Don Bullis on NM’s outlaws
Author and historian’s specialty is New Mexico’s most vicious villains
Billy the Kid, New Mexico’s most notorious outlaw, was a choirboy compared to some of the cattle thieves, cutthroats and train robbers that ravaged the territory.
Desperadoes led by John Selman and John Kinney, the High Fives Gang, the “Bronco Bill” Walters Gang, the Seven Rivers Boys and the Horrell brothers were menacing and often mad dog-mean factors on the New Mexico frontier in the decades leading up to statehood in 1912.
“The John Kinney Gang was huge, probably the biggest in the territory’s history,” said Don Bullis, New Mexico author and historian. “The gang operated in southwest New Mexico after 1878 and stole so much livestock (in the Mesilla Valley) they almost put farmers out of business because they were running off all their oxen.
“But the Horrells were the nastiest, the most vicious. They were big-time cattle thieves and racists. They shot Hispanic people at random. They shot up a Hispanic wedding (on Dec. 20, 1873) in Lincoln.” Casualties in the wedding shooting included four men killed and a woman who was wounded.
Bullis gives a talk titled “Outlaw Gangs: The Scourge of Territorial New Mexico” at 2 p.m. today at the Sandoval County Historical Society’s DeLavy House in Bernalillo.
Bullis said John Kinney was run to ground and arrested in March 1883 and that the Horrells’ murderous ways soon made New Mexico too hot for the four brothers — Sam, Mart, Merritt and Tom — who were still living in early 1874. Those four returned that year to their home ground near Lampasas in central Texas.
“Most of them were dead within five years, killed by vigilantes or in feuds,” Bullis said.
Hooked on New Mexico
Bullis, 77, was born in Bowling Green, Ohio, but he has made New Mexico his home since the 1960s and lives now in Rio Rancho with his wife, Gloria. You would be hard put to find anyone more versed in the state’s history than he is. If there is anything Bullis does not know about New Mexico outlaws, chances are good no one else knows it either.
He has written two novels and nine nonfiction books. The nonfiction includes “Ellos Pasaron Por Aqui
(They Passed By Here): 99 New Mexicans and a Few Other Folks,” “Unsolved: New Mexico’s American Valley Ranch Murders & Other Mysteries,” “Duels, Gunfights & Shoot-Outs” and “New Mexico’s Finest: Peace Officers Killed in the Line of Duty.” In 2011, the New Mexico State Library named Bullis New Mexico’s Centennial Author.
Bullis became fascinated with New Mexico during a visit to the state in 1955. When it came time to attend college, he enrolled at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales. One of his fellow students and friends at ENMU was Michael Blake, who would go on to write the novel “Dances With Wolves” and the Oscar-winning screenplay for the movie based on the book. Both Bullis and Blake were honored as outstanding ENMU alumni in 2013.
Bullis earned bachelor’s degrees in American history and American literature from ENMU in 1970 and did graduate work in literature at the University of New Mexico.
“My intention was to get a Ph.D. and teach college,” Bullis said. “I thought that was what I’d like to do. But I had to work my way through college, so it took me nine years to get through Eastern and after a year at UNM I had been around colleges for 10 years. I guess I just reached the saturation point.”
Instead he wove together an intriguing career that included both newspaper and police work.
No Robin Hoods
Bullis was a columnist for the New Mexico Independent from 1979 to 1982, served as editor of the Sandoval County Times-Independent, wrote a history column for the Rio Rancho Observer from 1987 to 2002 and does a column these days for New Mexico Stockman magazine.
In a law enforcement career that started in 1982 and ended 20 years later, he worked as an investigator for the Sandoval County Sheriff’s Department, was town marshal for the village of San Ysidro and then served with the State Department of Public Safety, retiring from the
latter as sergeant in charge of intelligence operations. He was part of the governor’s Organized Crime Prevention Commission from 1987 through 1989.
Working newspaper and police beats is about the best way there is to learn about outlaws. Bullis said the main difference between today’s criminals and those in Territorial New Mexico is that 90 percent of modern crime stems from drug use.
“In Territorial times, crime was motivated by greed, laziness and, I suppose you could say, poverty to some extent,” Bullis said. “Poverty is always with us.”
One thing for sure, Bullis said, is that the notion of Old West outlaws as righteous renegades or Robin Hoods is nonsense.
“There was nothing noble about them,” he said. “Most were venal lowlifes.”
Hatful of buckshot
In “Ellos Pasaron Por Aqui” (2005), Bullis notes that even while they were beating a retreat from New Mexico in 1874, the Horrell brothers could not forego their vile and ferocious tendencies.
“About 15 miles west of Roswell, they encountered five Hispanic freighters and killed all of them,” he writes.
But, as noted earlier, most of the brothers got what was coming to them. John “Pink” Higgins, a cattleman and gunfighter, shot Merritt to death in a Texas saloon in 1876. In 1878, Mart and Tom were arrested for robbing and killing a merchant in Bosque County, Texas, and were visited in jail soon afterward by more than 100 masked citizens.
“They didn’t even take them out and hang them,” Bullis said. “They just shot them in their cells. Mart was shot 11 times and Tom 10. A witness said that afterwards there was enough buckshot on the floor to fill the crown of a good-sized hat.”