The Battle of Lincoln, New Mexico, so-called Five-Day Battle or Five-Day Siege, was a five-day-long firefight between the Murphy-Dolan Faction and the Regulators that took place between July 15–19, 1878, in Lincoln, New Mexico. It was the largest armed battle of the Lincoln County War in the New Mexico Territory. The firefight was interrupted and suppressed by United States Cavalry led by Lt. Col. Nathan Dudley from Fort Stanton.
By September 1878, when Territorial Governor Lew Wallace was appointed by the president, many of the Regulators and other fighters had returned to normal life, as many had left the area. Wallace tasked Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett to reduce lawlessness in the region, and, within three years, he and his deputies had hunted down and killed William "Billy the Kid" Bonney and other figures who had continued to operate in the area.
Armed conflict in the Lincoln County War began with the killing of John Tunstall on February 18, 1878, by members of the Jesse Evans Gang (who were hired as gunmen by the "Murphy-Dolan" faction—referred to as "The House" by local residents) to harass their commercial competition in Lincoln. Tunstall had become a competitor of the established Murphy-Dolan mercantile store and bank.
The failure of Lincoln County Sheriff William J. Brady to take action against those responsible for the death of Tunstall led to Tunstall's supporters forming their own armed vigilante group. They called themselves the Lincoln County Regulators, and were led by Richard "Dick" Brewer. Other members included gunmen such as Charlie Bowdre, John Middleton, Frank Coe, George Coe, "Big Jim" French, Doc Scurlock, and William Bonney (later known as "Billy the Kid"). The conflict resulted in numerous deaths on both sides, including the killing of Sheriff Brady on April 1, 1878.
On April 29, 1878, George Peppin, the newly appointed county sheriff, led a posse that included Jesse Evans and several of his gang, as well as the Seven Rivers Warriors gang to engage three Regulators in a shootout at the Fritz Ranch, resulting in the death of Frank McNab, the wounding of Ab Saunders, and the capture of Frank Coe. Shortly after his capture, Frank Coe escaped custody, although the details are unknown.
The following morning, George Coe took up a defensive position on the roof of Alexander McSween's house. Coe had lost his trigger finger earlier in the month in a gunfight with Buckshot Roberts. He took aim at 'Dutch Charlie' Kruling, a member of the Seven Rivers gang. As the distance exceeded 350 yards, Henry Brown warned Coe he was wasting his shot, but Coe shot and successfully wounded Kruling. That same day, Seven Rivers members Tom Green, Charles Marshall, Jim Patterson, and John Galvin were killed in Lincoln, and the Regulators were blamed.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
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