The current rise of gun culture, while qualitatively different, reminds me of the inherent dangers of the Old West, “when a man’s only chance was his old .44.” Many people were killed then, but it rarely involved bystanders. However it did involve a huge investment in guns as they were the weapons of choice and it often involved grievances and questions of manhood. Only a very few women participated, and then mostly on the side lines.
When I was a staff member at NMSU I had an office next to George McNew whose father was a hired gun for Albert Fall in the 1890s. William McNew was one of three men suspected of murdering Albert Jennings Fountain and his son as he was returning from a court case in Lincoln, New Mexico in 1896. Their bodies were never found and McNew and his likely two accomplices were defended by Fall and acquitted. As George McNew told me half jokingly - “Dad was accused of every murder in Doña Ana County, but was only guilty of half of them!” (See: www.dailykos.com/… ) George did not know of his father’s activities until after William’s death. Billy McNew, as he was known when he worked for Fall, had become a respectable rancher! Fall himself wound up in prison as Secretary of the Interior under Warren G. Harding because of his prime role in the Teapot Dome scandal.
When my wife and family moved briefly to Mesilla, I discovered that one of the descendents of McNew’s alleged main victim lived only a few doors down! Not only that, we were at that time in close proximity to the Fountain Theater, an establishment founded by the Fountains in 1905, which now serves as an art movie theater. We are certainly not that far from the old west!
My interest in gunslingers traces back to my early days living in Yuma, Arizona. I read about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Arizona Highways and from reprints of stories from the Tombstone Epitaph, that town’s local paper at the time. Of course one of the most well known of the people involved in that shootout was Wyatt Earp.
Earp was infamous for the events that occurred later than the O.K. Corral gun battle. After his brother was murdered in Tombstone, Wyatt and later several associates, organized in a posse, ran down anybody they suspected of being involved, including having a shootout in the Tucson trainyards. A warrant was then issued for his arrest, along with members of his posse. Earp, Doc Holliday and several others quickly moved to Colorado and the governor there refused to extradite them. But it was more complicated than that, especially for Doc Holliday (See: truewestmagazine.com/...).
Wyatt Earp outlasted most such men, living to eighty, later started a gambling business in Seattle, not far from where I live now! See: www.historylink.org/… His gambling club opened in 1899, but he was there for a relatively short time before leaving for the gold strike in Alaska, where he would not have the local law men after him for violating gambling laws.
Interestingly, the Former Guy’s grandfather beat Wyatt Earp to starting a business in Seattle! See: www.kiro7.com/… and then went on to the Yukon. He finally died in the 1918 flu epidemic.
Other gunfighters grace the old west’s newspaper headlines. Some in Arizona, those that survived their violent careers and were not hung, would end up in Yuma Territorial Prison. A place nobody in their right mind wanted to visit back then. Oddly it later became a High School and the school (Yuma High School) still bears the nickname the “Criminals.” See: www.yumaunion.org/…
Of course I could not mention gunfighters without Billy the Kid (See: en.wikipedia.org/...), who came from New York City and with his mother and her second husband wound up in Silver City, New Mexico. His mother then died of tuberculosis and his step-father abandoned both Billy and his brother. Billy was 14 and took to thievery to survive. For a while he worked on a ranch in Arizona, but he was soon wanted in Arizona for robbery and thus returned to New Mexico, eventually getting involved in the Lincoln County War, a series of shoot outs that did not make anybody look good, including the local lawmen and soldiers. Billy was arrested, but broke out. He was eventually shot by Sheriff Pat Garrett in Ft. Sumner, New Mexico, as is mentioned in the folk song.
My family and I were invited to Lincoln by a historian associated with the town and we thoroughly enjoyed going through the buildings, many pretty much the same as in the days of Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett.
The late 1800s in New Mexico and Arizona were not safe. Apaches raided outlying ranches, outlaws hid out in the remote mountains and guns were easily available, although lawmen often had you leave yours at the Sheriff’s office or some other location to avoid trouble in towns. Drunken cowboys often shot up towns and robbers in the back country often left no witnesses. The area around the Gray Ranch in Southwest New Mexico is a case in point. The Gray Ranch (now called the Diamond A Ranch, a 500 square mile portion of a much larger conglomerate of ranches) was bought by the Grays from one Curly Bill Brocius, who claimed it was his (See: pleasantgray.files.wordpress.com/....) But that may well have been a lie. Brocius was apparently killed later in the Whetstone Mountains by Wyatt Earp's “posse” after the murder of Morgan Earp. Brocius and Johnny Ringo had in fact murdered two shopkeepers, who had killed two members of Brocius’ gang when they tried to rob the general store in Hachita, New Mexico. See: en.wikipedia.org/…
I have spent many enjoyable hikes exploring Black Bill Canyon, in the Animas Mountains, possibly named after Curly Bill
This essay could go on forever, as these sagas were convoluted and intertwined, and never were as simple as told in movies, or in song. Suffice it to say that the old west was a dangerous place and we can thank a lot of people, who are not mentioned much in popular culture, that the gunfighter was suppressed. But considering what has happened over the last few decades, perhaps a more dangerous type is emerging! One with an AR-15, instead of a six-shooter!