The Saga of Billy the Kid/Chapter 12

Hatreds die hard, and peace came slowly. The peace that began tentatively to settle over Lincoln was like a hair-trigger, innocuous in itself but needing only the slightest pressure of a finger to render it deadly.

Murphy was not alive to enjoy the triumph of his faction. He died in Santa Fé shortly before the battle which ended McSween’s life and hope of power at one blow. It was perhaps as well so. The war had ruined Murphy. His properties had been mortgaged to pay his fighting men. His creditors closed out his cattle ranch, his merchandising business, and his hotel, and the Big Store became the courthouse. Lord of the Mountains in his time, rich, wielding immense power, he died practically penniless.

But the war had also wrecked the financial fortunes of McSween. He left little to his widow but a heritage of hate. The vendetta, in fact, had swept over all Lincoln County like a pestilence, leaving ruin and desolation in its wake. Families had been impoverished, farms had remained untilled, business had come to a standstill. General bankruptcy was the price paid for rapine and murder. With Murphy and McSween both dead, their factions gradually disintegrated. War must be financed and there was no longer any money to keep it going.

General Lew Wallace came to New Mexico as governor ​in August, 1878, determined to carry out President Hayes's orders and end the feud.

"When I reached Santa Fé," he wrote, "I found the law was practically a nullity and had no way of asserting itself. The insurrection seemed to be confined to one county which strangely enough was called Lincoln. I received statements of judges that they dared not hold court in certain districts. The United States Marshal told me he had a large number of warrants which he dared not serve and he could not find deputies rash enough to attempt service when they knew their lives would pay the penalty. The military commander at Fort Stanton sent me a list of murders that had been committed in that part of the country. I forwarded these combined statements to President Hayes."

Governor Wallace, in his investigation of the Lincoln County situation, acquainted himself with both sides of the story through conferences with Murphy and McSween men who met him in the capital. Mrs. McSween, through her lawyer, George Chapman of Las Vegas, prepared a number of affidavits which she forwarded to the governor, giving the details of the burning of her home, the murder of her husband, and Colonel Dudley's actions while in Lincoln with his troops. Sheriff Peppin and other Murphy leaders also sent affidavits. Both John Chisum and U.S. Commissioner Angell called on Governor Wallace and endeavoured to give him a clear understanding of the vendetta, its causes, battles, and present status. However, with conflicting statements before him, clear understanding of so complex a problem was difficult.

Governor Wallace had grave doubts from the first as to his ability to end the feud. But that was the specific problem given to him to solve by President Hayes, and ​he set himself to the task. His first step was to issue a proclamation of amnesty to all who had taken part in the war, except those under indictment for crime, on the understanding that they lay down their arms. This action was, to some extent, effective. There was practically no more fighting nor, for that matter, had there been since the big battle in Lincoln; but nothing the governor could do could terminate the bitter hatreds the war had kindled or prevent the deadly spirit of the feud from smouldering dangerously for years.

Billy the Kid ignored the governor’s proclamation. Since the death of McSween, there was no faction leader to claim his allegiance, but he had hatreds of his own and a score of vengeance still to pay off. He had, moreover, acquired the habit of outlawry. He doubtless had no desire for any other mode of life but he believed, also, that his enemies would kill him if he returned to peaceful pursuits. He continued in arms, and since there was no longer any McSween-faction exchequer upon which to draw, he lived by gambling and the wholesale rustling of livestock. The men who remained with him were Charlie Bowdre, Tom O’Folliard, Jim French, John Middleton, Hendry Brown, Fred Wayte, and Doc Skurlock. They made their rendezvous for a while in the mountains near Fort Stanton.

Governor Wallace determined to have a personal interview with Billy the Kid and use his powers of persuasion to induce him to leave off fighting and lawlessness and settle down to useful citizenship. With this purpose in mind, he drove across country from Santa Fé by way of Fort Stanton to Lincoln.

