History & Significance
Lincoln is a small village in the valley of the Rio Bonito in Lincoln County, New Mexico, a community that has changed so little since the 1870s that the National Park Service describes its main street as the most complete surviving example of a nineteenth-century frontier village in the American Southwest. The single street is about a mile long. The Tunstall Store, the courthouse that was then a general store, the torreón, and the other buildings that were at the center of the Lincoln County War in 1878 still stand in something close to their original condition.
Lincoln County in the 1870s was one of the largest counties in the United States, a vast area of southeastern New Mexico that encompassed cattle ranges, Apache reservation land, Army installations, and a small but economically significant trade center at the county seat of Lincoln. The county's commercial life was dominated by the House, a mercantile and political operation run by James Dolan and Lawrence Murphy that controlled access to government contracts for supplying the Army and the Mescalero Apache Reservation, set prices for local goods, and exercised a monopoly power over the county's economy that antagonized everyone who competed with it.
In 1877 a young English rancher named John Tunstall and his partner Alexander McSween established a competing store and bank in Lincoln, backed by the wealthy rancher John Chisum. The House responded to the competition with legal harassment and eventually with violence: Tunstall was killed by a posse in February 1878, an act that triggered the armed conflict known as the Lincoln County War. Billy the Kid, who was working for Tunstall at the time of the murder, joined the group of Tunstall's men who organized as the Regulators and began killing the men responsible for Tunstall's death.
The war escalated through 1878, involving pitched battles, ambushes, the five-day siege of the McSween house in July 1878 that ended in McSween's death, and eventually the intervention of federal troops. Billy the Kid escaped from Lincoln County jail in April 1881, killing two deputies. Pat Garrett shot him at Fort Sumner in July 1881.
The Lincoln County War and its causes
The conflict that became the Lincoln County War had economic roots in the competition for government contracts. The Army posts and the Mescalero Reservation in Lincoln County required regular supplies of beef, grain, and goods, and the contracts to provide those supplies were extremely lucrative. The House had held those contracts for years, and the margins it charged were possible only because it faced no serious competition.
John Tunstall's arrival with capital and mercantile ambitions threatened that monopoly directly. The competing store offered lower prices and better terms to local ranchers and farmers, and the competing bank offered an alternative to the credit arrangements that the House used to bind customers to its terms. The House's response combined the legal and the violent: lawsuits, foreclosure proceedings, and eventually the deputized posse that murdered Tunstall on a road outside Lincoln in February 1878.
The Regulators who formed in response to Tunstall's murder operated under the legal framework of a constable's warrant, nominally authorized to arrest Tunstall's killers. In practice they conducted a series of killings that removed the men responsible for the murder but also drew escalating violence from the House and its allies in the county government. The conflict had, by the summer of 1878, involved several hundred men in armed confrontations across Lincoln County, with casualties on both sides and no end in sight.
Billy the Kid and the mythology that grew from Lincoln
William Bonney, who called himself Billy the Kid and was also known as Henry McCarty and Henry Antrim, was approximately eighteen years old when Tunstall was killed. He had arrived in Lincoln County after a childhood in Indiana, Kansas, and New Mexico and an adolescence that included his first killing in Arizona at age seventeen. He was working on Tunstall's ranch when the murder occurred and apparently felt a genuine loyalty to the dead man.
His participation in the Regulators' activities and his subsequent career as an outlaw were documented extensively in the territorial press and in the correspondence of New Mexico Governor Lew Wallace, who was in Lincoln County in 1878 attempting to end the war and who had a direct correspondence with Bonney offering amnesty in exchange for testimony. The amnesty negotiation fell through, and Bonney continued his outlaw career until Pat Garrett shot him at Pete Maxwell's ranch at Fort Sumner on July 14, 1881.
The mythology that grew around Billy the Kid began before his death and has not stopped growing since. The historical record, preserved in the Lincoln County courthouse records, the territorial court documents, the newspaper archives, and the correspondence of the principals, tells a more ambiguous story than the legend does. He was a participant in lethal violence who killed several people, an intelligent man trapped in a violent situation partly of his own making and partly of his times, and a figure whose life intersected with enough famous events in a short time to generate the mythological accretion that continues.
The preserved village and the Mescalero context
Lincoln's preservation is a consequence of its abandonment as a commercial center. When the county seat moved to Carrizozo in 1913, the economic rationale for commercial development in Lincoln disappeared. The buildings that remained were no longer subject to the replacement pressure that development brings, and the village froze in something close to its 1880s configuration.
The Lincoln County Historic Site, operated by the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs and the National Park Service, encompasses the Tunstall Store, the courthouse, the torreón, and several other original structures. The records held at the site include Lincoln County deed records, the court documents from the Lincoln County War era, and other primary documentation of the events that made the county famous.
The Mescalero Apache Reservation, established in 1873, bordered Lincoln County and was a constant presence in the county's economy and politics during the Lincoln County War period. The Army presence in Lincoln County, at Fort Stanton, was partly there to maintain the reservation boundaries. The Mescalero's experience of the Lincoln County period, documented in the reservation records and the Bureau of Indian Affairs correspondence, provides a different perspective on the same events that dominate the county's history from the settler point of view.