On the morning of April 4th, 1878, Andrew L. Roberts sat on his mule and watched the road to Blazer’s Mill with the weary caution of a man who had spent a lifetime reading danger in the dust of the frontier. He was short and stocky, a man who preferred mules to horses, and he had come down over the mountain from the South Fork of the Rio Hondo that morning for one reason: to check whether the mail had finally arrived with the payment for his ranch. He had sold his place in the beautiful Rio Hondo Valley of central New Mexico and wanted nothing more than to clear out of the territory altogether, to leave behind the feud that had engulfed Lincoln County and that had made him a target for both sides simply because he refused to choose one.
Dr. Joseph H. Blazer, a dentist from Pennsylvania, ran the mill that bore his name. He leased his big house to an Indian agent named Frederick Godfroy and his family, while the Blazers lived in a smaller adobe nearby and operated a store out the back.
Mrs. Godfroy often cooked meals for weary travelers, and Roberts had hoped to find one. But when he arrived, there were no other patrons. Blazer warned him that a group of armed men had been sighted on the road to the west and that they had killed one of the agency steers the night before.
Roberts accurately deduced that these were the Lincoln County Regulators, and he wisely decided to make himself scarce. Not for long. He soon spied what he thought was a mail buggy heading to the mill, so he turned his mule around and headed back. That was his big mistake.
In his absence, the Regulators had arrived, fourteen of them in total. There was Billy Bonney, alias Billy the Kid. There was their leader, Dick Brewer, and the cousins Frank and George Coe, John Middleton, Josiah Doc Scurlock, Dirty Steve Stevens, Charlie Bowdre, Frank McNab, Henry Newton Brown, Fred Waite, John Scroggins, Natio Gonzalez, and a man known as Tiger Sam Smith. Smith and Gonzalez would not stay, riding on and missing the fight to come.
But that still left an even dozen Regulators for Roberts to deal with, hardened and desperate men who made no bones about their willingness to kill. Roberts did not see their horses until it was too late, corralled in the back of the mill, and by then he figured he had done enough running. He decided to stay and see what these old boys were made of. Mrs.
Godfroy was adamant that no firearms be allowed inside where people were eating, so Billy and the others stacked their guns on the porch or just inside the door. Only John Middleton remained armed, staying outside as a lookout. It was he, not Dirty Steve, who first spotted Roberts and warned the others. Dick Brewer, despite now being a wanted outlaw himself, still held a warrant for Buckshot’s arrest.
He sent Frank Coe out to talk to him. Frank and Roberts had been neighbors on the Rio Hondo, and they got along well. By this point, Roberts had climbed down off his mule and had followed the house rules by removing his gun belt and placing it over his saddle horn. Not his Winchester, though.
He kept that in hand as Frank came out to greet him. The two sat down and talked for a while, with Frank doing his level best to convince Roberts to surrender. Roberts refused. He knew full well what had happened to Baker, Morton, and McCloskey, men who had been taken into custody and then shot dead.
He told Coe that if it was just him and George and maybe Dick Brewer, he would have no problem surrendering. But there was no way in hell he was going to take his chances with Billy the Kid and Charlie Bowdre, not after that running gunfight with them outside San Patricio a week prior. Frank later said they talked for at least half an hour. “I begged him to surrender, but the answer was no.
No, no. I think he was the bravest man I ever met, not a bit excited, knowing too that his life was in our hands. ” Finally, Dick Brewer grew tired of waiting and sent out reinforcements, one of whom was Charlie Bowdre. Bowdre was not as tactful as Frank Coe.
As soon as he came outside, he yelled at Roberts to throw his hands up, to which Buckshot simply replied, “No. ” Charlie then went for the butt of his pistol as Roberts raised his rifle to his hip. The two men fired on each other almost simultaneously. Roberts’s shot hit Bowdre’s belt buckle before ricocheting and shattering George Coe’s gun hand, destroying his trigger finger and thumb.
As for Bowdre’s round, it hit Roberts in the belly. Frank Coe later recalled seeing the dust flying from Buckshot’s clothing when the bullet struck. The rest of the Regulators spilled outside as Roberts began backing into the doorway at Doc Blazer’s office, working the lever of his Winchester with a fury. According to Frank, he had never seen a man handle a Winchester as fast as Roberts could.
