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THE RIVALS
Lawrence Gustave Murphy was born in County Wexford, Ireland, in 1831, or so he said. Hoping to be ordained a Catholic priest, he graduated from St. Patrick’s College at Maynooth. But then he was expelled from the seminary for some infraction, and in disgust or shame he fled the potato famine by emigrating to Buffalo, New York. Enlisting at twenty-one in the US Army’s 5th Infantry and serving in Texas, Murphy rose to the rank of hard-bitten sergeant before he was commissioned a first lieutenant in the New Mexico Volunteers in 1861. Became Kit Carson’s regimental adjutant and quartermaster. When the Confederate Army retreated from the Southwest, the Volunteers found field exercise in slaughtering the ever-vexing Navajos and Apaches. All the killing gave Murphy a certain outlook.
Thin, five feet nine, mustached and goateed, with ever-squinting green eyes and a leonine head of Irish red hair, Murphy could be suave and gregarious in good company, but a childhood in the Great Famine and a hard, violent life in the Army had given him the fierce, canny, adamant disposition of a hungry dog. He made it to the rank of captain at Fort Sumner, then was a brevet major and commanding officer at Fort Stanton before mustering out in 1866 to form L. G. Murphy & Co. with another former officer, Lieutenant Colonel Emil Fritz, who handled the finances loaned to them by a wealthy entrepreneur. At first they operated a civilian brewery, saloon, and store for provisions at Fort Stanton, but a fracas with an Army captain got them evicted from government property and they shifted their operation nine miles northeast to the village of Lincoln.
Emil Fritz, the cofounder of the House, was not yet forty-two but sick unto death with heart and kidney diseases. An osteopath falsified the German’s medical exam so he could sign up for a ten-thousand-dollar policy from the Merchants Life Assurance Co. of New York in order to give his sister in America a nest egg. Emil named Alexander McSween the executor of his estate and then voyaged back to Stuttgart for an auf Wiedersehen with his family. In June 1874 he finally passed away. Would have left a gaping hole in the establishment were it not for James Joseph Dolan stepping up like he was Murphy’s favored son and the store was his entitlement.
Jimmy, as he was called, was born in County Galway, Ireland in 1848, the son of a tallow chandler. Came over as a boy and attended a Christian Brothers grammar school while inhabiting the Five Points slum of New York City, but he got fed up with education and took a full-time job at twelve in a lingerie store. Enlisted as a drummer boy with the New York Zouaves in 1863, reenlisted to massacre Indians in Kansas, mustered out of the Army at Fort Stanton in 1869, and hired on as a clerk with Fritz and Murphy, having soldiered for the officers and seen they were kindred spirits. A few years later, when the L. G. Murphy & Co. provisions store and brewery was at the fringe of Fort Stanton and the village of Lincoln was still called San Placito, the fiery Dolan had been prosecuted for murder but was acquitted for Wild West reasons.
Oh, but he was a hotheaded pipsqueak, just a weedy five feet two, and as sourly pretty as a petulant damsel with his wavy, brown, ambrosial locks and ever-pouting disposition. Still, L. G. Murphy was so fond of him that most mistook them as doting father and son, and there was unseemly gossip about them sharing a bed.
In the fall of 1874 Murphy held the grand opening of the House and permitted himself to be captured by a wet-plate collodion camera for a formal carte de visite, with a glowering, wool-suited Dolan standing beside his seated boss, a hand affectionately atop Murphy’s right shoulder as the brevet major, probate judge, and wealthy entrepreneur seemed to gaze off at his fabulous future.
The House was the third largest privately owned building in all of the New Mexico Territory and the first with a pitched roof. Within was a jammed store, a saloon, post office, savings and loan, a second-floor Masonic hall, and a lavish, high-ceilinged residence tidied by the housekeeper, Mrs. Lloyd. All of it made possible by overcharging for necessaries, practicing usury through their bank, selling deeds to properties the company didn’t own and then foreclosing, and by finagling to win lucrative government contracts to be the sole suppliers of meat, produce, hay, charcoal, sugar, whiskey, and other commodities—much of it acquired illegally—to the region’s Indian reservations and Army posts.
And some tricky accounting was afoot, with L. G. Murphy & Co. getting paid by the federal government for fictitious sales of hundreds of cattle from L. G.’s thirty-thousand-acre Carrizozo Springs ranch, for which of course he had no clear title. With Sheriff William J. Brady his employee and the highest government authority in Lincoln County, there was little Murphy did that was judged illegal by civic authorities.
Yet, in spite of all that financial heft and those seemingly favorable circumstances, by 1877 the overextended House had fallen on hard times and Lawrence Gustave Murphy and his partners were scrounging for money. Alexander McSween knew far too much about the operations of the House, so when he demanded payment of his immense legal bills, Murphy could do nothing more than transfer ownership to him of six acres on the plaza and his former adobe house next to the Wortley Hotel for “$1.00 and other good and sufficient considerations.” Soon after that Murphy found out he had ravaging intestinal cancer, for which he claimed his doctor recommended he drink as much whiskey as he could handle to dull the pain. Warned that he had less than a year of his crooked life left, worn down with illness and misfortune, and in a perpetual state of inebriation, Murphy was convinced to withdraw from running the House, deeding it over to Jimmy Dolan, whom he also designated heir of his estate. The firm became Jas. J. Dolan & Co., and under that scheming management could have achieved prosperity again but for the undercutting competition of J. H. Tunstall & Co. General Merchandise.
