Tag Archives: The Lincoln County War

Robert E. Howard in Lincoln County

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In June of 1935, Robert E. Howard and his friend Truett Vinson took a road trip through New Mexico, and on the way stopped in the town of Lincoln.  Howard was fascinated by the Lincoln County War.  It’s easy to understand why.  It was a horrible, senseless conflict fueled by greed and pride from which no one came out looking good.

A friend and I took a similar trip this past June.  We’d been talking about this trip for over a year.  Family considerations required him to move back to Kansas, so we knew we had to go or the trip would never happen.  We managed to find a couple of days when we could both get free and headed west.

After hiking in the mountains we made our way to Lincoln, where we stayed the night at the Wortley Hotel (Where No Guest Has Been Gunned Down in Over 100 Years).  The next morning, we toured the town before heading home.

Howard described his impressions of Lincoln in a letter to H. P. Lovecraft in a letter circa July 1935.  My intention of this post is to comment on some of the things Howard wrote about, supplemented with my own photos from the trip.  I didn’t know much about the Lincoln County War before we went, but I’ve learned a lot since then.  (I hadn’t read that portion of Howard’s correspondence at the time.) Had I known more, I would taken some additional pictures.

REH in LincolnWhile it’s not the most famous picture of Howard, the photo on the left has been fairly widely disseminated.  It was taken in front of the Lincoln County Courthouse.  Click to enlarge the image.  The sign says “The house from which Billy the Kid made his fast escape after killing his two guards Bell and Ollinger before ? 1881 being later killed by Sherriff Pat Garrett. Visitors Welcome.”

I’m not sure who the person on the left is.  It could be Vinson, but I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that it’s one of the locals.  I just can’t remember where I read it.  If I really did.

If that is one of the locals, it would most likely be Ramon Maes, who was the grandson of Lucio Montoya, one of the participants on the Murphy-Dolan side of the conflict.  (Billy the Kid fought for the McSween-Tunstall faction.)  Maes regaled the Texans with tales of the fighting and gave them the key to the building.  At one time it was the Murphy-Dolan store and bank, and after the Lincoln County War ended, it became the courthouse and jail.  When Howard was there, it was a storage building. Continue reading →

Why It’s Been So Quiet Around Here Lately

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LeopardSome of you may have (hopefully) noticed that I’ve not posted much in the last month or so.  There are reasons for that.

When the spring semester ended, I thought I would have a few weeks where things slowed down.  Not so.  My son had few weeks of school left, and his schedule was pretty full.   Also, I’m on a 12 month contract, so I still had things to do at the office, things I’m still working on.

Memorial Day involved some travel, both to see family as well as visit Scarborough Renaissance Festival.  This makes 25 consecutive years I’ve attended. The next weekend was my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary celebration.  The actual anniversary was a week later, but that was when we could all get together at the same time.  Everyone had a great time.

Classes started the Monday after that, my son got braces, life happened.  Nothing bad, but time consuming.

The first Friday in June, a friend and I spent a couple of days in New Mexico.  He’s moving back to Kansas this week, and we’d been talking about taking this trip for months.  We got up early and drove over to the Lincoln National Forest and spent the afternoon hiking up to about 9k feet.  Then we went and spent the night at the Wortley Hotel in Lincoln, where no guest has been shot for over 100 years.  It was once owned by Pat Garrett, the man who shot Billy the Kid.

The next morning we took a walking tour of the town, which is a historic site.  The whole town, not just a few buildings.  I’ll probably write about that on Dispatches From the Lone Star Front.  I also intend to post something here about Lincoln and Robert E. Howard, since Howard was interested in the Lincoln County War.  I knew almost nothing about it, but I can see why Howard was so keen on it.  It’s fascinating stuff.

The day after we got back, I went with my son as a sponsor at his church youth camp.  The camp was in Estes Park, Colorado.  We had a blast.  The elk we walked up on before dawn on our hike to see the sun rise from a ridge above camp was worth getting up at that hour.

We got back at 2:30 in the morning Saturday.  The only downside (besides being on a bus full of middle school students for a total of 24 hours) was that I ended up missing Howard Days.  I had hoped to drive down for Saturday, but that wasn’t in the cards.

Since Memorial Day weekend, we’ve gotten almost 8 inches of rain, which is unusual.  I had to go buy a power mower when I got back because the grass was too high for my old fashioned push mower to handle.

Other than a diving competition in Corpus Christi at the end of the month, things should start settling down for the rest of the summer.

It’s been hard to squeeze much reading in, and when I’ve had the time, I’ve been too tired to read.  I’ve been trying to finish K. V. Johansen’s The Leopard.  I had intended to have the review up before the book went on sale, but no luck.  I should finish it tomorrow and get the review posted by Thursday.  After that, there are a number of titles I’ve been trying to get to or finish, including the new issue of Weird Tales.  I’ll try to get as many things read and reviewed as possible over the next few weeks.  Hopefully, everything will fall into a routine by the end of the week.