New Mexico Historical Review Volume 68 Number 2 Article 3 4-1-1993 An Excess of Law in Lincoln County: Thomas Catron, Samuel Axtell, and the Lincoln County War Joel K. Jacobsen Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmhr Recommended Citation Jacobsen, Joel K.. "An Excess of Law in Lincoln County: Thomas Catron, Samuel Axtell, and the Lincoln County War." New Mexico Historical Review 68, 2 (1993). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmhr/vol68/ iss2/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in New Mexico Historical Review by an authorized editor of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. An Excess of Law in Lincoln County: Thomas· Catron, Samuel Axtell, and the Lincoln County War JOEL K. JACOBSEN New Mexico's Lincoln County War of 1877-1878 has spawned endless retellings, from nineteenth-century dime novels to the movie Young Guns and including any number of books and articles, some more faithful to the facts than others. It lives in popular imagination as a series of violent encounters, from the assassination of Sheriff William Brady to the gunfight at Blazer's Mill. Through the dust and gunpowder smoke rides the image of Billy the Kid. But the Lincoln County War was also, to an underappreciated extent, a legal battle involving law yers, judges and juries, and the hyper-civilized rituals of the court room. Indeed, it might even be said that the cause of the Lincoln County War was not lawlessness but an excess of law, or at least an excess of tricky and occasionally dubious legal maneuvers.