As Governor Wallace sat with General Hatch, Juan Patron, and a group of army officers on the porch of the ​Ellis House, a lone horseman appeared riding slowly toward them through Lincoln street.

"Here comes the Kid," remarked Juan Patron.

Governor Wallace was moved to quick interest. He viewed the picturesque figure of the young outlaw with fixed attention. The Kid carried a rifle across his saddlebows, and if the governor's eves had been keen enough, they might have noted that the gun was cocked. The Kid had ridden into Lincoln from the west by the Fort Stanton road and came on at a running walk past the Murphy store, headquarters of his enemies, without so much as turning his head to glance at a group of men lounging there who eyed him with cold hatred. Having hitched his horse in front of the Ellis House, he walked briskly up the path to the porch, his rifle in his hand, his six-shooter at his belt. Governor Wallace rose.

"So you are Billy the Kid," said the governor to the outlaw.

"I am," said the outlaw to the governor.

The two men shook hands. In appearance they were as much alike as a drawing room and a corral. Veteran of the Mexican and Civil wars, author, statesman, and diplomat, Governor Wallace had an air of scholarly distinction which his pince-nez glasses served to emphasize. His face was intellectual, his hair, moustache, and imperial, iron-gray. Over against this figure of the polished gentleman was the sunburned youth with lean, hard face, shrewd, cold eyes, a red bandanna knotted around his neck, and tricked out in spruce new cowboy trappings.

It was a meeting, not so much of two men, as of two worlds. They clasped hands across a gulf of ages. One was a product of culture and refinement; the other of a rough frontier; one finished, the other primitive; one ​constructive, the other obstructive; one a representative of the progressive present, the other of a dying past; one a type that would soon be dominant; the other a type that would soon be extinct. The governor was an intellect; the Kid a trigger finger.

The Kid did not recognize the gulf. He showed no sign of embarrassment. He seemed as much at ease as if he had been accustomed to meeting governors every day. The trigger fingers of humanity take small account of social distinctions. A bullet will make as short work of a king as of a pauper. If there was any embarrassment, it was on the governor's side. He showed the slight embarrassment of surprise.

"You don't look at all as I had pictured you in my mind," said the governor.

"No?" The Kid smiled. "I left my horns and forked tail back at camp."

"Not that." The governor raised a deprecating palm. "But I had heard stories about you. If a man of whom I have heard or read interests me, I always visualize him." It was the novelist talking. "I formed a vivid mental image of you. I was quite sure you had beetling brows, black hair, and black, piercing eyes."

"And looked like a dead tough hombre," added the Kid with a laugh. "Well, yes. But here you are a clean-cut, good-looking boy. You don't look bad."

The Kid declined to argue the point.

"How old are you?"

"Nineteen."

"I am―let me see-just thirty-two years older than you. Old enough to be your father. So, Billy, I am going to talk to you like a father."

​The Kid nodded.

"I have issued a proclamation of amnesty to all who have taken part in the feud, and I want you to share in it. President Hayes has sent me to New Mexico to establish peace. He has faith that I will do it. I am going to try to justify his confidence. Now, Billy, I have come all the way to Lincoln for the special purpose of persuading you to stop all this fighting and settle down."

"Settle down? I couldn;t if I tried."

"Why not?"

"My enemies wouldn't let me."

"I think they would. If you proved to your enemies that you wanted to become a useful citizen, I believe they would leave you alone."

"Not in this country."

"Go to some other country, then, and start over again."

"No. This is my country and I'm staying here."

The Kid said it as Rob Roy might have said, "My foot is on my native heath and my name's McGregor."

"Stay, then. But turn over a new leaf."

"You don't know this country, Governor. Look up the street. Do you see that bunch of men standing at Murphy's store?"

"Yes."

"Know who they are?"

"No."

"They're Murphy men. There's Jimmy Dolan, 'Dad' Peppin, Andy Boyle, Old Man Pearce. Well, if I walked up the street without my guns, they'd kill me so quick I wouldn't know what happened."

"You just rode past them," replied the governor. "They made no move to kill you."

