Dick Brewer had always carried himself like a man who could not be shaken. In the spring of 1878, with Lincoln County, New Mexico, sliding into open war, that steadiness made him the one person the Regulators would follow into gunfire. He was their first leader, chosen not for his name but for his nerve, and on the morning of April 4 he led them to Blazer’s Mill with a warrant in his pocket and a decision pressing on him that would decide who lived and who died before the day was out. The man they were after was Buckshot Roberts, and Brewer knew exactly what bringing him in would cost.

Richard M. Brewer was born on February 19, 1850, in St. Albans, Vermont. He was four years old when his family moved west to Boaz, Wisconsin, and from there he kept drifting, through Missouri and finally into Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory.

He came as a farmer, buying land with the idea of a settled future, and in the spring of 1871 he went to work for Lawrence Murphy. The job did not last, and the reasons went unrecorded. By 1876 Brewer had moved into cattle work entirely, serving as ranch manager for John Tunstall, an Englishman who had built one of the largest spreads in the region. Lincoln County in those years was not so much a community as a battleground waiting for a spark.

The economy and the politics both ran through one institution: the mercantile firm of L. G. Murphy & Co. , owned by Lawrence Murphy and James Dolan and later reorganized as James J.

Dolan & Co. The store held a practical monopoly over the county, and the firm’s reach extended far beyond retail. It loaned substantial sums to the territorial governor. The territorial attorney general had mortgaged his own property to the company.

When Tunstall arrived and began competing for business, he discovered the foundation of Murphy and Dolan’s wealth: they held lucrative government contracts to supply beef to military forts and Indian agencies. Those contracts, combined with their lock on goods and credit for the local ranchers, allowed Murphy, Dolan, and their partner Riley to amass a fortune that made them the undisputed powers of the county. The social divisions followed old lines. The Murphy faction was made up largely of Irish Catholics.

Tunstall and his allies were mostly British Protestants. But money, not faith, was the real fault line, and the conflict came to a head over an insurance policy. Emil Fritz, a partner in L. G.

Murphy & Co. , had died in 1874. The estate’s administrators hired Alexander McSween to collect the insurance money. When the funds arrived, McSween hesitated to hand them over to the estate’s executor.

He knew the financial state of the House, the opposition faction that included Tunstall, and he doubted their willingness to accept the money regardless of the legality of their claim. In February 1878, a trial went against McSween, and the court issued an order to seize all his assets. The problem was that Tunstall’s property had become entangled with McSween’s, and in the confusion, Sheriff William Brady raised a posse to take possession of Tunstall’s remaining holdings at his ranch, seventy miles from Lincoln. Dolan added his own men to the force: the John Kinney gang, the Seven Rivers Warriors, and the Jesse Evans Gang, men already notorious for harassing and rustling cattle from the Tunstall and Chisum ranches.

They now served as hired guns for the faction. On February 18, 1878, John Tunstall was killed. The murder did not scatter his men. It organized them.

A group was formed to track down the killer, and Dick Brewer was chosen to lead it. That group became the Regulators, and among its members were men whose names would outlive them all: Billy the Kid, whose real name was Henry McCarty, and José Chávez y Chávez, along with the rest of what came to be known as Billy the Kid’s gang. Brewer had built friendships with these men before the war began, and they moved with him often. He led them with a mature, courageous bearing that earned the respect of the other members, and they accepted him as their commander without question.

Under Brewer’s leadership, the Regulators were involved in a series of killings. The dead included Sheriff William Brady, William Morton, Deputy Sheriff George W. Hindman, lawman Frank Baker, and even one of their own, William McCloskey, whom the Regulators claimed had betrayed them. Brewer objected to the killings of Brady and Hindman, but he supported and took part in the others.

History would come to remember these deaths as Billy the Kid’s work, and the Kid’s notoriety would eventually define the Regulators’ brutal reputation. But many historians have doubted that the Kid was the primary actor in most of these cases. The victims more often died in crossfire, when several Regulators fired at once. The Kid got the credit because he got the fame, and the fame fed the legend.

By early April, the Regulators had a warrant out for a man named Andrew Roberts, better known as Buckshot. On April 4, 1878, Brewer led the Regulators to Blazer’s Mill to confront him. The fight was short and catastrophic. Gunfire erupted, and within moments five Regulators were wounded and one was dead: Brewer himself.

Buckshot Roberts was also killed in the exchange, shot either by George Coe, whose finger Roberts had shot off, or by Charlie Bowdre. The two men, the leader of the Regulators and the man he had come to arrest, were buried near the big house where the battle had taken place. The Regulators did not disband. They elected a new leader, a man named McSween, to carry on the fight.

On April 29, 1878, a group led by Sheriff Peppin, joined by members of the Jesse Evans Gang and the Seven Rivers Warriors, clashed with McSween, Saunders, and Frank Coe at the Fritz ranch. McSween was killed in the exchange. Saunders was mortally wounded. Frank Coe was captured and taken into custody.

The next day, four members of the Seven Rivers Warriors—Tom Green, Charles Marshall, Jim Patterson, and John Galvin—were killed in Lincoln. The Regulators faced charges for these deaths, but no specific evidence was ever proven against them. And Frank Coe, despite being held prisoner, escaped custody a while after his arrest. It was said that Deputy Sheriff Wallace Olinger helped him, handing him a pistol.

With McSween gone, the Regulators took up defensive positions in the town of Lincoln. They exchanged gunfire with Dolan’s men, and there were reports that soldiers from the U. S. Army cavalry were involved.

During one exchange, a rifle shot from George Coe struck a Dolan supporter named Dutch Charlie Kruling. On May 15, the Regulators located and arrested Manuel Segovia, a member of the infamous Jesse Evans Gang. Segovia was believed to be the man whose shooting had killed McSween. They shot him as he tried to flee.

After that, the Regulators took in a new member, a young Texas cowboy named Tom O’Folliard, who quickly became Henry McCarty’s closest friend. Dick Brewer never saw any of it. He had been dead for more than a month by then, buried beside the man he had died trying to arrest, his name already passing into the story of the Lincoln County War as the first leader of the Regulators, the man who stood at the line between outlaw and lawman and held it until the bullets decided otherwise.