The Murder of Sheriff William Brady

Lily Klasner not long after the events described: “… Brady and George Hindman were killed in the streets of Lincoln by men hid in the corral behind the new store of McSween and Tunstall, shot in the back as they were passing. John Middleton, [Robert] Weiderman [Widenmann], a Negro, George Washington, and another Negro, Little Henry, ‘the kid’ [sic] and a man called French were seen to come out the corral after the firing. All must have shot.”

Keleher, and Utley are most likely correct, as their scholarship rises to the top in a cauldron full of historians of the Lincoln County War. As for Ab McCabe’s letter, it is unlikely that Widenmann participated although one writer claims he was there, in the corral, feeding his dog, but did not shoot. Until that date he was a deputy U.S. Marshal. George Washington and George Robinson, both former members of the Negro 10th Cavalry, were arrested after the killings, but were released and likely had nothing to do with it.

In the final analysis, only one man was ever convicted of killing Sheriff Brady, and that was William Bonney—Billy the Kid. In his own defense, he claimed that he did not fire the fatal shot since he spent his time shooting at Billy Mathews, a man with whom he had a personal grudge. Bonney blamed Mathews, as Brady’s chief deputy, for the disorder that led to Tunsdall’s murder the previous February 18th.

So, what to believe? Take your pick. Better yet, simply acknowledge that no one knows exactly what happened in Lincoln on April 1, 1878, except that a sheriff and one of his deputies were murdered from ambush by a gang of cowards, perhaps led by Billy the Kid.

And who was William Brady that so much hostility was directed toward him?

Brady, a native of Cavan County in Northern Ireland, was born in 1825 or 1829, depending on the source. He completed his education there about 1844 and began work on the family’s tenant farm. He became head of his family upon the death of his father in 1846, just at the height of the Irish potato famine (1845-1852). He left Ireland for the United States in 1850 and soon after his arrival joined the U. S. States Army. He served two five-year enlistments before he joined the New Mexico Volunteers as a lieutenant in August of 1860 and subsequently served during the Texas-Confederate invasion of New Mexico in 1862.

While he was stationed in Albuquerque, Brady met Bonifacia Chaves of Corrales and they married in late 1862. They were the parents of nine children, the youngest of which was born after his father was slain.

After the Civil War, Brady was stationed at Fort Stanton and in 1864 as a captain he was named commandant of that installation. He was promoted to brevet major the follow- ing year during which he was involved in several actions against Navajo Indians. Late in 1865, he was reassigned as commandant of Fort Selden, and in May of 1866 he was reassigned once more to command Fort Sumner, where he remained until his discharge in October of that year. He moved his family to a place called Walnut Grove near the village of Rio Bonito; a village which would become the town of Lincoln when the county of the same name was created in 1869. William Brady was one of the petitioners for the creation of the new county.

Brady became a United States citizen in July 1869 and ran for Lincoln County Sheriff that September and was elected by a vote of 102 to 94 for his opponent, Francisco Romero. Two years later, Brady became the first representative from Lincoln County to serve in the Territorial House of Representatives. He subsequently ran for probate judge and lost. He was again elected sheriff in 1876.

As the Lincoln County War heated up, Brady was thought to have been a tool of Lawrence G. Murphy, also a former military officer, and the Santa Fe Ring. Historian Donald Lavish held an alternative view. For one thing, he wrote, it was not true that Brady and Murphy were old army friends; they were never stationed together and only met once, briefly, in 1861. For another, in his second run for sheriff in 1876, Lawrence Murphy supported Brady’s opponent, Saturnino Baca.

Lavish suggests that Brady’s support of Murphy—an Irishman—against John Tunstall—an Englishman—resulted because “… Brady never forgot the methods used by the English to confiscate property and force the Irish to become tenants on their own land.”

Lavish takes little note of the fact that Brady and Murphy were both natives of Ireland, both Roman Catholics, both former military men, and both ambitious to succeed in their adopted country. That may explain why Brady seemed anxious to go after the English-Protestant, Tunstall-McSween, faction with writs of attachments of dubious legal standing. Brady was clearly not evenhanded in dealing with the complexities of the Lincoln County War.

The murder of Sheriff Brady, though, firmly established one thing: that both sides in the war were utterly cold-blooded and more than willing to commit murder to further their own interests and objectives. ▫