"The reason," said the Kid, "is right here in my lap." ​He patted his rifle. "Here's another pretty good reason." He rested his hand on the ivory handle of his six-shooter. "They knew if they made a move, I'd get two or three of them even if they got me. They didn't want to take a chance. But just let 'em catch me without my shootin' irons———" A shrug completed his sentence.

"I'm inclined to think you exaggerate the situation."

"I know what I'm talking about. I've gone too far to turn back. I've done too much fighting. I've killed too many men.

"But what of your future?"

"I wouldn't gamble much money on my future. I may live a year or two; I may die in the next five minutes."

"You mean you expect to be killed?"

The Kid looked surprised at the question.

"Certainly. They'll get me sooner or later."

"But," urged the governor, "if you change your way of living, you may change your way of dying. If you live by the six-shooter, you will probably die by the six-shooter. But there is still a chance for you. You are still in your youth. Life should still be sweet to you. Cease to be an enemy yourself and you will soon find yourself without enemies. I want to see peace again in these mountains. You can help me bring it about. I want you to surrender———"

"Me surrender?"

"Yes, and stand trial on whatever charges may be brought against you. If you are acquitted———

"No jury would acquit me of anything."

"—that will wipe the slate clean. If you are convicted, I give you my promise now that I will pardon you and set you free."

"I wouldn't have a chance in any court in New Mexico."

​"I repeat that I will pardon you if the verdict goes against you. But I want you first to stand trial like a man."

The Kid thought for a moment in silence. Abstractedly, he lifted his rifle and blew a fleck of dust off the magazine.

"No, Governor," he said, "I can't do it. No use. It's too late. I've got to go on as I am, and when the time comes, die with my boots on."

Neither spoke for a moment.

"I'm sorry, Billy," said the governor. "You are wrong in your attitude. But if I can't persuade you to change it, that would seem to end the matter."

They rose and shook hands.

"Good-bye, Governor," said the Kid.

"Good-bye, my boy," said the governor.

Governor Wallace watched the Kid as he rode off along the cañon road until he disappeared.

"If that boy would take my advice," he said, turning to his companions with a note of sadness in his voice, "I believe he has in him the making of a fine man."

Two years later, Billy, in the shadow of the gallows, recalled the governor's promise of a pardon. But the pardon did not come and his friendship turned to hate.

"The Lincoln County reign of terror is not over," wrote Mrs. Susan E. Wallace, the governor's wife, in a letter from Fort Stanton, "and we hold our lives at the mercy of desperadoes and outlaws, chief among them Billy the Kid, whose boast is that he has killed a man for every year of his life. Once he was captured and escaped and now he swears, when he has killed the sheriff and the judge who passed sentence upon him and Governor Wallace, he will surrender and be hanged.

​"'I mean to ride into the plaza at Santa Fé, hitch my horse in front of the palace, and put a bullet through Lew Wallace.'

"These are his words. One of my friends warned me to close the shutters at evening, so the bright light of the student lamp might not make such a shining mark of the governor writing until late upon 'Ben Hur.'"

Mrs. Wallace's picture of the author sitting by the open window of the palace working upon his book late into the night under the light of the lamp with the vague menace of Billy the Kid's six-shooter out in the darkness of Santa Fé's silent streets is singularly interesting and adds a touch of romance to the history of the novel whose fame was soon to fill the world. What if the Kid had made good his threat and his bullet had come out of the night to stay the hand of the writer? Where, then, would have been "Ben Hur," and how much pleasure would have been denied to millions of men and women in the reading of it?

Mrs. McSween was not a woman to sit and weep over her misfortunes. She had the courage of her hatreds and faith in a God of vengeance. The refusal of Colonel Dudley to interfere when he could have done so rankled in her soul and, carrying out the threat she had hurled at that officer, she now left no stone unturned to shoulder upon him the responsibility for the crime that had widowed her and left her homeless. In elaborate affidavits, she laid her case not only before Governor Wallace but before the authorities at Washington. The governor, it is said, favoured prosecution, but the attorney-general of the territory decided that the courts had no jurisdiction.

