Legends of the Old West - BILLY THE KID Ep. 2 | “Crooks, Killers and Thieves”

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

Lincoln County in southeastern New Mexico Territory grows into a hotbed of corruption and murder. Men named Murphy, Dolan and Brady align themselves against others called Tunstall, McSween and Chisum. An outlaw gang kills and steals at will, and it’s about to add a new man to its roster. The forces of the Lincoln County War arrange themselves before the arrival of William H. Bonney. Join Black Barrel+ for bingeable seasons with no commercials: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. The night was cold and the moon was nearly full. It covered the lone street in the town of Lincoln with a pale light. It was a good night to stay warm in the saloons. And as it turned out, it was a good night to stay warm in the saloons. And as it turned out, it was a good night for murder. Five brothers and some of their friends and relatives had journeyed from Texas to southeastern New Mexico a few months earlier. The brothers had taken part in the killing of four Texas state policemen in Lampasas and then fled the state. Now, a group of men that included at least one of the brothers

rode into Lincoln to get drunk in the saloons and brothels. By midnight, they were out of control. They shot up businesses and terrified other revelers. The town constable and four officers confronted the drunken men in the street. One of the rowdies shot the constable and killed him on the spot. The murder ignited a gun battle. Seven or eight men fired at each other at the same time. The lawman killed the man who had shot the constable, but the other two men escaped. The officers tracked them down and riddled them with bullets, shooting one of them more than a dozen times. One of the dead men was one of the brothers who fled Texas.

The officers had been mostly Hispanic, and Hispanics in Lincoln County were feuding with the dominant force in the area, the corrupt store owned by white Irishmen named Murphy and Dolan. The murders on that night escalated the racial tension into something close to a race war. Three weeks after the shootout in Lincoln, the brothers from Texas retaliated. They stormed a Hispanic wedding celebration

and began firing into the crowd. They may have been looking for a young man named Juan Patron, whom they blamed for the murder of their brother. Patron wasn't there, but the brothers ended up killing his father and several other bystanders. For the next year and a half, the two sides left dead bodies all over Lincoln County. Estimates range as low as 13 killed and as high as 75. The bloodshed finally subsided when the brothers and their followers drifted back to Texas. The events were called the Horror War, named after the Outlaw Brothers.

The shootout in Lincoln happened exactly nine months after Catherine McCarty and William Antrim got married in Santa Fe. It was the deadliest war in Lincoln's history up to that time, and as it was winding down, Catherine's son Henry was escaping from a jail on the other side of the territory and running to Arizona. No one remembers the Horrill War today. It's been overshadowed by events known as the Lincoln County War

that happened just three years later, in which Henry Antrim, then called William H. Bonney and nicknamed Billy the Kid, would play a starring role. As a podcast network, our first priority has always been audio and the stories we're able to share with you. But we also sell merch, and organizing that was made both possible

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Shopify.com slash realm. From Black Barrel Media, this is Legends of the Old West. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this is a 10-part series about the most notorious outlaw in the history of the American West, Billy the Kid. This is Episode 2, Crooks, Killers, and Thieves. By 1873, the Secretary of War and the United States Army had had enough of L.G. Murphy. They kicked him out of Fort Stanton in southern New Mexico territory. To say that Murphy and his business partner, Emil Fritz, were robbing the Fort blind would probably be an exaggeration, but maybe not by much. Murphy and Fritz, but especially Murphy, had absolutely no morals or scruples. The two men were both former soldiers and former commanders of Fort Stanton, but for the last six years they had been

running a crooked game on their former comrades-in-arms. Murphy was about the same age as Catherine McCarty, and like her, he was an immigrant who had fled Ireland during the famine of the 1840s. He came to America, joined the Army, and served in California and New Mexico during the Civil War. When the war ended, he stayed on at his post, Fort Stanton, in New Mexico Territory. For the final six months of his service, he was the commander at Fort Stanton. When his enlistment was up, he retired from the army and opened a store right there in the fort. His business partner in the venture was the man who had preceded him as commander of Fort Stanton, a German immigrant named Emil Fritz. So the two most recent commanders teamed up to start a store inside the fort

and immediately started stealing money from the men they had just commanded and the army they had just served. They loaned money to unstable officers who quickly fell into their debt. They used their connections to gain contracts to supply the army and the nearby Apache reservations with everything they needed. Beef, corn, flour, coffee, sugar, and many other things. And then they overcharged the government for the items. Or they lied about the number of Apaches who needed the items so they could inflate the orders and make extra money.

