Billy the Kid Read online

  From that meeting sprang a plot to rid the county of William Brady. Whether McSween stated that he wanted Brady out of the way, implied it, or unintentionally left that impression with his listeners is not known. At least one heard him offer a reward to anyone who killed the sheriff. In any event, as they rode up the trail to Lincoln the Regulators laid plans for assassinating Brady. On the Blackwater the party split, the Anglos sending the Hispanics off to San Patricio because their sensibilities might be injured by the slaying of a man who had a Hispanic wife.3

  That McSween could have urged such a foolish act seems preposterous. It would undermine his contention to be acting in behalf of the law, and almost certainly it would offend the substantial body of public opinion that had so far supported him. Moreover, Brady himself visited the Chisum ranch on March 28, about the same time as the Regulators, and let it be known that he felt confident of McSween’s appearance at court and would not try to find and arrest him.4

  But McSween had no confidence in Brady’s assurances. Court convened on April 1, and McSween feared that before he could even reach the courthouse Brady would arrest him if given the chance. In Brady’s jail, McSween felt certain, the arrest warrant would turn out to be a death warrant.5

  McSween’s state of mind may well have produced such fevered imaginings. The civil suit, the criminal charge, the murder of Tunstall, the crisis in his finances, and his plight as a fugitive from the law had left him demoralized and distraught, possibly muddying his thinking and impairing his judgment. Sue McSween, a tough and determined woman, may also have urged forceful measures.

  During the night of March 31, the assassins prepared their ambush. Six Regulators posted themselves in the corral behind the Tunstall store. An adobe wall with a gate for wagons projected eastward from the rear of the building, hiding the corral from the street. The executioners were Billy Bonney, Frank McNab, John Middleton, Fred Waite, Jim French, and Henry Brown. Rob Widenmann would come out the back door shortly before the fatal moment—to feed Tunstall’s dog, as he later explained. Most people believed that he was part of the group too, and anti-McSween newspapers later contemptuously labeled him “the dog-feeder.”

  About nine o’clock on the morning of April 1, Sheriff Brady walked down the street from the Dolan store, accompanied by deputies Billy Mathews, George Hindman, George Peppin, and John Long. Mathews, of course, had headed the attachment posse, and Hindman had ridden with Morton’s subposse. Peppin was one of the men who had occupied the Tunstall store in February. Reverend Ealy and his family, living temporarily in the McSween house, watched the party make its way down the street. Brady paused to talk briefly with a woman, then hurried to catch up with his companions.6

  The sheriff and his aides were going to the courthouse to post notice that a clerical error had fixed the wrong day for the convening of district court. The appointed day was not April 1, as had been announced, but April 8. After accomplishing this purpose, Brady and the deputies turned back up the street to the west and headed for the Dolan store.7

  When the lawmen drew opposite the Tunstall corral, the concealed gunmen rose from behind the wall, leveled their Winchesters, and opened a rapid fire. A storm of bullets swept the street, striking down Brady and, behind him, George Hindman. At least a dozen bullets ripped through the sheriff. One struck Hindman, who fell wounded and crying for water. As Mathews, Peppin, and Long raced for the cover of a house across the street, Ike Stockton emerged from his saloon, pulled Hindman to his feet, and started to help him to safety. Another bullet finished the deputy. Still farther across the street, Justice of the Peace Wilson lay hurt and bewildered in his garden. While hoeing onions, he had caught a wild round through the fleshy part of both buttocks.

  After a few moments of silence, Billy Bonney and Jim French leaped the corral wall and sprinted into the street. Backed by French, Bonney stooped over Brady and picked up his Winchester rifle. At this moment Billy Mathews, watching from the window of the Cisneros house beyond, took aim and fired. The bullet punched through Billy’s thigh and zipped through French’s thigh as well. The Kid dropped the rifle, and the two hobbled back to the protection of the corral.

