Two Irish men were central to the story of Wild West icon Billy the Kid

Just about everyone knows about the young gunfighter from the heyday of the Wild West.

Less well known, however, is how a blood feud with two Irishmen triggered Billy’s killing spree.

It could be said that James Dolan and John H. Riley “created” Billy the Kid.

Mitchell Smyth, from Ballycastle, now living in Toronto, often shares stories here - some about the country where he was born and brought up, and others about places and people from the other side of the Atlantic.

Today he tells how he once followed the Billy the Kid trail in New Mexico on a travel story for the Toronto Star, of which he was travel editor.

At one point, he says, he stayed in the house once occupied by Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady (a native, incidentally, of Cavan town). It’s now a B&B and, says Smyth, “I slept in the room, the owners told me, that had been occupied by Billy when Brady held him for three days, on a minor charge, before releasing him.”

That was before the Kid became a hunted outlaw.

The B&B was “in the town of Lincoln,” Mitchell added “the capital of Lincoln County, which covered a vast swathe of southern New Mexico.”

And it was in Lincoln that Smyth learned the story of “Jimmy” Dolan and John Riley, and how they crossed paths with young William Bonney who would go down in legend as Billy the Kid.

The time-frame here is the years 1877 to 1881, when there was virtually no law in Lincoln County, home to only 3,000 people of whom more than half were Hispanic.

Pretty well everyone carried a gun, and used it!

Dolan (born 1848) from Loughrea, County Galway, and Riley (born 1851) from Valentia Island, County Kerry, had established a flourishing business in Lincoln, supplying cattle, horses and grain to the U.S. Army in Fort Stanton, and food supplies to the nearby Native American reservation. All this was paid for by the federal government.

Their headquarters was a massive warehouse called The House on Lincoln’s main street. They were profiting hand over fist.

Then along came two entrepreneurs from St. Louis, John Tunstall and Alexander McSween. McSween was from Scotland via Canada.

Tunstall was from England; his family had sent him to America with a huge bankroll to make a name for himself.

The duo saw no reason why Dolan and Riley should have a lock on the government contracts, so they set up in opposition, cutting their prices below what The House was charging.

The power struggle was teetering on the edge of violence when Billy the Kid, a “saddle tramp” (cowboy) and part-time cattle rustler, was taken on as a wrangler by Tunstall at his ranch.

(Wranglers were employed to handle, herd, round up and find pasture for animals, especially horses and cattle.)

Billy had drifted west from New York, where he was born in 1860 to Irish immigrant parents.

The suave, refined Tunstall became a kind of mentor to the rough-hewn 17-year-old.

The feud exploded in February 1878 into what has gone down in western lore as “the Lincoln County War” when Dolan and Riley, who had Sheriff Brady in their pocket, got Brady to send a posse to arrest Tunstall on some minor charge.

When Tunstall protested, the leader of the posse shot him dead. Tunstall was 24.

The death of his mentor triggered some sort of blood-lust in Billy and he vowed revenge on Dolan, Riley and Brady.

The Lincoln County war was on!

On one side were a group of rustlers called The Boys, who had been supplying stolen cattle to Dolan and Riley to sell to the army.

On the other side were the so-called Regulators, gunmen hired by McSween and including Billy the Kid.

The war was a series of skirmishes, ambushes and tit-for-tat killings. It culminated in a five-day siege of the McSween house in July 1878.

On the fifth day, with the house blazing, Billy escaped in the darkness; McSween was not so lucky. He was shot dead as he ran after Billy.

With both McSween and Tunstall dead, the war was over. The death toll was 23 men.

There were no heroes; just plenty of villains.

And there were no winners, for the government cancelled the Dolan-Riley contract, leaving them broke.

Riley moved to Colorado, where he died in 1916.

Dolan remained in New Mexico, and was elected to the territorial Senate. He died in 1898.

Billy the Kid became a small-time cattle and horse thief, killing anyone who got in his way and twice escaping from jail.

Finally, with a 500-dollar price on his head, his former friend Pat Garrett, now sheriff (the Kid had killed Brady) tracked him down to Fort Sumner on 13 July 1881 and shot him dead before he could reach for his gun.

William Bonney was 21.

Then the pulp novelists took over, turning a young thug into a knight-errant of the plains.

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