. Yonder in the dusty street men fell when the Horrels rode from Ruidoso one night—Texas men, with a ruthless hate for all Latins impelling them—there, before that squat-built store, Constable Martinez died beneath their bullets, and with him his deputies Gillam and Warner. There, too, fell Bill Horrel. And in that adobe house that was a dance hall then, guns blazed when the Horrels came again, the death of their brother rankling, to stretch four men and a woman dead on the floor. That was before the Kid’s time. Come down the years a little. Behind us stands the stair at the foot of which Bell tumbled, with the Kid’s bullet through his heart. There at the corner of the house Bob Ollinger fell, with his breast mangled. Yonder, to the east, you can see among the shade trees, the roof of the building which stands where the McSween store stood. A few feet beyond that point Sheriff Brady and his deputy Hindman were struck down by the bullets that rained upon them from the ambush the Kid and his warriors had planned. Brady fell dead there, but when the Kid took his guns from his body, he put another bullet through his head just to make sure. Hindman, shot in the back, lay in the street for half an hour, moaning for water. None dared fetch it to him. It might be construed by the killers as an act of hostility. Peaceable people kept within their doors, clenching their teeth against the agony-edged groans of the dying man. At last Port Stockton, himself a desperado, tending bar at the time, unbuckled his gun-belt and laid his weapons on the bar, filled his sombrero with water and stalked forth, his jaw set stubbornly. The skin must have crawled between his shoulders as he felt the eyes of Billy the Kid on him, opaque, passionless eyes, faintly questioning, weighing his action without emotion, without mercy. Stockton bent and set the brim of his hat to the dying man’s lips, while his life hung on the crook of the Kid’s trigger finger. But Billy did not fire; Hindman drank and fell back dead. And Stockton went his way unmolested along the trail that led ultimately to his bloody death in Durango. The dusty street stretches still and sleepy in the hot sunshine before us; there is a bird singing in a cottonwood, and a woman calls her child in petulant Spanish. But once that street was a stage for violent and bloody drama. Turn your head now and look at the mountain that rises behind the town. There on the bare, rock-littered slope Crawford and Montoya crouched that hot summer day so long ago. There Crawford died, pitching headlong from the ledge where he crouched, to roll down the long slope like a rag doll. Perhaps he did not die instantly. Men say death came slowly to him, all through the long, hot day as he lay groaning with the agony of a broken back. On the ledge above his comrade Montoya lay with his broken leg. Turn again to the dusty street of Lincoln and look at the inn, which stands where the McSween house stood. Men died in the backyard there—Harvey Morris, Francisco Semora, Vincente Romero, McSween himself, Bob Beckwith. And yonder in the road before the site of the old house George Chapman, the Las Vegas lawyer, was killed by Bill Campbell, one of Murphy’s Texan gunmen. No one dared go forth at the sound of the shot; they peered from their windows and saw the body of a man lying in the street, but until daylight came none knew who it was.

Lincoln is a haunted town—yet it is not merely the fact of knowing so many men died there that makes it haunted, to me. I have visited many spots where death was dealt whole-sale: the Alamo, for instance; the battle-field of Goliad; La Bahia, where Fannin’s men were massacred; Fort Griffin; Fort McKavett; the hanging-tree in the courthouse yard at Goliad where so many men kicked out their lives. But none of those places ever affected me just as Lincoln did. My conception of them was not tinged with a definite horror as with Lincoln. I think I know why. Burns, in his splendid book that narrates the feud, missed one dominant element entirely; and this is the geographical, or perhaps I should say topographical effect on the inhabitants. I think geography is the reason for the unusually savage and bloodthirsty manner in which the feud was fought out, a savagery that has impressed everyone who has ever made an intelligent study of the feud and the psychology behind it. The valley in which Lincoln lies is isolated from the rest of the world. Vast expanses of desert and mountains separate it from the rest of humanity--deserts too barren to support human life. The people in Lincoln lost touch with the world. Isolated as they were, their own affairs, their relationship with one another, took on an importance and significance out of proportion to their actual meaning. Thrown together too much, jealousies and resentments rankled and grew, feeding upon themselves, until they reached monstrous proportions and culminated in those bloody atrocities which startled even the tough West of that day. Visualize that narrow valley, hidden away among the barren hills, isolated from the world, where its inhabitants inescapably dwelt side by side, hating and being hated, and at last killing and being killed. In such restricted, isolated spots, human passions smolder and burn, feeding on the impulses which give them birth, until they reached a point that can hardly be conceived by dwellers in more fortunte spots. It was with a horror I frankly confess that I visualized the reign of terror that stalked that blood-drenched valley; day and night was a tense waiting, waiting, until the thunder of the sudden guns broke the tension for a moment and men died like flies—and then silence followed, and the tension shut down again. No man who valued his life dared speak; when a shot rang out at night and a human being cried out in agony, no one dared open the door and see who had fallen. I visualized people caught together like rats, fighting in terror and agony and bloodshed; going about their work by day with a shut mouth and an averted eye, momentarily expecting a bullet in the back; and at night lying shuddering behind locked doors, trembling in expectation of the stealthy footstep, the hand on the bolt, the sudden blast of lead through the windows. Feuds in Texas were generally fought out in the open, over wide expanses of country. But the nature of the Bonito Valley determined the nature of the feud—narrow, concentrated, horrible. I have heard of people going mad in isolated places; I believe the Lincoln County War was tinged with madness.

(I was originally going to use notes and correct Howard’s description of the Lincoln County War, but I gave up halfway through the second paragraph as I realised that my notes would be longer than his story. And in worse language, too. . . . Suffice to say that almost everything above is wrong in it’s facts, apparently in large part because Howard based it on Walter Noble Burns [there is a reason his version was called “The Saga of Billy the Kid”] and Pat Garrett’s self-glorifying tale [which was actually ghostwritten for him]. If you’re interested, I recommend pretty much any book written since the 1980s for a more truthful description of events.)

“Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War”

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