  This reckless deed has usually been seen as no more than an attempt to steal Brady’s rifle. That may indeed have been part of the purpose, for Billy would have wanted to retrieve the rifle Brady had taken from him on February 20 or at least get a replacement. More likely, considering McSween’s preoccupation with the arrest warrant and attachment writ, the daring dash was aimed mainly at recovering these documents. Frank Coe later declared that the Kid “ran to get the papers from Brady.” If so, Mathews’s bullet intervened, and the papers remained in the sheriff’s pocket.8

  Although the firing alerted the entire town, an eerie solitude fell over the scene. Citizens cowered in their homes while the assassins and the deputies remained warily behind cover. Carlota Baca, the young daughter of Saturnino Baca, had been playing with dolls on the top floor of the torreon. She looked into the street below, then hurried next door to tell her mother.

  “Oh God, run and see, it may be papa,” screamed Juanita Baca.

  Carlota darted into the street and bent over Sheriff Brady, probably the first to venture into the open after the shooting.9

  Billy’s wound did not immobilize him, but Jim French’s was serious enough to require medical attention. Reverend Ealy was not only a preacher but also a doctor—a “medical missionary,” as he styled himself. French therefore slipped out of the back of the corral and made his way next door to the McSween house, where the Ealys admitted him.

  “He came walking into our back door,” Ealy remembered. “The ball passed through his left thigh. I drew a silk handkerchief through the wound, bound it up and he was taken charge of by Sam Corbet [Tunstall’s former clerk].”10

  The Regulators seemed in no hurry to leave town, and Brady’s deputies showed little interest in provoking a gun battle. Finally the murderers rode leisurely off to the hills while the deputies loosed a long-range fire at them. Almost nonchalantly, John Middleton dismounted, seated himself on the ground, took deliberate aim with his elbow resting on his knee, and returned the fire.11

  With the departure of the Regulators, the deputies grew bolder. George Peppin took charge and, hardly knowing what to expect, sent an appeal for help to Captain Purington, who showed up in the afternoon with a cavalry detachment.

  Meantime, Peppin and his men followed a trail of blood to McSween’s back door. Three times they searched the house without finding Jim French. As Reverend Ealy later explained, “I learned that Sam Corbet had sawed a hole through the floor under a bed and as there was not any cellar under the house laid him on a blanket on his back with 2 revolvers in his hands.”12 That night, after the excitement died down, French slipped out of town, possibly with Billy’s help.

  Lincoln boiled with shock and excitement. Adding to the turmoil, shortly after the shooting, Mac and Sue McSween arrived, as expected, with John Chisum in his carriage. Learning that he was a week early for court, McSween went to the home of Isaac Ellis, at his store on the eastern edge of town. There, backed by a squad of soldiers, Peppin produced the arrest warrant that Brady had carried. More fearful than ever of falling into the toils of county lawmen, McSween answered that Brady’s death deprived Peppin of his authority as a deputy. Finally, however, McSween agreed to place himself in military rather than county custody, and the officer with Peppin, Lieutenant George W. Smith, assented. Later, Captain Purington proved less anxious to interfere with Peppin, but at length, possibly perceiving that McSween would not survive for a week in the Lincoln jail, he agreed to hold McSween at Fort Stanton until court convened.13

  Whatever had led to the Brady assassination—McSween’s wishes, a Regulator plot, simply an opportunity of the moment—the deed could hardly have been more damaging to McSween’s interests. The code sanctioned killing for cause, but here there seemed insufficient cause. To gun down a generally respected lawman from ambush disgusted peo
ple inclined to tolerate almost any measure of violence or homicide that could be rationalized. Heretofore, public opinion had largely favored McSween. Now, it held both sides to be equally evil, lawless, and murderous.

  In the Brady slaying, Billy Bonney again demonstrated the daring and aggressiveness that had marked his part in the exploits of the Martínez posse on February 20. Tradition credits Billy with taking the lead in firing on Brady, whereas McNab is generally thought to have put the first bullet into Hindman, against whom he supposedly bore a grudge. The second and fatal shot to Hindman almost certainly was fired by Fred Waite.14 Though unprovable, the tradition, so far as it touches Billy, is consistent with his rash bolt into the street to Brady’s body. Despite an occasional flamboyant feat of this kind, however, he remained essentially one of a group of rugged, heedless warriors—by now a peer but hardly a chieftain.