Before long, the Murphy Fritz store was the dominant economic force in the area. The store controlled everything, and the partners opened a smaller store in a nearby village that had been called La Placida del Rio Benito, the little village of the Pretty River. But by the time Murphy and Fritz opened their branch store in the town, it had changed its name to honor America's assassinated president. The town was now called Lincoln. Lawrence Murphy was a hard-drinking Irishman from County Wexford, and he found a kindred spirit in Jimmy Dolan, a hard-drinking Irishman from County Kerry.

Dolan had been a soldier at Fort Stanton, and when he finished his service, he joined Murphy's store as a clerk. By the time the Secretary of War kicked the store out of the fort because of its fraudulent practices, Dolan was ready for a larger role in the operation. Dolan was ready for a larger role in the operation. Emil Fritz had traveled back to Germany to visit his family and then had died shortly after his arrival. Murphy made Dolan his new partner and then they brought in a third hard-drinking Irishman to be the new clerk, John Riley.

They moved their headquarters to Lincoln and constructed the biggest building in town as their new store. Most folks called it the Big Store, but the operation would soon be known by the nickname, The House. It didn't take long for the house to secure a stranglehold on Lincoln County and the town of Lincoln. The county was huge, roughly the size of the state of South Carolina, which made it larger than nine other states. And it was sparsely populated, containing mostly land owned by ranchers or land in the public domain that ranchers could use for free to graze their livestock. But if ranchers or farmers or villagers needed supplies, they had to go to Lincoln to get them, which meant they had to go to Murphy's store. And Murphy became the biggest and most reliable customer for farmers,

and that's how he strangled them. Murphy and Dolan would offer to buy a farmer's entire crop, which gave the farmer the perfect outlet for his goods. But the farmer didn't receive cash for his crop. He received credit to Murphy's store. So farmers faced difficult decisions. They could travel long distances to try to sell portions of their crops for cash, or they could sell the entire crop to Murphy and Dolan, but they would only receive store credit in exchange. Farmers often caved and sold their crops to Murphy and Dolan, which put them in debt to the store.

Through these debts, Murphy and Dolan ruthlessly forced small farmers and ranchers off their lands and expanded the reach of the house. And they could do all this without fear because the house was part of the Santa Fe ring. As the man who would become the chief opponent to the ring would put it in a letter to his family, everything in New Mexico that pays at all is worked by a ring. There's the Indian ring, the army ring, the political ring, the legal ring, the Roman Catholic ring, the cattle ring,

the horse thieves ring, the land ring, and half a dozen other rings. In short, what he meant was, almost everything in New Mexico was corrupt. Every element of business was supervised and operated by men who were tied together for the sole purpose of dominating that specific element. The Santa Fe Ring was the name given to the network of corrupt politicians and government officials who controlled New Mexico. And at the top of the food chain was the U.S. District Attorney, Thomas Catron. Catron ruled a web of legislators, judges, sheriffs, marshals, ranchers, businessmen, and merchants.

Even the governor himself answered to Catron on matters that involved the ring. Even the governor himself answered to Catron on matters that involved the ring. Catron and the members of the ring had turned New Mexico into their own private kingdom. And the Lincoln County arm of the ring was the house, operated by Lawrence Murphy and Jimmy Dolan. They were allied with Catron in the ring, which meant they were virtually untouchable, but not totally untouchable. Three men were circling the edges of the black hole that was centered on Lincoln. They were being drawn closer and closer together as they were pulled toward the center, and soon they would find themselves aligned against Murphy, Dolan, and the Santa Fe Ring in the events we call today the Lincoln County War.

They were cattle baron John Chisholm, lawyer Alexander McSween, and aspiring ringleader John Henry Tunstall. Chisholm was the first arrival, planting his flag in New Mexico two years after the end of the Civil War. He was a Texas cattleman who had followed the trail blazed by fellow Texans Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight. Loving and Goodnight had seen the potential for beef markets in New Mexico and then farther north in Colorado, where the boomtown of Denver was gradually growing into a thriving city. Chisholm followed the trail west from Texas into New Mexico, and he recognized the value of the land around the Pecos River. He set up his

ranch in the Pecos River Valley, and after a couple years, he had 80,000 cattle grazing over 150 miles of land. He had more than 100 cowboys working the range at cow camps throughout western New Mexico. By 1875, the year a teenager named Henry Antrim escaped from jail in Silver City, Chisholm had moved his headquarters to a ranch near a tiny hamlet that wasn't much more than a store and a post office. That hamlet was called Roswell, and it was almost exactly 50 miles west of Lincoln. Chisholm's massive cattle herd was a prime target for thieves. In the early years of Chisholm's ranch, he and his cowboys fought Apaches and Comanches who stole his horses and cattle.

