Good guys and bad guys

Art imitates life, life imitates art

Mescalero, NM (2023).

I am often compelled to look inside abandoned houses, and this one in southern New Mexico forced me to pull over for a history lesson. It left me with questions about how much of our American gun culture is inspired by history and romanticized by art.

This place sits by the roadside within the Mescalero Apache reservation in southern New Mexico. According to many sources, it's where, in 1878, Buckshot Roberts made his last stand in a wild west gunfight commonly called the "Battle of Blazer's Mill." It involved Roberts, Billy the Kid, and The Regulators.

Roberts, who apparently was in town on peaceful business, was targeted as a member of a rival gang. He killed the leader of The Regulators, Dick Brewer, and wounded many others before being shot himself. Roberts held off perhaps as many as a dozen men after he holed up in the house.

It was all part of what was known as the Lincoln County War, and Billy the Kid supposedly said of Roberts, “yes sir, he licked our crowd to a finish.” In the 1988 movie Young Guns, Charlie Sheen played Dick Brewer, Emilio Estevez was Billy the Kid, and Brian Keith portrayed the mule-riding Buckshot Roberts who yells, "Let's Dance!" before opening fire.

Roberts died the next day and was buried in the same coffin as Brewer on a nearby hillside which, like the house, is now covered in trash.