In his Preface Utley writes

Unlike the High Noon in which Gary Cooper is the lone hero, the Lincoln County High Noon boasts not a single hero. Readers who must have a sympathetic character to identify with may put this book down now.

But I, who usually do put down a book when I don’t like anyone in it, didn’t this time. I was rewarded with a meticulously annotated tale told with an acid pen that debunks every myth you ever heard concerning the 1878-1881 Lincoln County War in New Mexico Territory, including the one about Billy the Kid.

First of all, they were all drunk.

Like firearms, whiskey was always within reach and more or less constantly imbibed. “Almost every person took a drink,” recalled Lily Klasner. “Men who drank,” she observed, “became quarrelsome, and were for settling their difficulties with some sort of fight, using fists, knives, or shooting irons. The litany of shootings in Lincoln County during the early 1870s, as set down in the newspapers, betrays whiskey almost invariably as an ingredient. The code [of the West] governed not only drunken riffraff. Time and again, prominent citizens shot it out as well.

And about that code of the West.

Fiction writers did not create the code…it had more lethal consequences than at any other time in history because of the casual attitude toward death and destruction spawned by the Civil War and Reconstruction. Texans came into New Mexico with dark and bitter memories of Reconstruction excesses at home…Nearly everyone carried a Winchester rifle or carbine and a Colt’s six-shooter, and if someone wronged you, no matter how trivially, you shot it out on the spot.

Guns and booze, mixed in with government fraud and massive outright thefts that only began with rustling, and a social acceptance of violence and murder as a means of solving disputes. What could go wrong? In Lincoln County in the year 1878 just about everything did. The instigator was John Tunstall, a 24-year old English ne’er-do-well cast out by his family who came into New Mexico to make his fortune and he didn’t care how. Ah, but Lawrence G. Murphy was there before him. Owner of the largest mercantile in Lincoln and

Master of fraudulent practice, he regularly fattened his returns from government contracts by falsifying vouchers, overcounting Indians, inflating average beef weight, and other such crooked devices. From outlaw gangs he bought stolen cattle at cut rates and turned them in on his contracts at full price. For the area’s farmers, he fixed the prices both of buying and selling. Not surprisingly, debits usually exceeded credits…He got ranchers into debt, then ran them off and resold their spreads to newcomers for exorbitant sums, since most of the county was public domain, such transactions rarely involved legal title.

Tunstall had no notion of coming in as a new broom; he just wanted everything Murphy had without all the bother of stealing it for himself. One thing led to another and he was dead before he was twenty-five. His partner Alex McSween, who should have known better, succeeded him in death five short months later. Things did not settle down afterward, as the gunfighters hired by Tunstall and Murphy spent a winter looting and raping and burning and murdering their way across Lincoln County.

Territorial governor Lew Wallace, hired by President Hayes to clean up this mess, instead spent his first five months on the job in the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe finishing his novel, Ben Hur. Priorities. When he did eventually show up in Lincoln he stuck around just long enough to declare victory and promptly decamped, never to return. Local authorities made a stab at charging the perpetrators and trying them. They were aided in this when Billy the Kid turned state’s evidence on his erstwhile fellow gangbangers. (See “not a single hero” above.) Almost everyone who went to trial was convicted and almost none of them went to jail.

In his “Post-Mortem” Utley writes of four underlying themes in the Lincoln County War. The first was, you guessed it, liquor.

Everywhere on the frontier, nearly all men drank nearly all the time, which made nearly all men more or less drunk most of the time.

The second was, of course

…the instant accessibility of firearms…When whiskey or any other cause sparked the instinct to violence, guns could be quickly summoned to the fray, with frequently mortal effect.

The third was the thirst for money and power, a virtual meme of the Gilded Age in itself, and the fourth was the code of the West.

Avenge insult or wrong, real or imagined, the code decreed. Never retreat before an aggressor. Any degree of violence is permissible, including death. “I’ll die before I’ll run,” vowed practitioners of the code.

Not quite the white hats versus the black hats of Hollywood, is it? There is more truth in the works of Louis L’Amour than I had previously thought.

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Fun fact: Utley points out that none of this narrative’s protagonists, Tunstall, Murphy, or Chisum, showed any interest in women. He makes a weak case largely based on the kind and quality of men he surrounded himself with that Murphy was gay. Tunstall and Chisum appeared to have been asexual.

I wonder if one day some graduate student looking for a thesis might explore the possibility that they were displacing the biological urge to procreate with the lust for and pursuit of power. And if it has happened elsewhere, and elsewhen.

Book Review Monday Chatter Billy the Kid High Noon in Lincoln Lincoln County War Robert M. Utley