As the 1870s progressed, the biggest danger to Chisholm's operation came from smaller ranchers who moved into the area. They basically started their ranches by stealing Chisholm's cattle. A fierce collection of ranchers sprang up around a settlement called Seven Rivers and they became more and more brazen about their rustling. The Seven Rivers clan was supported by Murphy and Dolan. The two businessmen were in direct competition with Chisholm for contracts to supply beef to the army and the reservations. The house bought cattle from the Seven Rivers ranchers with no questions asked, even if the cows clearly bore the signature brand and jingle bob ear markings of Chisholm's

operation. And worse yet for Chisholm, one of his cowboys had turned into an outlaw and was a conduit between his cattle and the smuggling network that ran from Texas to Arizona. between his cattle and the smuggling network that ran from Texas to Arizona. Bandits stole cattle from ranchers in the Panhandle and then drove them west into New Mexico. They sold the stock to merchants like Murphy and Dolan, or to smaller ranchers like the men in Seven Rivers who were trying to compete with giants like John Chisholm. Then the black market network extended southwest to the small community of La Mesilla outside Las Cruces. La Mesilla was the home of John Kinney. Kinney was a New Englander by birth, but by the early 1870s, he owned a ranch that was a well-known link in the smuggling chain

between West Texas and southern Arizona. From Kinney's ranch in Mesilla, the smuggling chain between West Texas and southern Arizona. From Kinney's Ranch in Mesilla, the smuggling route continued west into southern Arizona, where it landed at another spot that was a hub of illegal activity, the ranch of Newman Clanton. Old Man Clanton, as Newman was called, had three sons, two of whom were named Ike and Billy. A few years from now, Ike and Billy would find themselves trapped in a vacant lot on Fremont Street in Tombstone, Arizona. They were confronted by Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and two of Wyatt's brothers. The gunfight that followed would be the most famous in American history, and Billy Clanton would not survive it. Ike Clanton would spend much of the rest of his short life trying to hang Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, or to outright murder them in

revenge. Ike and his father were known leaders of a loose group of killers and thieves who were referred to in southern Arizona as the Cowboys. Most of them had drifted west from Texas, so if you traced that smuggling route back into New Mexico, you'd find another group of rustlers and killers called simply the Boys. They were predominantly hard cases from Texas, and their captain was Jesse Evans, the former employee of John Chisholm. So this was the area around Lincoln County. Cattle King John Chisholm was fighting the Murphy-Dolan faction on one side and the ranchers of Seven Rivers on the other. Outlaw Captain Jesse Evans ran a gang that stole Chisholm's cattle and sold them to Murphy and Dolan, as well as doing other dirty work needed by the house. The Murphy-Dolan operation was tied to the Santa Fe Ring, the network of corrupt government officials who ran New Mexico territory. And Lincoln County itself was a huge, sprawling land with virtually no law.

The men who were in positions of law enforcement, like sheriffs or judges, were almost all connected to the Santa Fe Ring, and therefore corrupt, and they included the sheriff of Lincoln, William Brady. Brady was yet another hard-drinking Irishman who served in the army with Murphy and Dolan. He wasn't quite as evil as those two, but he was loyal. And not just because he was Irish and had been a soldier. He was deeply in debt to the Murphy-Dolan store, like almost everyone else in town. Into this darkening storm walked two outsiders who would end up starting a war by challenging the House and the Santa Fe Ring.

Alexander McSween and John Henry Tunstall. McSween and his wife Susan landed in Lincoln in 1875, a few months before 15-year-old Henry Antrim climbed up a chimney to escape from jail in Silver City. McSween set up a law practice, and as the only lawyer in town, he went to work for the biggest operation in town, the Murphy Dolan Store. He became the debt collector for the biggest operation in town, the Murphy Dolan store. He became the debt collector for the house. As a newcomer to the area, he probably wasn't familiar with the extent of the corruption in New Mexico territory, but he was about to get a crash course from Jimmy Dolan.

