Legends of the Old West - BILLY THE KID Ep. 3 | “The Machine”

Episode Date: April 28, 2021

Tensions mount as Jimmy Dolan discovers the method he will use to destroy John Tunstall and Alex McSween. With support from the Santa Fe ring, Dolan begins to dismantle Tunstall's operation. Henry "Kid" Antrim transforms himself into William H. Bonney. He rides with Jesse Evans' outlaw gang, but as war looms in Lincoln County, Billy switches sides and joins the men who will soon form a legendary posse. Join Black Barrel+ for bingeable seasons with no commercials: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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lay on the street all night and into the next morning. Finally, with the cold January sun firmly in the sky, a hotel owner judged the scene to be safe enough to venture outside. He dragged the dead man off the main street of Las Cruces, New Mexico.

The previous night, a man named Quirino Fletcher was running his mouth. He bragged about escaping from a prison in northern Mexico. He had been sent to jail for murdering a man from Texas named Mansfield. Well, here in Las Cruces, he ran into friends of Mr. Mansfield. They didn't like his boastful talk of having killed their buddy. Around 10.30 p.m., three men blasted Fletcher six times with their pistols. Fletcher slumped into the dirt of Main Street with bullets in his head and body. And that's where he stayed, all night long. No one was arrested for the killing,

but everyone knew who did it. And they weren't about to risk offending the outlaws by touching the dead man. As a podcast network, our first priority has always been audio and the stories we're able to share with you. But we also sell merch and organizing that was made both possible and easy with Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell and grow at every stage of your business from the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage.

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Because businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash realm, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash r-e-a-l-m now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in. shopify.com slash realm. The next morning, a man who owned a hotel on Main Street decided they had waited long enough. He hauled Fletcher's body out of the thoroughfare. Presumably, life returned to normal shortly thereafter. Murder was a common occurrence in southern New Mexico in the 1870s, and the killers were well known in the area. It was never proved, though always suspected,

that outlaw Captain Jesse Evans and two of his cronies murdered Carino Fletcher on Main Street, January 19, 1876. The rampant lawlessness of Evans and his loose gang of outlaws called the Boys would eventually wear thin in the Las Cruces area, and Evans would lead his gang northeast to a county called Lincoln, where a war was brewing. When he did, he had a new recruit with him, a skinny young man who may still have called himself Kid Antrim. But because he was on the run for murder, he would soon change his name to William H. Bonney. From Black Barrel Media, this is Legends of the Old West. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this is a 10-part series about the most notorious outlaw in the history of the American West, Billy the Kid.

This is Episode 3, The Machine. Henry Antrim's movements are predictably hard to track after he fled Fort Grant in the wake of the killing of Frank Cahill. We know he headed east, back toward the area around his former hometown of Silver City. He probably followed the old smuggling trails that flowed through southern Arizona and New Mexico. If he did that, he would have run south of Silver City and ended up in Las Cruces, where smuggling kingpin John Kinney and outlaw Captain Jesse Evans waited. Jesse and his loose-knit band of killers and thieves had been on a horse-stealing spree in the fall of 1877. They snatched horses in the Las Cruces area and then drove them up to Lincoln. Then they stole horses in Lincoln and drove them back to Kinney's Ranch near Las Cruces. It was on one of these raids that a man recognized a new member of Jesse's gang. On October 1st, 1877, Jesse Evans and seven of his men stole some horses from a camp in the mountains south of Silver City.

The next day, the thieves passed a man on the road who knew Henry Antrim from Silver City, and the man recognized the young outlaw as one of the group. It was the beginning of a whirlwind month for the kid. As the group moved northeast toward Lincoln, they picked up members of the overall gang. By the time they got to the small town of Tularosa, they were 17 strong. They got drunk and shot up the town and terrorized the citizens. Then they moved up into the mountains south of Lincoln, where they received two important visitors, John Riley and James Longwell. Big changes had taken place around Lincoln in the spring and summer of 1877, before a drifter named Kid Antrim joined the boys.

