Lengthy
feud between
rival factions in
Lincoln County, New Mexico in the
1870s and
1880s.
It all began when lawyer
Alexander McSween,
John Chisum, and an
Englishman named
John Tunstall tried to break the
Murphy-Dolan-Riley monopoly that owned the
store,
bank,
hotel,
saloon,
freighting, and
law in
Lincoln.
Skirmishes between the two
factions started in
1875, when McSween refused to
sell a dead client's 300 head of
cattle to Murphy.
After the McSween-Chisum-Tunstall faction built a
rival store in Lincoln, the Murphy-Dolan-Riley
faction tried to force them
out of business, even recruiting the
sheriff to threaten potential
customers away from the new store.
The local
magistrate slapped
attachments on all of McSween's
property, which included Tunstall's
ranch. An extremely large
posse of 30 men set out on
February 18, 1878 to raid the ranch. Tunstall had been
tipped off the night before and set off for town accompanied by his
ranch hands (including
William Bonney, better known as
Billy the Kid) to discuss the attachments. However, the posse
gunned Tunstall down in the road.
A week later, one of Tunstall's hands finagled the
constableship and issued
arrest warrants for the
outlaw posse members -- only two were
captured and
killed, while the others eluded arrest.
A couple of months later, the sheriff and one of his
deputies were shot from behind a wall.
Billy the Kid and another two Tunstall hands were
indicted, but the
killing brought the
army into town. McSween and a dozen men holed up in his
townhouse and traded
shots with the Murphy faction on July 15. A
troop of 60
soldiers, accompanied by a
Gatling gun and a
howitzer from
Fort Stanton, arrived on the 19th. The
house was set on
fire to
prevent the men from escaping under the cover of
darkness -- about half the men, including
Billy the Kid, escaped, but McSween was shot five times as he ran out his
front door. With McSween's
death, the
war ended.