High Noon in Lincoln
Utley, Robert M.
HIGH NOON IN LINCOLN: VIOLENCE ON THE WESTERN FRONTIER Robert M. Utley/University of New Mexico Press/$22.50 Wayne Michael Sarf I n the recent R-rated teenage West- 1 ern Young Guns, an...
...if cloud-dwelling scribes such as Walter Noble Burns (in his 1926 bestseller The Saga of Billy the Kid) persisted in glamorizing a "Kid" who murdered in cold blood, they could at least argue that everybody else in Lincoln was doing it...
...But the film does reassure us that Henry McCarty (alias Henry Antrim, alias Kid Antrim, alias William Bonney) remains a Kid for the ages...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1989 Utley, sailing deftly among the rocks of contemporary evidence, avoids all but a few minor collisions, as when he repeats a poetic story concerning the Kid's jailbreak: told en route to the jail that Bill had already killed another guard, deputy Bob Olinger allegedly observed, "Yes, and he's killed me, too"—just before being blasted by the Kid from an upstairs window...
...Historically insignificant, he becomes food for the mythologist, or perhaps the sociologist—Ness interesting as a human being," as Peter Lyon once noted, "than as a sort of glorified Rorschach inkblot by which one may elicit fantasies and so judge their inventors...
...If the author at times seems detached and clinical (with only participants' words providing the queer black humor that so often leavens accounts of Western lawlessness), we can hardly demand emotions set aflame by the characters or their behavior herein...
...Even criminal outsiders rode in, enticed by anarchy...
...Nearly everyone carried a Winchester rifle or carbine and a Colt's six-shooter, and if someone wronged you, no matter how trivially, you shot it out on the spot...
...Any degree of violence is permissible, including death...
...The comment may seem defensive or naive, but Utley—not one to indulge in false nostalgia—recognizes that all ages have their fashions in crime...
...Even as Murphy's ongoing ruin through drink gave the leading role in "The House" to his partner, James Dolan, John Tunstall moved in to set up a rival store—discreetly backed by a wealthy cattleman, John Chisum, who (John Wayne's 1970 screen portrayal notwithstanding) preferred hiring guns to wearing them...
...A climax of sorts was ignited on July 19, when the weak and vacillating McSween tried to seize Lincoln town with roughly sixty gunmen...
...Stagecoach holdups, frequent elsewhere in New Mexico, were also unknown because stagecoaches, in the usual sense, were unknown...
...Recalling one long-range Sharps rifle shot that pierced a Murphy-Dolan man's stomach, smashed his spine, and left him dead after a week's lingering, a McSweenite fondly ranked it "among the great examples of marksmanship...
...If only it could be blamed, like the book's nearly invisible semicolons, on the publisher...
...An absurdly vast outpouring of art, music, pseudohistory, and simple, unassuming trash—films, teleplays, novels (dime and otherwise), stage melodramas, poems, and an Aaron Copland-scored ballet—has thrown him into every conceivable role, from hero to villain to victim...
...Even an Army detachment's arrival proved anticlimactic when its eccentric commander decided against interference in a civilian dispute...
...How the code came to be suspended for a month or two can only be explained by the depravity of a few offenders...
...Thus, Wild West "heroism" for the 1980s...
...Accused of stock theft, Tunstall was shot down on February 18, 1878, ostensibly while resisting arrest by a Murphy-Dolan "posse...
...That he assigns Billy a properly minor role here highlights Utley's lack of sensationalism...
...The fifth theme, the delight of romancers and bane of historians, was simply Billy the Kid himself, and "beyond all the analyses of meaning, the Lincoln County War's most enduring legacy to the world may well be as a launchpad for the rise of an unknown youth of sunny disposition and deadly trigger finger into one of the mightiest legends of all time...
...or when Mrs...
...his legend was secured on July 14, 1881, when a onetime acquaintance, Sheriff Pat Garrett (rather a reconciliation candidate, endorsed by James Dolan and John Chisum), shot him in a darkened bedroom...
...Having hoped to find at least one—but not being the sort to create them—Utley firmly brands the Lincoln bloodletting "a war without heroes...
...that he promises us a future, full-length biography underscores the strange fascination of the Kid's life and legend...
...but if McSween and Tunstall did differ from their enemies, it was in their reluctance to adopt the Western code...
