By Nancy Coggeshall
It is November 1, 1884. A prisoner is being transported in a buckboard from San Fancisco Plaza, what is now Reserve, to the Socorro seat, 130 miles away.
He can’t trust the six guards who escort him. He doesn’t know the deputy sheriff and driver that well. Enroute, the party passes another team and wagon with a coffin in the back. The prisoner doesn’t ask who is in it. “I might be in one myself soon,” he thinks.
The buckboard could become a Carretta de la Muerte [death wagon]. Coincidentally it is the Mexican holiday, the Day of the Dead. The prisoner is Elfego Baca, Socorro County’s nineteen-tear-old deputy sheriff.
What did he do?
Four days before, Baca arrested a rambunctious cowboy. Charlie McCarty fired his gun in Dan Milligan’s saloon in San Francisco Plaza. Baca’s routine act of law enforcement erupted into one of the most spectacular gunfights in the annals of the west and established a legend of bravery that stands tall today.
Pedro Sarracino, another Socorro County deputy and store manager in Frisco Plaza, had told Baca of the reprehensible behavior of cowboys in the county’s far-western reaches. Clashes occurred between the settled, sheep-herding and farming Hispano farming villagers and the recent influx of Anglo ranchers. Ranchers’ stock trampled villagers’ plots. Besides that, cowboys rode into town and shot at anything in sight. [Cowboys] once had castrated a man known only as El Burro and used another, Epitacio Martinez, for target practice, shooting him four times.
When Sarracino related this atrocity, Baca chided him. “I told Sarracino…that he should be ashamed of himself, having the law on his side, to permit the cowboys to do what they did.” Baca arrived in the town on October 28, the ink barely dry on his commission as deputy sheriff issued two days before.
Charlie McCarty worked for John B. Slaughter, a Texas rancher who like others had come to the area with large numbers of cattle and cowboys in 1883. Baca arrested the Slaughter cowboy twice. The first arrest took place on the morning of October 28. Then later in the early afternoon, McCarty was arrested for the same offense at the request of saloonkeeper Dan Milligan. In the second arrest McCarty fired five shots at the unarmed deputy. Baca and a posse of Hispanics pursued McCarty, arrested him, brought him back and kept him until there could be a trial. McCarty again tried to kill the young deputy with a gun from another Slaughter cowboy, Young Parham.
In a complete turnabout, Milligan now asks for McCarty’s release, fearing, perhaps, loss of trade or reprisal from other disgruntled Slaughter hands. Somewhat inebriated he twice returns to the house where McCarty was held to demand the cowboy’s release. The second time he returns with a group of Slaughter’s cowboys, with ranch foreman Young Parham among them. At this point Baca gives the group till the count of three to withdraw. Baca hung on to his supposed prisoner.
In the fracas Baca shoots Tabe Allen, a member of the cowboy mob, in the knee. Young Parham’s horse is killed, and Parham, who has fallen beneath the horse dies.
October 29 is quiet. Cowboys send riders out to the distant ranches, claiming the Mexicans were on the war path. James Cook, manager of the WS Ranch in Alma, responds, along with that town’s deputy sheriff, Dan Bechtol.
The number of cowboys who rally is probably between thirty and forty-five. These cattlemen meet at Milligan’s saloon. They designate Cook as one of the leaders. Two others, Jerome Wadsworth and Clement Hightower meet with Baca about eight o’clock in the morning of October 30. Baca will produce McCarthy for a trial if they will sign an agreement that Baca will not be harmed. The agreement is drawn up, and Baca’s posse men escort McCarty to the home of Justice of the Peace Lopez in Upper Plaza. A crowd of cowboys approaches the courtroom. One man in the mob insults Baca, and someone fires at the deputy. Meanwhile, the trail takes place. McCarty is fined five dollars and set free.
Baca departs abruptly. Seeking sanctuary from the mob, he enters a jacal [a small adobe-like structure]. Friends of Young Parham now seeking revenge for his death have now secured a warrant for his arrest. Jerome Wadsworth and William B. Hearne, another Slaughter cowboy, are joined by Captain William French to arrest Baca. They approached the jacal. Hearne goes to the door, knocks, asks if anyone is there, then kicks the door violently. He is shot. A bullet through the door hits him in the gut. The cowboys lay a siege. Baca withstands there onslaught for twenty-four hours. The cowboys’ fire was not constant. There was enough time between barrages for Baca to prepare beef stew, coffee, and tortillas.
The shooting continues on October 31. A crowd of Hispanics grows on the hillsides around the village. Cook wants to get Baca to Socorro for a trial. The WS manager feels that the American cowboys constitute a mob.
Just as things look hopeless, an official party from Socorro arrives. Cook persuades one of them to approach Baca and take responsibility for Baca’s life until the accused can get to Socorro.
The young deputy emerges from the jacal looking like a wild animal. The official party takes him to Milligan’s to eat and bathe. They start for Socorro the next day.
How did the kid survive the repeated fusillades of the cowboys? Baca says that the floor of the jacal was eighteen inches to two feet below ground so that shots missed him entirely.
Is there another explanation? Perhaps. According to Baca in a 1924 pamphlet, “At the Hackal [jacal] the only objects were Neustra Senoa Santa Ana, a statue to be over six hundred years old. Neither the statue nor I was hit.
***
notes: Facts surrounding the Elfego Baca gunfight are wildly exaggerated in the telling. Why not? It’s a wonderfully colorful, valiant tale, rich in the stuff of myth.
The number of bullets fired during the standoff has been reported as low as four hundred and as high as four thousand. Western historian and Baca biographer, Larry Ball of Arkansas State University, says that when he comes across figures such as that, he usually “divides by one half and then by fifty percent.”
Of the high number of rounds discharged, Englishman Montague Stevens, a Horse Springs rancher and friend of Frederic Remington [the well known artist of the Old West], remarked that there weren’t that many rounds of ammunition in the whole county.
At Elfego Baca’s trial, the door of the jacal where he sought refuge was produced as evidence. There were 367 holes in it.
True West magazine in their September 2000 issue ran a side bar to an article about the gunfight─“How Many Shots Did Baca fire?” They figure fifty-one rounds were shot from the jacal.
As for the duration of the standoff, that was closer to twenty-four hours not thirty-six.
And the number of cowboys? According to Ball, the older Baca got, the more ways he found to tell the story. The figure of 150 is high. Ball takes the figures cited by Captain William French in his memoir, Recollections of a Western Ranchman,” (reprinted by High-Lonesome Press in Silver City), which is twenty to thirty, and the figure that Jerome Wadsworth mentioned in his testimony at Baca’s trial, that of forty-five to fifty.
Suggested reading: High-Lonesome Press’s reprint of Captain William French’s Recollections of a Western Ranchman. Fifty Years on the Old Frontier: As Cowboy, Hunter, Guide, Scout, and Ranchman by James H. Cook. Elfego Baca in Life and Legend by Larry D. Ball. Dr. Ball is presently working on a revision of his 1992 biography of Baca.
Desert Exposure, October 2000
Silver City, New Mexico