McSween was born to Scottish parents on Canada's Prince Edward Island, and he was a firm believer in nonviolence, which was a dangerous philosophy in a town like Lincoln. His biggest task for the house would ultimately spark the most violent era of Lincoln County's history. It probably seemed like a simple chore at the time, and certainly no one thought it would lead to the bloodshed that followed. But it began with a death, and that was a bad omen. Murphy's original business partner, Emil Fritz, brought his brother and sister to America and settled them on a farm

in New Mexico. After the store relocated from Fort Stanton to Lincoln, Fritz decided to visit his family in Germany. Before he left, he took out a $10,000 life insurance policy from a company in New York. A few months later, Emil Fritz died in Germany. After Fritz's death, Murphy elevated Jimmy Dolan from clerk to partner in the firm. And while it seemed like everyone in Lincoln County was in debt to the Murphy store, no one knew that the store itself was also in major debt. Despite the rackets that the house had worked for years, it was still in desperate financial trouble.

And when Emil Fritz died, there was no way Murphy and Dolan could pay his share of the store to his brother and sister. It would have ruined the business. So they stalled. They wouldn't let their lawyer, Alex McSween, move forward with the settlement of Fritz's estate, which meant McSween was being denied the commission he would have made on all the work. At that point, McSween cut all ties with the Murphy-Dolan operation. But ironically, he stayed on the Emil Fritz case. Fritz had been

dead for two years, and with Murphy and Dolan stalling on the payout of Fritz's interest in the store, Fritz's brother and sister wanted the life insurance money. They wanted McSween to go to New York to meet with the insurance company. So that's what McSween did. A friend of his in Lincoln, a lifelong resident named Juan Patron, whose family hated Murphy and Dolan, drove McSween up to Santa Fe in a wagon to catch a train east across the country. While they were in Santa Fe, McSween and Patron had a fateful meeting with a young Englishman named John Henry Tunstall. Tunstall had become a regular at Herlo's Restaurant in Santa Fe.

The restaurant was part of the hotel in which Tunstall was staying, and Tunstall had been in town for two long months while he plotted to make his fortune. He was a rich man's son from London, and although he would use his father's money to get himself started, he desperately wanted to make a fortune on his own. He had one desire, to own as much land as possible. He had one desire, to own as much land as possible. He planned to watch its value increase year after year and watch his bank account increase with it. But it wasn't that simple.

He spent the first half of 1876 in California, where he learned that many of the biggest and nicest pieces of land were tied up in old Spanish and Mexican land grants. Getting his hands on those could be a long and complicated process. He was advised that he could find cheaper land in New Mexico. He traveled overland to Santa Fe and arrived in August. He checked into Herlo's Hotel and began telling everyone that he wanted to buy land. But again, he discovered it was not as easy as he thought it would be. Then he was told of a new tactic. If you couldn't buy land, buy livestock. With very little investment, a person could buy a herd of cattle and graze it for free on public land.

Tunstall wasn't wild about the idea, but it was better than nothing. He had been advised to look toward a sparsely populated county called Lincoln in the southeast corner of the territory. There were thousands and thousands of acres of free land and plenty of cattle for sale. And as luck would have it, three men from Lincoln County had just arrived in Santa Fe, Alex McSween, Juan Patron, and Saturnino Baca. The Scotsman McSween and the Englishman Tunstall sat down in Hurlow's restaurant and discussed the prospects of Lincoln County. McSween laid out the situation. The Murphy-Dolan operation known as the House controlled the economy in the area. But it was in serious financial trouble, and no one knew this better than Alex McSween.

He said that if a man with enough grit and determination formed a company to compete with the House, and if that man was assisted by someone with inside knowledge of the house's business, then the two of them could successfully break the stranglehold of Murphy and Dolan. The new company would then control Lincoln County, and it would get rich. Tunstall was sold. As McSween boarded a train to New York to handle the life insurance dispute, Tunstall hopped in the wagon with Juan Patron and Saturnino Baca and headed for Lincoln. During the long ride south, Patron and Baca probably told the young Englishman about some of the recent history of Lincoln. For three years,