  Following on the execution of Morton, Baker, and McCloskey, the slaying of Brady revealed another truth about Billy and his friends: they were willing to take human life in circumstances that violated even the lax ethical code of the time and place. Even more than the killing of Morton, Baker, and McCloskey, even more indeed than the slaying of Tunstall, Brady’s death was cold-blooded murder.

  Yet the assassins looked on themselves as soldiers in a righteous war and on the slaying as justified by the code of war rather than the code of the frontier. Years later Eugene Manlove Rhodes, a gifted writer who traced his origins to the New Mexico frontier, perceived the distinction. “It has at last penetrated my thick old head that the Lincoln County War was WAR,” he wrote. “Ghastly but no worse than any war.” Billy the Kid and his friends had gunned down Brady and Hindman from ambush. “In war this would have been brilliant strategy, generalship, fame-building.” All war, he noted, was murder. “Chisum and Murphy men were doing exactly what the Allies and the Germans did; what the damyanks and johnnyrebs did—nothing more or less.”15

  Although overstated, the parallel captures the state of mind with which Billy and his comrades approached both the ambush of Brady and their further campaigns against the enemy.

  7

  The Shootout

  Like most of his neighbors on the Ruidoso, Andrew L. Roberts had a murky past. It may have included a stint as a hunter for Buffalo Bill Cody, and it may have involved a shootout with the Texas Rangers. He rarely talked of his past and minded his own business, but the load of buckshot he carried in his right shoulder suggested that he could be a scrapper if pressed. The wound prevented him from raising his arm above the waist, which forced him to do his firing, rifle and pistol, from the hip. He was short and stocky and preferred a mule to a horse. He ran a few cows on the upper Ruidoso, where he had made friends with Frank Coe, and also worked occasionally for Jimmy Dolan at his branch store at South Fork, near Blazer’s Mills.

  As Dolan employees, Buckshot Roberts and George Hindman had been tapped by Billy Mathews for posse service when Mathews arrived at the South Fork store on February 12, 1878. They rode with him to the Tunstall ranch on the next day and again on February 18. Roberts had been at the ranch with Mathews and others when Morton’s subposse cut down Tunstall, but his name had wound up on the arrest warrant issued by Justice Wilson. That Governor Axtell had in effect invalidated that much-worn document, as well as Dick Brewer’s commission as special constable, had not discouraged the Regulators from their self-appointed mission.

  Roberts wanted no part of the troubles that had engulfed Lincoln County and had singled him out as a target for the other side. He sold his ranch to someone in Santa Fe and awaited only the arrival of the payment before clearing out of the county altogether. That the check might be in the mail carrier’s pouch brought him over the mountain to South Fork on the morning of April 4.1

  Cradled by forested slopes rising on both sides of a narrow valley, Blazer’s Mills spread along the north bank of the upper Tularosa River, here a mountain stream about ten feet wide. Over the span of a decade, Dr. Joseph H. Blazer, a former dentist, had emerged as the leading citizen of the little frontier community. The surrounding Indian reservation had come later, and whether Blazer’s property belonged to him or the U.S. government remained an unresolved issue. Despite the standoff, Blazer got along reasonably well with the Indian agent, Frederick C. Godfroy. Indeed, Blazer had leased his big house to the government for use as the agent’s residence.

  This house, a two-story adobe fortress surmounted by a cupola, faced the river about two hundred yards upstream from the sawmill and gristmill. Agent Godfroy and his family occupied the house and occasionally took in lodgers. Mrs. Godfroy cooked meals for travelers. Blazer, who lived with his family in another dwelling immediately to the east, maintained an office in one room on the northwest corner of the big house. A shed tacked to the rear housed the Blazer store.

  Mounted on his mule and trailing a packhorse, Buckshot Roberts showed up at the big house on the morning of April 4. He hoped to receive his money from the mail carrier due that day, he explained to Dr. Blazer, then continue to Las Cruces. He had best move on, Blazer said. An Indian had just reported a band of men on the road to the west. They had killed a steer from the agency beef herd the night before, said the Indian, and were headed east. Suspecting these men to be Regulators and wanting no gunplay on his property, Blazer urged Roberts to leave.