When it seemed that some official action was inevitable, Colonel Dudley himself demanded an investigation. Under warrant of the War Department, a military court ​was convened and sat for six weeks at Fort Stanton. As a result of the hearing, Colonel Dudley was exonerated. His defense was that he had no authority to interfere in the battle because Sheriff Peppin was on the ground and in command of the situation. The court decided that his position was technically sound. It may have been' so; at least it was technically plausible. But the fact remains that while Colonel Dudley was splitting hairs over the technical question of his authority, the McSween home went up in flames and five men were slaughtered within two hundred yards of his camp where he had two well-armed squadrons of cavalry and two pieces of artillery. In arriving at its verdict, the court seems to have lost sight of the human tragedy in weighing the niceties of military law.

Billy the Kid added to his list of killings on August 5th during a horse-stealing raid on the Mescalero Apache reservation. Joe Bernstein, Indian agency clerk, saw the outlaws rounding up some horses not far from Blazer's sawmill, scene of the "Buckshot" Roberts fight. Supposing them to be cowboys labouring under a mistaken idea of ownership, he rode out to them. "Hey," he shouted, "what are you fellows about? Don't drive those horses off. They belong on this range." His blunder cost him his life. Without stopping to argue the matter, Billy the Kid shot him. "The horses didn't belong to him," the Kid explained afterward, "and it takes a bullet to teach some people to keep their noses out of other men's business. He was only a Jew, anyway."

Jimmy Dolan, Billy Matthews, Bill Campbell, and Jesse Evans foregathered in Stockton's bar. It was a ​chilly day late in February, 1879. The unpropitious weather depressed their spirits. Moreover, it had been deadly dull in Lincoln for a long time. The good old days when a man was killed every morning for breakfast seemed gone for ever. So these fighting men passed the bottle and braced their drooping spirits. When they sauntered out into the street they saw the world as through a glass, rosily. Their hearts were full of good cheer and friendliness when they spied Billy the Kid, Charlie Bowdre, and Tom O'Folliard lounging in front of the Ellis House.

"Come on," said Dolan, "let's make up with those fellows. The war's over. Might as well click glasses and call all bets off. It's time for another drink anyway."

They careened up to their ancient enemies.

"Hello, Billy," said Jesse Evans with hilarious good humour. "How's my old pal?"

The Kid eyed him with hard suspicion.

Evans stuck out his hand.

"Put her there, Billy," he said.

The Kid hesitated.

"Come on, Billy, shake hands," urged Evans. "We're all going to bury the hatchet and be friends."

Tough old Bill Campbell cut in with an amiable remark. Billy Matthews, who had shot the Kid and whom the Kid had once attempted to kill, admitted he was willing to call everything square.

"Come on over to Patron's and let's all have a friendly glass," said Dolan.

So to Juan Patron's bar they went, and drowned old enmities and ratified a pact of peace in rounds of drink.

It so fell out that Lawyer George Chapman arrived in Lincoln late that afternoon. After supper with Mrs. ​McSween, he went to his sleeping quarters in the McSween store to start a fire and warm up the place.

"I'll be back in half an hour," he told Mrs. McSween.

In the meantime, the newly made friends had continued to celebrate their informal treaty of peace in generous potations. It was a grand and glorious thing for old enemies to get together at last on a basis of friendship, and they decided to make the occasion a joyous and memorable one. Hiring the two old Negro musicians, George Washington and Sebron Bates, they went the rounds of all the saloons in town, making merry with music and roistering good fellowship. But the best of friends must part and Billy the Kid, Bowdre, and O'Folliard finally went back to the Ellis House and got to bed while Jesse Evans, as full of friendliness as of liquor, tumbled in for the night at the Wortley Hotel, leaving Dolan, Campbell, and Matthews to continue their carousal.

On his way back to Mrs. McSween's home, Chapman ran into these three boozy revellers in front of San Juan Church.

