Blaze Of Glory

The murder of Colonel Fountain is the most notorious of New Mexico’s many “unsolved” killings. Pat Garrett came out of retirement to track down the killers, and this resulted in the bloody gunfight at the Wildy Well. Feared gunman Oliver Lee and two others were charged with the crime. Albert Bacon Fall who liked to brag that he never lost a murder trial defended them. This “trial of the decade” was the climax of the west’s last great range war, a war so violent that it cost New Mexico statehood for three decades. A huge camp was thrown up overnight in the rugged mountain camp of Hillsboro to accommodate the hundreds of newsmen who flocked in from across the nation.

The Tularosa War was a fight for control of the Southwest. The bodies of the two victims were never found. Fall won as he predicted he would, only to meet his downfall and disgrace as the principal figure of Washington’s Teapot Dome Scandal. Fountain and Garrett lost the Tularosa War, but both men are still thought of as two of the frontier’s best, giants among giants.