  Why the Regulators had come west of the divide, beyond the theater of war, remains unclear. They themselves dropped some vague explanations about men they wanted to arrest being reported on the Tularosa. Lawrence Murphy furnished another explanation when he alerted the military at Fort Stanton that the Regulators had ridden west to ambush the judicial party traveling from Mesilla to hold court in Lincoln. A massacre of the judge, the district attorney, the clerk of the court, and other officials would have been as reckless as the murder of Sheriff Brady, but the tip was taken seriously enough to prompt dispatch of a cavalry escort to meet the supposed victims.2

  Whatever the Regulators’ mission, there they were on the Tularosa only two days after the murder of Sheriff Brady. Dick Brewer had fourteen men, including the Coes, Middleton, McNab, Scurlock, Brown, Waite, and Bowdre. Even Billy Bonney and Jim French, surely sitting their saddles in pain as a result of the bullet Billy Mathews had drilled through their thighs, rode with their fellow subscribers to the “iron clad.”3 They reined in at Blazer’s Mills late on the morning of April 4, herded their mounts into a corral surrounded by a high board fence across the river from the big house, and asked Mrs. Godfroy to fix them dinner.

  Roberts, meantime, had heeded Dr. Blazer’s appeal and headed west, following a mountain trail rather than the main road to avoid the Regulators. He saw them riding back up the road but later also spotted the mail buckboard laboring up the grade toward Blazer’s Mills. Turning back in hopes of getting his check, he scouted the little settlement from a distance. He saw no sign of the Regulators, whose horses were hidden behind Blazer’s corral fence, and assumed that they had ridden on to the east. Tying his packhorse to a tree, he prodded his mule across the valley to pick up his mail.

  John Middleton lounged on guard outside while the Regulators ate inside. Seeing Roberts approach, he went in and reported a “mighty well-armed man” riding up on a mule and said he had heard the man give his name as Roberts. Brewer said, “I have a warrant for Roberts.” Frank Coe, who knew Roberts, went outside alone to talk with him.4

  Too late Roberts discovered his blunder. He had tied his mule at the southwest corner of the house and, respecting a rule of Dr. Blazer’s, draped his pistol belt over the saddle horn. Winchester carbine in hand, he was making his way toward the front door when Frank Coe emerged. The two shook hands, then walked around the corner of the house to the west to have a talk. Impatiently, Brewer and his comrades waited to see if Frank could persuade Roberts to surrender.

  Frank found Buckshot as stubborn as reputed. Sitting on an uncovered plank porch in front of the door to Dr. Blazer’s office, Coe tried to talk his friend into giving up.
/>   “No,” answered Roberts, “never alive. The Kid is with you and he will kill me on sight.”5

  “No,” said Coe, “give me your gun and we’ll walk around to the crowd. I’ll stand by you.”

  “We talked for half an hour,” remembered Coe. “I begged him to surrender, but the answer was no, no, no. I think he was the bravest man I ever met—not a bit excited, knowing too that his life was in his hands.”

  Brewer could contain his impatience no longer. He sent a handful of his men storming around the house to end the stalemate. Backed by Middleton and George Coe, Charley Bowdre appeared immediately in front of the pair.

  “Roberts, throw up your hands,” he yelled.

  “No,” replied Buckshot, as he rose to his feet and brought his carbine up to his hip.

  Both fired at the same time. Roberts’s bullet smashed Bowdre’s buckle and dropped his pistol belt to the ground, then ricocheted into George Coe’s right hand, mangling his thumb and trigger finger. Bowdre’s bullet punched through Roberts’s stomach just above the hips. “The dust flew from his clothes from both sides,” noted Frank Coe, who had leapt to get out of the line of fire.

  Brewer’s other men dashed into the fray as Roberts, grievously wounded, backed into the doorway of Dr. Blazer’s office while pumping his carbine from the hip. “I never saw a man that could handle a Winchester as fast as he could,” marveled Frank Coe later. A bullet thudded into John Middleton’s chest and lodged in a lung. Another hit the barrel of Doc Scurlock’s holstered pistol and coursed down his leg, “burning him like a hot iron.”6 Still another almost got Billy Bonney. “The Kid slipped in between the wall and a wagon,” recalled Frank Coe. “Roberts took a shot at him, just shaved his arm. Kid backed out as it was too hot there for him.”7