Lawrence Murphy, who had been the czar of Lincoln County for almost a decade, was drinking himself to death. By the spring of 1877, he was basically useless. He sold his share of the L.G. Murphy Company to his protege, Jimmy Dolan. Dolan changed the name of the operation to the James J. Dolan Company, and he promoted the store's clerk to full partner. That partner was John Riley. So now Jimmy Dolan and John Riley ran the organization known as the House,

which was backed by the corrupt political machine called the Santa Fe Ring. At the same time as the leadership and ownership of the House passed from the old guard to the new guard, a young Englishman partnered with a Scotsman to form a competing company. John Tunstall, the Englishman, had arrived in Lincoln a year ago, in the fall of 1876. By the spring of 1877, as Jimmy Dolan took over for L.G. Murphy, Tunstall had bought land and cattle in Lincoln County.

And, in August, he completed construction of a store in the town of Lincoln that would be a direct threat to Jimmy Dolan's store. Tunstall was supported by a Scotsman named Alex McSween. McSween had been the debt collector and lawyer for the Murphy Dolan store before they'd had a falling out. The falling out proved to be an ongoing situation, and it would have terrible consequences very soon. But at the moment, the co-owner of the James J. Dolan store, John Riley, and an employee of the store, James Longwell, were having a party with outlaws at a mountain retreat. Dolan and Riley had long been associated with outlaw Jesse Evans and the gang of thieves known as the Boys. The Boys stole cattle and horses and sold them at rock-bottom prices to the Dolan Company. Then the Dolan Company sold them to other buyers who never asked where they came from.

It was a sweet racket, but there was one problem. The young upstart Englishman, John Tunstall. Tunstall was planning to cut in on Jimmy Dolan's action, and Dolan was not going to allow that to happen. The escalation toward war was about to begin. As the bonfire at the mountaintop party burned down to ashes, the group of 20 or so men split up. Some of them headed back toward Tularosa, the town they had just terrorized a couple days ago. Some of them headed east toward the Seven Rivers community. The ranchers of Seven Rivers had recently reached an uneasy truce with cattle baron John Chisholm. Chisholm had been in the area

for a decade, and he had a massive ranch and a massive cattle herd. When smaller ranchers moved into the land south of Chisholm, they stole his cattle and used them to start their own herds, or sold them to Murphy and Dolan. Either way, Chisholm was mad. He and his cowboys fought the Seven Rivers ranchers, and by extension, Murphy and Dolan. Shots were fired and people were killed, but ultimately the two sides were able to make a tentative peace. And at this point, Chisholm didn't actually own the cattle that roamed his lands. He had sold the entire herd to a company in St. Louis, and the man who had brokered the deal was Alex McSween. So that's how the two sides stacked up. Jimmy Dolan was on one side, allied with the Santa Fe Ring, the Seven Rivers Ranchers,

and the outlaw gang run by Jesse Evans. And John Tunstall was on the other side, allied with small-time lawyer Alex McSween and cattle king John Chisholm, who was easing into retirement. And if that sounds like a mismatch, it was. And it would have tragic consequences in just a couple months. Henry the Kid Antrim would join John Tunstall's side soon, but for now, he was in Jesse Evans' gang. He was at the mountaintop party, and he was riding down to Seven Rivers with the rest of the outlaws.

But this is where fate would intervene for the kid. When the bandits rode into the Seven Rivers area, most of them stayed at one ranch while the kid stayed at another. No one knows why the kid went to a separate ranch, but it might have changed his life. Because John Tunstall's foreman was on his way to Seven Rivers to arrest Jesse Evans. A month earlier, Jesse Evans and some of his gang, which may have included the kid, stole horses from John Tunstall. Tunstall's foreman, Dick Brewer, grabbed a couple neighbors and chased the bandits. Brewer's friends were two men who would eventually become regulators, Josiah Doc Skurlock and Charlie Beaudry. The three men trailed the bandits all the way to Mesilla, the stronghold of smuggling kingpin John Kinney, but they couldn't recover

the horses. A month later, at the same time the bandits were having a party in the mountains, Brewer was the foreman of a grand jury in Lincoln. He made sure the jury swore out arrest warrants for the horse thieves and he was deputized as a constable to serve them. Brewer rounded up a posse and then convinced the local sheriff to join the effort. The sheriff, William Brady, needed to be convinced because he was allied with Jimmy Dolan, which meant he was also allied with Jesse Evans, which meant he was against John Tunstall and Dick Brewer. Brady was not wild about going on this raid and possibly making enemies of both Evans and Dolan, but eventually he agreed to do his duty, and the posse rode to the ranch

near Seven Rivers where the gang was rumored to be staying. The 15 men of the posse confronted the seven bandits. Shots were fired as the outlaws mounted a brief standoff. But the bandits were outnumbered and outgunned, and they soon surrendered. Brewer took four men into custody, three of whom were Jesse Evans and his top lieutenants, Frank Baker and Tom Hill, who were stone-cold killers. As the posse headed back toward Lincoln with its prisoners, the kid had escaped the action at the ranch. He likely stayed in the Seven Rivers area while the leaders of the gang were carted off to jail by John Tunstall's foreman. During this time, the kid might have worked for cattle king