One of Roberts’s rounds caught John Middleton in the chest. Another hit Scurlock’s holster and carried down his leg. Scurlock’s grandson would later quote his grandfather as saying the bullet burned like a hot iron. At least one round perforated George Coe’s shirt, and yet another came within an inch of ending Billy the Kid.
The young outlaw was able to take refuge between a wall and a wagon, and Roberts’s bullet only managed to scratch his arm. With lethal precision and a stroke of fortune, Andrew L. Roberts had taken three Regulators out of the fight and sent the rest in search of cover. They had likely assumed Roberts would surrender when faced by superior numbers and had been caught unawares by his almost suicidal bravado.
Fatally wounded, outnumbered, and cut off from the pistols still hanging from the saddle of his tethered mule, Roberts began backing away toward Dr. Blazer’s single-story adobe house, still firing his Winchester as he went and leaving a haze of smoke behind him. Billy the Kid was trying to keep count of how many bullets were left in that rifle. When he judged that Roberts was out of ammo, he charged in.
Roberts was ready. He shoved his empty rifle into Billy’s stomach, knocking the air out of him, and the Kid was forced to retreat. The wounded Roberts went searching for another weapon and found exactly what he needed hanging on the wall in Doc Blazer’s office: a single-shot 1873 Springfield chambered in . 45-70.
Rummaging further, he found a box of shells. He made a barricade of sorts with a mattress, loaded the rifle, and prepared to sell his life dearly. Meanwhile, Dick Brewer tried to persuade one of the employees at the mill, David Eastston, to flush Roberts out. Eastston declined.
Brewer appealed to Blazer and Agent Godfroy. They too had sense enough not to approach a man like Roberts when he was wounded and backed into a corner. So Brewer decided to handle it himself. He crept around back to the corral and took cover behind a pile of wood about a hundred yards from where Roberts was hiding.
Taking careful aim, Dick fired. Inside Blazer’s office, Brewer’s bullet slammed into the wall behind Roberts, blowing particles of adobe onto the floor. Glancing down the valley, Roberts saw the smoke from Brewer’s rifle drifting away from the logs. Propping Blazer’s rifle on the mattress, he sighted on the logs to where the smoke had been and waited.
Soon the top of Brewer’s head appeared. Buckshot squeezed the trigger. The big Springfield blasted. The bullet hit Brewer in the left eye, leaving a tiny blue mark, then blew the back of his skull into fragments.
That was the end of the fight at Blazer’s Mill. Even Frank Coe would later admit that nobody else was willing to call Roberts’s hand. Doc Blazer fixed up the wounded as best he could, for he was a dentist after all, and provided a wagon to carry the injured Middleton and George Coe. About eighteen miles down the trail, they ran into the surgeon from Fort Stanton, who had apparently already been summoned to render aid to Roberts.
He too tended to the wounded Regulators before continuing on to the mill. But by the time he arrived, Andrew Roberts was too far gone. He died the following day. He and Brewer were laid to rest right there at the mill, and according to some accounts, they were buried in the same coffin.
Their graves are still marked on what is now the Mescalero Apache Reservation just south of Rio Hondo. There remains a question about who fired the shot that killed Roberts. Billy the Kid had managed to get off at least one round during his charge. According to the son and grandson of Dr.
Blazer, it was indeed Billy the Kid who fired the fatal round, a claim repeated in Pat Garrett’s The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid. Yet none of the actual participants in the fight mentioned Billy shooting Roberts. Most historians, though not all, disagree with the witnessing Blazers and point to Charlie Bowdre as the one who did it. To Billy’s credit, he would later say of Roberts and the gunfight there at Blazer’s Mill, “Yes, sir.
He licked our crowd to a finish. ”
There is another version of the story, told by George Coe, that when Charlie Bowdre ordered Roberts to throw up his hands, the former ranger responded by saying, “Not much, Maryanne. ” Some have suggested the phrase was a sarcastic way of calling Bowdre a little girl, or worse, a derogatory term. But whatever words were exchanged, and whoever fired the fatal round, what is certain is that Andrew Roberts, a man whose origins historian Robert Utley called murky, took on a dozen killers all on his lonesome.
Although they put him under, he killed their leader in the process and left a few of the others with scars they would carry for the rest of their lives. George Coe would be photographed many times with his blown-off finger. The Regulators had won the day, but Buckshot Roberts had made them pay a price they would remember for the rest of their days.