"Here's that McSween lawyer," said Dolan, "trying to stir up trouble when we've sworn peace. Now's our chance to show him what's what."

He halted Chapman as the lawyer was brushing past.

"You seem to be a pretty big man," Dolan said.

"Perhaps," agreed Chapman.

"How tall do they grow where you come from?"

"They grow gentlemen where I come from."

"Well, I declare," answered Campbell. "Now, I reckon a gentleman like you ought to be a mighty good dancer. Suppose you start in and show us how nice you can dance. Hit her up. And since we ain't got no fiddle ​along with us now, I'll just play a little music for you with my six-shooter."

"I'll dance for no ruffians," Chapman replied hotly.

Mrs. McSween, sitting in her parlour perhaps fifty feet away, heard two shots.

"They've killed Chapman," she cried instinctively, springing from her chair.

"Oh, no," said a woman friend who was with her. "They're only shooting off their pistols in fun."

"I know they've murdered Chapman," repeated Mrs. McSween.

She ran to the window and peered out but it was too dark for her to see into the street.

A Mexican rushed in.

"There is a man lying dead in the road," he said excitedly.

"It's Chapman," cried Mrs. McSween.

But no one dared go out to see who it was.

Early next morning, Miguel Luna, then a little boy, was sent by his mother to the Montaña store to buy some groceries. In the half-light of dawn he saw something lying at the side of the road and smoke was rising from it. He thought it was a bundle of rags that someone had set afire. He went a little closer. He was horrified to see a dead man, his clothes burned half off and still smouldering and emitting little curls of smoke. He ran back in fright to his mother.

That afternoon Chapman's body was lowered into a grave behind the old McSween store beside the resting place of McSween, Tunstall, and Morris. The six-shooter that killed him had been held so close that the leap of flame from its barrel had set fire to some legal papers which he carried in the breast pocket of his coat. ​Dolan, Campbell, and Matthews were tried for the murder at Socorro. Dolan testified that he had fired in the air. He and Matthews were acquitted. Campbell was convicted. Placed in jail temporarily at Fort Stanton, he escaped and was never heard of again in that country. He was a Texan and a desperate man. His real name was said to be Ed Richardson.

Most of the men who fought in the Lincoln County war have been sleeping peacefully in their graves for years. Riley was in business in Las Cruces for a time and then moved to Colorado, where he died in prosperous circumstances. John Copeland, the McSween sheriff, died in 1902. "Dad" Peppin, the Murphy sheriff, continued to live in Lincoln until his death in 1905. William Brady, Sheriff Brady's eldest son, was living on a ranch in Bonito Cañon in 1924. Bob Brady, another son, was jailer at Lincoln for several years. Josefina Brady, who married Florencio Chavez, died in Lincoln a few years ago. Billy Matthews moved to Roswell, where he was postmaster in 1904.

Dolan bought the old McSween store from Tom Larue and ran it for five years, living in a residence he built across the street which is now the Bonito Inn. He also purchased the old Tunstall ranch on the Rio Feliz and continued in the cattle business. The tragic associations of these two places, once owned by men whom he had hounded out of life, weighed nothing with him. Dolan was of iron stuff and not afraid of ghosts. After his marriage to a daughter of the Fritz family, he moved to Las Cruces, where he became registrar of the Land Office. He died in Roswell and was buried in the little family cemetery on the Fritz ranch.

​After the big battle Mrs. McSween lived four years in Lincoln in a new residence she built opposite San Juan Church, almost on the spot where she had had her memorable interviews with Colonel Dudley. Two years after McSween's death, she married George L. Barber, a lawyer. When John Chisum turned over to her two hundred red heifers in payment of a debt he had owed to McSween for legal services, she moved to Three Rivers, where she established a cattle ranch and became known as "the Cattle Queen of New Mexico." Before leaving Lincoln, which had been the background of so many tragic experiences, she sold the old McSween store to Tom Larue. Having disposed of her cattle ranch in 1917 to Albert B. Fall, United States Senator and Secretary of the Interior under President Harding, she moved to White Oaks.