John Chisholm, the arch enemy of the Seven Rivers Ranchers. But like everything in the kid's life up to this point, it was short-lived. The outlaw gang needed to break its leaders out of jail, and the kid would soon find himself in jail. And at that point, he would reach a crossroads in his life, and he would likely be offered a deal by John Tunstall and Dick Brewer. Three weeks in the Lincoln Jail would have been a miserable experience. It wasn't the classic Old West jail you see in movies.

It was a dungeon. It was a hole in the ground with an adobe building on top of it. Jesse Evans and his three men were allowed out of the hole for one hour a day. They got an hour of exercise first thing in the morning, and for the remaining 23 hours a day, they were crammed together in a pit, which is why they were probably desperate to escape when the jailbreak finally happened in mid-November. Sometime around November 16th, a group of men who were interested in the freedom of Jesse Evans gathered outside Lincoln. They were a mix of the corrupt forces in Lincoln County.

They were members of the gang. They were Seven Rivers ranchers. And they were cattlemen who worked for Murphy and Dolan. And maybe they included the kid. Overnight on the 16th, they rode into Lincoln. There were around 30 of them, all armed. And as they marched up to the jail, they found a lone

guard stationed in the Adobe building. For the last couple weeks, six guards had stood watch at all times, but tonight, Sheriff Brady had sent five of them home. The one man who remained looked out at 30 gunmen, and he politely stepped aside, which he had probably been told to do anyway. The men broke down the door to the dungeon with heavy rocks that had been conveniently piled next to the jail. A few minutes later, and with very little effort, Jesse Evans and his three men were free. They climbed onto their horses and galloped out of town. It was probably the easiest jailbreak in the history of New Mexico, and it had almost certainly been organized, or at least blessed, by Jimmy

Dolan. The midnight jailbreak surprised no one in Lincoln County, least of all John Tunstall. Every man who participated in the action, from the gang members to the ranchers to the cattlemen to Sheriff Brady, was allied with Dolan. While Jesse Evans had been in jail, Tunstall had made a play to flip him. Tunstall had gone out of his way to try to become friendly with Evans and his men. He sent them gifts that included whiskey and new clothes. Evans and his men. He sent them gifts that included whiskey and new clothes. Tunstall still hadn't recovered the horses that had been stolen by Jesse's gang two months ago, and at the very least, he wanted them back. Maybe he thought he could bribe Jesse into telling him who had the animals. Or maybe, with a lot of luck, he could get Jesse to change sides and join him in a fight against Dolan.

Neither happened, but it seemed like fate stepped in at this point. The person who had at least a couple of Tunstall's horses was Kid Antrim, and not long after the mob broke Jesse out of jail, the Kid was arrested and thrown in the same dungeon that Jesse had recently vacated. The kid was arrested and thrown in the same dungeon that Jesse had recently vacated. The man who arrested the kid was probably Deputy Constable Dick Brewer, foreman of the Tunstall operation. Tunstall probably saw the kid as the next best option to Jesse Evans. The kid had been with the boys for two months.

He knew their inner workings. He knew their relationship to Dolan, and he had impressed people in the area with his ability to ride and shoot. If Tunstall couldn't get the kid to testify in open court against Jesse Evans and Jimmy Dolan, then the kid would be an asset as a hired gun. Either option would get the kid out of jail, and he probably jumped at the chance. option would get the kid out of jail, and he probably jumped at the chance. So, in December 1877, the kid switched sides and went to work for John Tunstall under the supervision of Dick Brewer. People still called him Kid, but by this point, if not sooner, he was using the name William H. Bonney.

