Such Men as Billy the Kid

By Joel Jacobsen

Book Overview

During the 1870s a group of merchants and their allies, known as "The House," gained control over the economy of Lincoln County, New Mexico. In 1877 this control was challenged by an English entrepreneur, John Tunstall. The House violently resisted the interloper, eventually killing him; Tunstall's employees and supporters, known as the Regulators, sought to take vengeance on the House by killing those responsible for Tunstall's death. Among the Regulators was a young man known as Billy the Kid.

This story of greed, violence, and death has entered American folklore through the mythologizing of the career of Billy the Kid and also through a tendency to see the Lincoln County War as an archetype of Western history. As are Dodge City, Boot Hill, and the OK Corral, the Lincoln County War is emblematic of frontier lawlessness.

The story has been often retold, and central to many of the accounts is the question of right and wrong, even of good and evil; was Billy the Kid merely a thug, a gun-for-hire, in an amoral turf battle between rival gangs? Or was the Kid actually a participant in a brave but doomed attempt to wrest control of a defenseless town from a corrupt and vicious band?

Basing his account on a careful reexamination of the evidence, particularly on expressions of public sentiment, court records, and the actions of Tunstall and the House, Jacobsen subjects traditional attitudes--both the "Billy as martyr" and the "war among thieves" explanations--to a searching reexamination, and finds that--as with most things in life--the truth lies somewhat between.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803276060
• ISBN13: 9780803276062
• Release Date: July 1997
• Publisher: Bison Books
• Length: 322 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.7" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Billy the Kid was one of the good guys

Jacobsen's account of the Lincoln County War amounts to a long overdue exposé of the political corruption of New Mexico's territorial Republican establishment, and that establishment's willingness to kill all manner of innocent persons to maintain the capital stakes of its respective players. I write this statement as a modern Republican activist. The viewpoint is necessary, however, to understand modern New Mexico politics, right down to the Anglo-Hispanic division that all too often still exists in that state.From the murder of English entrepreneur John Henry Tunstall by a "posse" of outlaws sent with the blessing of Lincoln County Sheriff John Brady, one of the primary villains in the affair, to the cold-blooded murder of Tunstall's lawyer and surviving partner, Alexander McSween, with the help of another "posse" led by famed murderer and rapist John Kinney and his own army of bandits, the reader is shocked to see the misapplication of law to protect the guilty. In this entire affair, William Henry Bonney, later known as "Billy the Kid", was simply a Tunstall hand and loyalist, and one of many Tunstall and McSween partisans to carry the fight to the perpetrators when the corrupt Sheriff Brady refused to have the murderers rounded up and tried. The Tunstall and McSween partisans, commissioned by the local justice of the peace to bring in the killers Brady would not, formed themselves into a semi-formalized group calling themselves "the Regulators". Here, Billy Bonney was one of the Regulators' crack shots, but the leaders were Dick Brewer and Frank McNab, both killed in the course of the war. Against the regulators, the corrupt establishment brought to bear the weight of the established military outpost at Ft. Stanton, west of Lincoln. The commander, Col. Dudley, actively breached the posse comitatus act of 1878 to side with the forces of J.J. Dolan, Murphy, US attorneys Rynerson and Catron, and Governor Axtell. Thus, Dudley committed his men to the final siege of the regulators in Lincoln, which culminated in the shocking murder of Alexander McSween and two partisans as they attempted to surrender to Deputy Beckwith.The story vindicates Billy Bonney to some extent. While the murders of Tunstall and McSween were never punished (the establishment never attempted to punish them), Bonney was the only one singled out for execution. The appearance, in fact, is that the territorial government of Lew Wallace chose him as the scapegoat for the general breakdown in public order. Indeed, the author successfully demonstrates that the "Lincoln County War" resulted from the partisanship of successive territorial governors, and the federal officers in Santa Fe, in a matter having to do with two competing enterprises in Lincoln. In this sense, the Lincoln County War was a case of Republican monopolists bringing in armed paramilitary forces to get rid of their upstart English competitor, who was thriving on the patronage of the ancestral Hispanic community. Th

This book is pretty good

I can smell revisionist history and political correctness a mile away, but I must say, I didn't find any in this book. I'm a bit surprised that another reviewer felt that way. The probability that a shifty, shadowy 21 year old "kid" was not the mover and shaker in this sordid little war should surprise no one. I don't know Mr. Jacobsen's political leanings, but his writing is crisp, clear and a pleasure to read. This in spite of the fact that the Lincoln County War's causes were the rather mundane ones of protection of business and political interests that escalated out of control. Jacobsen has his opinions no question, but he still makes a good case and he is a very lucid writer. He doesn't preach an agenda. I found the book interesting and informative.

The first "must buy" since Utley's books for Billy buffs.

The most revealing, entertaining and well-written factual account of the Lincoln County (NM) wars since Utley's last book. No less a newspaper than The Washington Post calls this a "lively, lucid, compelling account of complex and confusing events about which scholars are still puzzling." The Post is correct (Kirkus is wrong). If you're a Billy the Kid junkie, first read Utley's "Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life." THEN, read this book by Jacobsen. From Utley, you'll get to know Billy. From Jacobsen, you'll discover that Bill Bonney was mostly a hanger-on who became an overnight celebrity and was killed shortly thereafter. The REAL players in this story are Tunstall and Murphy and Dolan and McSween and Catron and Brady -- so much so, that not until the final third of the book does the Kid REALLY come into play. If you like your history unvarnished, the sources impeccably reproduced, the background thorough -- this is the book for you. Whoever wrote the Kirkus review is wrong. This is not only entertaining, it is fascinating in its human portrayals of people out to make a buck and control county politics in the new territory of New Mexico. Trust the Chicago Tribune, which describes Jacobsen's book as "...a tonic to the hysterical and sensational accounts of the past."