Free To Hell on a Fast Horse by Mark Lee Gardner Page B

the mercantile firm of L. G. Murphy & Co. and its successor, J. J. Dolan & Co., commonly known as “The House,” had the upper hand in just about every moneymaking venture in the region. It operated for a time as the post trader at Fort Stanton and received numerous government contracts for beef, corn, flour, and other provisions. In Lincoln, The House maintained a brewery, saloon, and restaurant, as well as a large store. It also performed, on a limited basis, the services of a bank. Yet The House’s unashamed greed (eventhough many of its business practices were not unusual for the time), its long reach into local government, and its connection to territorial power brokers in New Mexico’s capital—the infamous “Santa Fe Ring”—earned it considerable ill will among the locals.
    “Only those who have experienced it can realize the extent to which Murphy & Co. dominated the country and controlled its people, economy, and politics,” remembered one county resident. “All Lincoln County was cowed and intimidated by them. To oppose them was to court disaster.” Three men—John Henry Tunstall, Alexander A. McSween, and John S. Chisum—did oppose The House’s regional supremacy, and it cost two of them their lives.
    A twenty-four-year-old Englishman with plenty of gumption—and capital to go with it—John Henry Tunstall first arrived in LincolnCounty in November 1876, determined to carve out his own modest empire from its vast lands. He was also a sure enough dude, complete with tailored suits (he had a penchant for Harris tweed), riding out-fits, and top boots. His hair was sandy colored and wavy, though well groomed, and he sported chin whiskers and a pencil-thin mustache. In photographs, he appears as stiff and aristocratic as the man on the Prince Albert tobacco tins, but those close to the young Englishman thought he was good-looking and personable. He was a prolific letter writer, expounding at length to his father in England (his chief financial backer) on the Wild West and predicting that he would make a fortune there. His plans could just as easily have been written by a member of The House: “I propose to confine my operations to Lincoln County, but I intend to handle it in such a way as to get the half of every dollar that is made in the county by anyone, and with our means we could get things into that shape in three years, if we only used two thirds of our capital in the undertaking.”

    John Henry Tunstall.
Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico
    Tunstall had focused his sights on southeastern New Mexico because of a chance meeting with Lincoln attorney Alexander A. McSween at a Santa Fe hotel. McSween, a Scotsman ten years Tunstall’s senior, was new to the Territory as well, having arrived with his wife, Susan, in March 1875. With a drooping mustache as thick as his Scottish brogue, McSween had initially worked as a lawyer for The House, where he got an insider’s look into the firm’s many business dealings. Within a few months, McSween had used this privileged information to help Tunstall buy a cattle ranch and open a mercantile store in Lincoln. The pair also established a bank; cattleman John S. Chisum served as the bank’s president. Chisum had his own grievances against The House, whose loose policy when buying beef for its government contracts had served as an open invitation for rustlers to steal from Chisum’s herds on the Pecos.
    The carefully plotted competition from Tunstall and McSween came at a time when The House was financially on its knees (the principals were not the best businessmen). And the fact that Tunstall was an upper-class English Protestant, while The House hothead, Jimmy Dolan, and his partner, John Riley, were both Irish Catholic, made this even worse. Born in County Galway, Ireland, in 1848, Dolan had emigrated to the United States at age six. During the Civil War, he had been a drummer boy for one of the colorful Zouave regiments from New York