extreme violence and bloodshed had ripped the county apart. The killings were called the Horal War, and Patron's father had been a victim. Patron himself had also been a victim. He walked with a limp because he'd been shot in the back by John Riley, the hot-tempered clerk of the Murphy Dolan store. When Tunstall arrived in Lincoln in November 1876, his goal was nothing short of dethroning the kings, Murphy and Dolan. Tunstall wanted to own land and cattle, he wanted to open a store to compete with the house,

and he wanted government contracts for beef and supplies. He said he eventually wanted half of every dollar that flowed through Lincoln. John Henry Tunstall was just as greedy as Murphy and Dolan. He was the source of the quote mentioned earlier, about everything in New Mexico being run by a ring. And here's the end of that quote. To make things stick, to do any good, it is necessary either to get into a ring or make one for yourself. Tunstall chose to make one for himself.

It would end up being the worst decision of his life. He was 23 years old when he arrived in Lincoln. He wouldn't live to see 25. Tunstall and McSween agreed on a plan that was simple on the surface. Buy land, buy cattle, build a store, and start taking business away from Murphy and Dolan. Murphy and Dolan surely recognized the young Englishman as a competitor, especially when they understood he was aligned with McSween, who knew every detail of their business. Dolan had an idea. If this young Englishman wanted to buy land, Dolan would try to get him to buy one of Murphy's ranches. Dolan tried to bribe McSween to convince Tunstall to buy the

ranch, but McSween told Tunstall to say no. Then McSween told Tunstall to take a look at a large tract of free land about 80 miles south of Lincoln. The land was legally free, but the Casey family had been living on it and using it for a decade. They were established long before McSween and Tunstall had ever heard of Lincoln. But Robert Casey, the head of the family, had never filed a claim on the land, so legally, he didn't own it. And Robert had been killed two years earlier, and now his widow ran the ranch. There were people around Lincoln who viewed the moves by McSween and Tunstall as the same type of morally bankrupt business practices used by Murphy and Dolan.

The newcomers were trying to force a widow off her land. But Ellen Casey, Robert's widow, was already on hard times. She was in debt, and a court ordered Sheriff Brady to impound 400 head of her cattle as a security. She could either pay the debt by buying back the cattle, or the cattle would be sold at public auction. She couldn't pay the debt, so they were sold at auction, and John Tunstall bought them for a greatly reduced price. Tunstall had the beginnings of his cattle herd. He now owned 4,000 acres of land, which had been bought through intermediaries because he wasn't a U.S. citizen

and therefore couldn't buy land in his own name. He used the man who would become his most trusted employee, Richard Brewer, to buy the land that had been used by the Casey's. Dick Brewer was a tough cowboy who had drifted west from Wisconsin. He knew cattle, he knew horses, and he became Tunstall's foreman. On paper, Tunstall's main ranch south of Lincoln actually belonged to Brewer. Less than a year after arriving in Lincoln, John Tunstall had land, cattle, a solid foreman, and a store going up in town. His lawyer and

advisor, Alex McSween, would become a partner in the operation soon, and McSween would bring cattle king John Chisholm over to their side before long. Tunstall was building a ring to rival the house, just like he said he would. But the Irishmen of the house, and the larger and more powerful Santa Fe ring, were not going to sit idly by and let these upstarts take over their kingdom. Jimmy Dolan began to fight back, using, of all things, the life insurance policy of Emil Fritz. Beginning with that one little thing, he started to tear down John Tunstall's operation. He used corrupt courts, corrupt law enforcement, and then murder to take down Tunstall and McSween. He also used the outlaw gang known as the Boys and their captain, Jesse Evans.

And Jesse had a new man in the gang. The new guy was a slender, baby-faced kid who had fled Arizona. He called himself William H. Bonney, and he had arrived just in time for the Lincoln County War. Next time on Legends of the Old West, John Tunstall's men begin to clash with Jimmy Dolan's men, and Dolan uses the power of the Santa Fe Ring to tighten the noose around Tunstall and McSween. Meanwhile, Billy Bonney joins Jesse Evans' outlaw gang and soon finds himself in a familiar spot, a jail cell. To get out, he'll make the choice that will change the course of his life and eventually turn him into a legend. That's next week on Legends of the Old West.

Research assistance for this season was provided by Aaron Aylsworth. Original music by Rob Valliere. Editing and sound design by Dave Harrison. I'm your writer and host, Chris Wimmer. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. Please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. Please visit our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, for more details, and join us on social media. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram, and The Barrel Media on Twitter.

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