No one knows for sure where the name William H. Bonney came from. The best guesses are that Billy adopted his stepfather's first name, William, and then used his own first name, Henry, to complete the first two-thirds of his famous alias. As for the Bonnie, a respected New Mexico historian named Herman Wisner theorized that Bonnie was the kid's original last name. He said the kid was not from New York, but from Missouri. Wisner spent years tracing the lineage of a family in Missouri named Bonnie, and he speculated that the kid's mother, Catherine, was actually born Catherine Bonnie. So when it came time for the kid to give himself a new name, he simply reverted back to his old name, Henry Bonnie, and then added William to the front.

name, Henry Bonney, and then added William to the front. Regardless of the origins of the name, the kid was now Billy Bonney, and he was about to become a kind of bodyguard and enforcer for John Tunstall. He was probably the smallest and skinniest enforcer in the Old West, but Tunstall couldn't afford to be picky about his gunmen. And Bonney and the other men of Tunstall's crew would be pressed into service in less than a month. A rapidly escalating series of events threatened the lives and property of John Tunstall and his advisor Alex McSween. It began around Christmas when McSween and cattle king John Chisholm were thrown in jail in Las Vegas, New Mexico. McSween and his wife Susan and John Chisholm were headed to the East Coast for an extended trip. Jimmy Dolan, a master manipulator, used this innocent vacation as the catalyst to begin the downfall of John Tunstall.

vacation as the catalyst to begin the downfall of John Tunstall. McSween had successfully collected about $7,000 of the $10,000 life insurance policy of Emil Fritz, the first business partner of L.G. Murphy. The money was supposed to go to Fritz's brother and sister in Lincoln County, but McSween was withholding it until he was sure he could get his commission. After all the fees and expenses, the brother and sister would receive about $2,000 of the $7,000 total. But this gave Jimmy Dolan the chance to force the power of the Santa Fe Ring onto McSween, and then Tunstall. Dolan sat down with the brother and sister. He convinced them that Alex McSween was actually fleeing the territory, that he was moving to the East Coast, and he was stealing their money.

They agreed to charge McSween with embezzlement. With Dolan guiding them, the brother and sister claimed McSween owed them $10,000, which was a lie, and everyone knew it. That sum was five times the amount they were owed from the life insurance policy, and it was many times more than the value of everything McSween owned. And that was how Dolan would destroy McSween and then Tunstall. Dolan planned to confiscate everything they owned to satisfy this huge debt. to confiscate everything they owned to satisfy this huge debt. Dolan met with two of his friends, a district attorney and a district court judge who were both staunch members of the Santa Fe Ring. They swore out arrest warrants for Alex McSween and John Chisholm, since Chisholm was allied with

McSween and was traveling with him at that very moment. Then Dolan wired the leader of the Santa Fe ring, Thomas Catron, and told him of the plan. Catron immediately wired the county sheriff who controlled the area around Las Vegas, New Mexico, and told him to arrest McSween and Chisholm on site. And he did. As soon as McSween and Chisholm pulled into town, the sheriff threw them in jail. They fought through two weeks of legal nonsense and assorted misadventures before something happened that could be viewed as positive. And it certainly wasn't much. In the second week of January, 1878, two deputy sheriffs escorted Alex and Susan McSween home to Lincoln, where McSween would be promptly placed under house arrest.

John Chisholm was still stuck in jail in Las Vegas, choosing to fight the legal battle from there. As soon as McSween returned to Lincoln, the real fight began. Jimmy Dolan kept the wheels of the Santa Fe political machine moving in an attempt to crush Tunstall and McSween, and he had fresh incentive to make his plan work. The house, owned by Dolan and Riley, was basically bankrupt. Dolan took one last drastic step to keep his business afloat. He mortgaged everything to the leader of the Santa Fe ring, Thomas Catron. All the land, all the livestock, all the buildings, all the goods in the stores. Dolan and Riley would lose it all if they couldn't turn their business around, which meant they had to wipe out Tunstall and McSween.

The meeting that brought all the combatants together one final time happened in early February at the home of the district court judge down in Mesilla, outside Las Cruces. It was a hearing to settle the dispute over the life insurance money. McSween had to answer to the charge of embezzlement. He was there with four men, John Tunstall, the Justice of the Peace from Lincoln, his law partner, and a deputy sheriff from Las Vegas

who had escorted him home and was now acting as his bodyguard. On the other side was the Santa Fe Ring, represented by the district court judge, the district attorney, Jimmy Dolan, and several others. After two days of haggling, it was decided that the case had to be postponed until April. It was decided that the case had to be postponed until April. The judge ordered McSween to be taken to jail until he could post bail, as an assurance that he wouldn't flee the county. McSween said he could post the bond immediately, but the district attorney refused to accept it, which meant McSween was guaranteed to go to the dungeon when he returned to Lincoln.