...The competitors were dead, Murphy-Dolan triumphant over an already declining economic empire...
...But having "planted himself in a world scarcely less alien to his London home than the moon," young Tunstall rode on to seek his fortunes in Lincoln County, which contained fewer than 2,000 citizens—most of them armed...
...T here are not many nice people here," complained John Henry Tunstall while describing Santa Fe in letters home, noting the Mexicans"greasers"—and regretting that commerce appeared "in the hands of the jews (sic) who have their sons & brothers with them always...
...As Tunstall wrote to his parents, "Everything in New Mexico, that pays at all," was "worked by a 'ring.' " But he chose to beat them by joining them...
...Perhaps residence in New Mexico has increased the risk for Robert M. Utley, already the author of Four Fighters of Lincoln County, but best known for such notable works of military and Indian history as The Last Days of the Sioux Nation...
...Shot it out" seems an unfortunate phrase here, for while most victims were (unavoidably) armed, the code of personal violence, at least as practiced in Lincoln, failed to stress giving the other fellow much show—even when killers operated (as both sides managed to do) with the blessing of cooperative legal officials...
...rr hat should have been the end of 1 it...
...For if such events paradoxically achieve "historical" importance largely because so much rot has already been written about them, their intrinsic allure can still hold more sober historians...
...44 cated New Mexican amateurs as Maurice Garland Fulton, Robert N. Mullin, and William A. Kellaher did write of the conflict as a whole—while failing to provide the nonsense required for wide popularity or impact...
...while certain violent crimes were common and seldom prosecuted, such familiar urban crimes as burglary, arson, and mugging were rare: "Bank robbery was unknown because banks were unknown...
...The title High Noon in Lincoln conjures forth a Gary Cooperish image that is immediately knocked down with a warning: "Readers who must have a sympathetic character to identify with may put this book down now...
...tley finds four underlying themes in explaining the "war": heavy drinking, the "instant accessibility of firearms," the usual Gilded Age quest for wealth and power, and, most compellingly, the code: "Avenge insult or wrong, real or imagined...
...a band called "The Wrestlers" slew so wantonly that, as one resident recalled, "on meeting a stranger on the road both sides cleared for action...
...Betrayed (a requirement for the outlaw-hero's résumé) and doubtless feeling unjustly singled out, Billy killed his two jailers and escaped after being sentenced to hang for his part in the ambush of Sheriff Brady, but he still haunted the area...
...soldiers watched...
...One newspaper account, cited in Kellaher's Violence in Lincoln County, thought it natural to term it an "unnatural" offense...
...The code did not sanction random, mindless, purposeless slaughter, destruction, and pillage...
...Yet the same eyewitness who had warned Olinger claimed that the deputy was killed before he could respond...
...But the western code, drunken rowdyism, and Indian depredations (or, rather, the threat of such depredations) contributed to an atmosphere of violence...
...An epic five-day siege of his own house ensued—though the countless shots fired caused few casualties except in the batTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1989 tie's final moments...
...But aside from the Kid's presence, said "war" held small satisfaction for the romantic...
...In a cashless economy where extended credit became a key weapon of control, Murphy played the genial politico-economic tyrant—fixing prices, buying stolen cattle, dispossessing debtors, and charging Uncle Sam for nonexistent Indians' rations...
...He is really an endearing sort, however, who before riding off toward the horizon and his destiny plants a climactic slug of vengeance in the head of the archfiend, Major Murphy (played by Jack Palance—a link to horse opera glories past...
...But the feuding continued...
...Never retreat before an aggressor...
...One may debate some specifics, such as the incredible statement that "everywhere on the frontier, nearly all men drank nearly all the time, which made nearly all men more or less drunk most of the time...
...The big fish in Lincoln's small pond was Irish-born Major Lawrence G. Murphy, probate judge, Democratic party ruler, rumored homosexual, winner of government supply contracts, and owner of Lincoln's "big store...
...Encountering Alexander A. McSween, the town of Lincoln's only lawyer (and a man sufficiently eccentric never to wear even a concealed weapon), Tunstall made of him an ally—or, in the Englishman's view, a tool...
...despite mythic portrayals of Tunstall as a monopoly-busting idealist, his only professed goal was becoming a "Land Grabber," setting up his own "ring," and getting "the half of every dollar that is made in the county by anyone...
