The Lincoln County War was an Old West range war between rival factions in 1878 in New Mexico Territory. The feud became famous because of the participation of a number of notable figures of the Old West, including Billy the Kid, sheriffs William Brady and Pat Garrett, cattle rancher John Chisum, lawyer and businessman Alexander McSween, and the general store monopolist Lawrence Murphy.
The war was fictionalized in several Hollywood films, including: John Wayne's Chisum in 1970, and the 1988 film Young Guns.
The conflict arose between two factions over the control of dry goods trade in the county. The older, established faction was led by Murphy and his business partner, James Dolan, who had a dry goods monopoly run through Murphy's general store. Young newcomers to the county, English-born John Tunstall and his business partner Alexander McSween, with backing from established cattleman John Chisum, opened a competing store in 1876. The two sides gathered lawmen, businessmen, and criminal gangs to their support. The Murphy-Dolan faction were allied with Lincoln County Sheriff Brady, and supported by the Jesse Evans Gang. The Tunstall-McSween faction organized their own posse of armed men, known as the Regulators, to defend their position, and had their own lawman, town constable Richard M. Brewer.
The conflict was marked by back-and-forth revenge killings, starting with the murder of Tunstall by members of the Evans Gang. In revenge for this and other killings, the Regulators killed Sheriff Brady. Further killings continued unabated for several months, climaxing in the Battle of Lincoln, a four-day gunfight and siege that resulted in the death of McSween and the scattering of the Regulators. After Pat Garrett was named County Sheriff in 1880, he hunted down Billy the Kid, killing two other former Regulators in the process.
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