White Oaks lies in a beautiful little cup of a valley in the Jicarilla Mountains twelve miles from Carrizozo, a railroad town on the plains. As you drive toward it, you catch your first view of the town from a rise in the cañon road. You are surprised at its impressive appearance. White Oaks, you think, must be a busy, bustling place. You see at a distance long rows of brick and stone business buildings lining the main street and, dotted over a wide area, handsome residences in tree-shaded yards. You splash across a creek in a deep arroyo and turn into the main street. If you were surprised at first at what you thought a vision of prosperity, you are amazed now to find only silence. All the stores are dark and deserted, except one in which a gray-bearded merchant smokes his pipe and waits for trade that rarely comes. Rows of big plate-glass windows, gray with dust and cobwebs, blink out upon the dreary emptiness of the weed-grown street. The sidewalks are caved in. Paint has peeled ​from the half-obliterated and weather-stained business signs which still tell dimly that here was a saloon, here a dance hall. Most of the residences are vacant and falling into ruin. Vagrant cows straggle through gaps in broken fences and crop the herbage of once well-tended lawns. White Oaks is a ghost town. When it was a booming gold camp in the late '70's, its streets were crowded, its merchants waxed rich, saloons, dance halls, and gambling houses were in full blast day and night, drinks were paid for in raw gold weighed in little scales on the bar, and gamesters bet buckskin bags full of gold dust on a card at faro. But the veins of gold on Baxter peak pinched out, the people left for other parts to seek their fortunes, and the town's glories suddenly departed. In the days of the gold stampede, White Oaks had more than two thousand inhabitants; now it has fifty.

Mrs. Barber is a fragile wisp of a woman in the twilight of life with traces of the comeliness and charm that made her famous as a frontier beauty and no little of the energy and courage that enabled her to weather the tragedies and sorrows of her pioneer days. The havoc and bloodshed of the feud are fresh in her mind and its old hatreds still vivid.

"Once settled at Three Rivers," she said, "I felt like a soul that had lived in torment and had escaped from hell to Heaven. After Lincoln, I cannot tell what happiness it was to gallop over the hills on my own ranch and breathe in the clean, pure air. I knew peace and contentment again for the first time in years.

"John Chisum himself assisted in driving my herd of heifers from the Pecos to my new home. The cattle were a godsend. They enabled me to build a new prosperity after the war had robbed me of nearly everything I had. ​'You have a fine business mind,' John Chisum said to me. 'I would be glad to have you manage one of my own ranches. You are going to make a wonderful success in cattle. 'So he encouraged me and I lived up to his prophecy.

"I managed my ranch myself. I did all the buying of supplies and provisions, watched expenses closely, kept books, put my affairs on a strictly business basis. I rode with my cowboys, directed round-ups, calving, branding, cutting out beeves, and did all my own marketing. I suppose the merchants and cattle buyers with whom I dealt fancied that, as I was a woman, they could pull the wool over my eyes; but I quickly undeceived them and they found that I drove shrewd bargains.

"As my business expanded, I built a beautiful home back from the river in the foothills of the White Mountains. I set out more than four thousand apple, pear, peach, and plum trees which in time bore splendid crops of luscious fruit. I increased my land holdings and my ranch extended three miles along the river, and it filled me with joy to see my herds grazing on a thousand hills. My cattle numbered eight thousand head when I finally sold out. Whenever I dropped into Albuquerque or Santa Fé for a visit, the public prints referred to me as 'the Cattle Queen of New Mexico.' As far as I know, I owned more cattle than any woman in the Southwest. I came to White Oaks because it is so peaceful here. My life has been so strenuous, I have seen so much fighting and killing, that in my old age, I want peace."

So in the deep peace of the mountain valley, Mrs. Barber awaits the final summons-a ghost woman in a ghost town, the curtain slowly falling on the bitter drama of her life, left alone with her memories that are crowded with dead men and desolate with graves.