...HIGH NOON IN LINCOLN: VIOLENCE ON THE WESTERN FRONTIER Robert M. Utley/University of New Mexico Press/$22.50 Wayne Michael Sarf I n the recent R-rated teenage West- 1 ern Young Guns, an obviously psychopathic "Billy the Kid" appalls even his good-bad-boy comrades—murdering one man in an outhouse, blowing out another's brains while shaking hands, and shooting a third after sabotaging his pistol...
...As for his assertion that all the Lincoln fighters practiced the code in some fashion, surely endorsing violence by one's employees hardly qualiifies...
...Cutting down a lawman from ambush, without warning," deadpans Utley, "violated the code to which most people subscribed...
...And perhaps a poor code is better than none...
...Indeed, casual violence was casually viewed, and when the Englishman observed mildly that one killer seemed "rather bad medicine," an acquaintance protested (according to Tunstall) that the gentleman "gets mad quick, and shoots quick, but he's a good shot & never cripples...
...Duly deputized themselves into the justice of the peace's constabulary, McSweenTunstall "Regulators" responded, as Utley logically explains, in kind: "They could try no one without belying their posture as officers . . . so they simply executed their victims on one pretext or another...
...Nor could it be recommended to lovers of chivalry...
...Fiction writers," Utley reminds us, "did not create the code"--which, while actually influencing men throughout the frontier West, may have reached an extreme form in Lincoln due to contacts with the Texas feud country and a casual attitude toward violence left by the Civil War and Reconstruction: The code demanded personal courage and pride, reckless disregard of life, and instant redress of insult, real or fancied—all traits with great appeal to the masculine young adventurers who flocked to the frontier...
...The face is blank, but it comes complete with a Handy Do-It-Yourself Kit so that the features may be easily filled in...
...While writing that his foes "need killing very badly," Tunstall refused all challenges from James Dolan to shoot it out—inspiring a recent sneer in Montana magazine (where appreciation of the physical courage implied by the code has not wholly vanished in this era of Uzi-toting crack dealers) that the Englishman was "a coward" who had "turned craven...
...Utley's findings on the nature and level of frontier violence complement those of other recent scholars...
...Struck by these atrocities, Utley responds: "The code sanctioned killing for cause, with the definition of cause left to the killer...
...none of his men have ever known what hurt them & I really think he is sorry for it afterward when he cools off...
...Newly appointed territorial governor Lew Wallace, who might have become a hero, proved too busy writing Ben Hur: "Nudged by the vicarious immediacy of the Holy Land, Lincoln County receded to the far corners of his mind...
...Soon even these niceties broke down: the Regulators' masterpiece came when Billy the Kid and five other riflemen hidden behind a Lincoln fence gate gave pro-Murphy sheriff William Brady and a deputy a volley in the back...
...While the Kid's chroniclers spilled rivers of ink, the arena in which he was a minor combatant, New Mexico's "Lincoln County War," became our most frequently rehashed frontier feud...
...Other writers, including such dediWayne Michael Sarf is the author of God Bless You, Buffalo Bill: A Layman's Guide to History and the Western Film (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press...
...Declaring an amnesty that somehow came to embrace everyone except Billy the Kid (then pursuing a career in stock theft), Wallace simply proclaimed peace and left those most responsible for the war free to re-emerge as respectable citizens...
...The house was set ablaze, McSween was killed in the ensuing rout, and his store was looted as U.S...
...In this sorry tale, only isolated moments of True Grit or pathos stand out, as when the cripple "Buckshot" Roberts drives off attacking Regulators despite a fatal wound...
...Utley finds his motives "no less greedy, his intended exploitation of the citizens no less complete, and his style of combat only a little less violent . . " While Tunstall practiced with his revolver, hired gunmen, and complained about the cost ("for men expect to be well-paid for going on the warpath"), Alex McSween disdained violence, and in fact both sides initially contented themselves with legal maneuverings...
...The Wrestlers went so far as to commit rape—a crime extremely rare in Lincoln and indeed the West itself...
...McSween vainly pleads with the soldiers to let her husband surrender to the military rather than be murdered...
...45...
...It was "about the `toughest' little spot in America," he asserted, meaning "the most lawless, a man can commit murder here with impunity...
Vol. 22 • March 1989 • No. 3