This was the Santa Fe Ring in action. McSween, Tunstall, and the rest of their party left Mesilla with the understanding that the whole mess would be revisited in two months. But Jimmy Dolan wasn't going to wait two months. As soon as Tunstall and McSween departed, Dolan met with the district attorney and they wrote a piece of paper that would lead to the first murder of the Lincoln County War. Emile Fritz's brother and sister still claimed McSween owed them $10,000. Jimmy Dolan and the lawyer for the brother and sister worked with the district attorney to prepare a civil suit against McSween for $10,000. As a security for the lawsuit, Dolan asked the district court judge to issue a writ of attachment for McSween's property.

This meant Dolan could seize everything McSween owned until it added up to $10,000. And then Dolan went one step further. Because it appeared to everyone that McSween and Tunstall were business partners, Dolan would attach Tunstall's property to the court order as well. This was the masterstroke. Now Dolan could use the Sheriff of Lincoln, his friend William Brady, to confiscate all property owned by McSween and Tunstall and hold it until the legal proceedings were done, which would be at least two more months. As McSween and Tunstall made the long journey back to Lincoln, they had no idea Jimmy Dolan had just sealed their fates. Dolan, accompanied by Jesse Evans and his outlaws, raced ahead of Tunstall and McSween. He arrived two days before his enemies and quickly put his

men to work. Dolan's business partner, John Riley, gleefully swept out the dungeon cell in anticipation of McSween's arrival. Sheriff Brady enlisted some men to catalog everything in McSween's house for the writ of attachment, including the house itself. When Tunstall and McSween finally returned to Lincoln, they discovered they were in serious trouble. The deputy sheriff who was guarding McSween

realized it could be a death sentence to give McSween to John Riley and Sheriff Brady. Any number of accidents could happen in that dungeon. The deputy refused to turn McSween over to Brady. He kept McSween under house arrest for his own protection. John Tunstall was free to move about as he pleased, and when he found Brady and Brady's goons taking inventory in his store, he was furious. He grabbed his best friend, Robert Weidenman, and two of his hired guns,

Billy Bonney and Fred Waite, and marched over to his store. Tunstall and Weidenman strode inside with pistols strapped to their hips. Billy Bonney and Fred Waite stood outside the door with Winchester rifles cocked and ready. Tunstall had no problem using violence to protect his interests. That's why he had a whole ranch full of men who were good with guns. But he wasn't stupid. In Mesilla a couple days ago, Jimmy Dolan had tried to pick a fight with him. Dolan had drawn his gun three times and dared Tunstall to engage in a shooting match. But Tunstall stayed cool.

He refused to participate. Now Tunstall and Weidenman squared off with Brady and Brady's minions. Tunstall threatened Brady. He said everyone in the store would pay a heavy price if this charade continued. And surprisingly, Brady relented. A little bit. He removed six horses and two mules from the inventory list and allowed Tunstall to take them to his ranch. Tunstall instructed Widenman, Bonney, and Waite to drive the animals to his main ranch on the Feliz River. Bonnie and Waite to drive the animals to his main ranch on the Feliz River. For the moment, a bloody confrontation had been avoided. Tunstall was not going to shrink from a fight, but right now, at his store in the middle of town, it was not the time or the place for a

gun battle. When the battle finally happened seven days later, Tunstall would not see it coming. He would not get to choose the time or the place, and he would suffer for it. Next time on Legends of the Old West, the power struggle between Jimmy Dolan and John Tunstall escalates, and then finally leads to murder. A cold-blooded killing forces everyone to choose sides. There can be no middle ground, as Lincoln County is on the brink of open warfare. That's next week on Legends of the Old West.

Research assistance for this season was provided by Aaron Aylsworth. Original music by Rob Valliere. Editing and sound design by Dave Harrison. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. Please visit our website, Black Barrel Media, for more details and join review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. Please visit our website, Black Barrel Media, for more details and join us on social media. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B Barrel Media on Twitter. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. So join Rakuten and start getting cash back at Sephora, Old Navy, Expedia, and other stores you love.

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