* * *
Kid Bonney heard much of that from Waite and Brewer at nights and on the jouncing ride up to Lincoln from the Ruidoso ranch along the Ham Mills trail. Hitching his horse in front of Tunstall’s store, he looked kitty-corner to the wide, handsome, two-storied House, with its second-floor veranda, which in the future would have dual wings of stair steps. And below in the shade of the veranda was L. G. Murphy aslant in a ladder-back chair, a quart of hooch cozied by his gloved hands and his overcoat collar up in defense against the cold air. Seeing something that troubled him, Murphy hurtfully stood up and tottered to the House’s entrance, jarring open the front door to shout inside.
The Kid heard a man say, “They have a hankering for my hide,” and he turned to see Alexander A. McSween walking eastward from his home next door to the Tunstall store, where he leased his law office. Waite, Brewer, and the Kid followed him inside.
McSween was a haughty, defiant Canadian in his thirties with a horseshoe mustache, a ribbony bow tie, and a Prince Albert suit underneath an Inverness topcoat. Educated for the Presbyterian ministry, Alex left it to enroll in law school at W
ashington University in St. Louis, staying with that program for just the first year of the usual two before hanging out his shingle in Eureka, Kansas. In 1873 he married Susan Hummer, and because of his financial malfeasance—but lying that it was due to his asthma—the couple fled to anything-goes New Mexico Territory and found out by chance there was no attorney in all of Lincoln County. At once it seemed to him there was a lucrative vacuum he could fill.
At first McSween lawyered and collected debts for L. G. Murphy, but he changed partners to waltz with an Englishman flush with his father’s money and with the financial backing of John Chisum, and he seemed to feel no compunction about conveying to John H. Tunstall the confidential information of his former clients. As the House was hovering near bankruptcy because of its financial reverses and owings on construction loans, J. J. Dolan sought revenge against a traitor by convincing Emil Fritz’s sister to swear out a warrant accusing Alex McSween of embezzlement of Emil’s insurance money. Which was true, for McSween’s piety did not overcome his chicanery, and he had deposited into his own St. Louis bank account the Emil Fritz settlement he’d gotten from the Merchants Life Assurance Co., permitting him to dress his wife in high fashion and furnish his house splendidly. Emil Fritz’s sister never received a cent. In a further annoyance, L. G. Murphy sued Emil’s estate and its executor, McSween, for $76,000 he claimed was owed him, but that action was dismissed by the probate court on January 10.
With a hefty overhead and fewer sales after Tunstall undercut their store prices and offered farmers credit, the House was going under, so on January 12, 1878, in a false gesture of friendship to the owners, the Santa Fe attorney and racketeer Thomas B. Catron accepted a mortgage on the House, its merchandise and past-due accounts, as well as the horses, cattle, hayfields, and forty acres of real estate associated with it.
On January 18, with a faith in the justice system that was without foundation, John H. Tunstall foolishly wrote a letter to the editor of the Mesilla Valley Independent indignantly charging Sheriff Brady and Jimmy Dolan with embezzling fifteen hundred dollars in taxes paid by Alexander McSween and meant for the commonwealth.
So it was that the Englishman John H. Tunstall and the Canadian Alexander A. McSween became the villains the Irish merchants in Lincoln could blame for everything that had gone sour.
And now the Kid stirred sugar into his hot coffee as he watched through a plate-glass window that warped them Jimmy Dolan and L. G. Murphy crossing Lincoln’s only street to the Tunstall store, Murphy flinging a hand grandly and hollering sentences that were consumed by a hungry wind, and Jimmy crutching his staggering boss, a Winchester rifle cradled in his left arm.
McSween was watching, too. He took off his caped Inverness topcoat and then his citified top hat. His kinky brown hair was stacked as high as a chocolate cake. “Escort Jimmy into my office,” he said and headed to the back of the store with his hat on the garment folded over his right arm. The Kid noticed that he carried no gun, a nonesuch in that era.
Dolan and Murphy let in the weather, then loudly shut the door. Cold eddied off their greatcoats.
Without emotion, Dick Brewer flatly said, “Well, this is awkward.”
Dolan flew his glare around the store, despising whatever he lit on. “Where’s Alex?”
“Yonder,” Waite said and shot his right thumb backward over his shoulder. “But just you.”
“Sure fine,” Dolan said and marched to the lawyer’s office, his Wellingtons clobbering the hardwood floor.
“And the Englishman not here either?” Murphy asked. His Irish accent made it “Anglish” and “I-ther.”
“At the Jinglebob Ranch with John Chisum,” said Waite.
“Well, more’s the pity,” L.G. said, falling back onto a Chippendale side chair by the stove and clomping the heels of his boots out wide. His head lolled until he fixed on the Kid, and he asked in his Irish accent, “Who might ye be, then?”
“William H. Bonney. They call me Kid.”
