WEEKEND EXTRA Victoria, his, criminal, company, through

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WEEKEND EXTRA: How the death of a B.C. merchant spurred Billy the Kid's killing spree
Everyone knows the story of one of America’s most famous outlaws. But few know what set the teen on his killing spree: The murder of his boss, a Victoria merchant


Billy the Kid rides through America’s nation-building mythology like an enigmatic outlaw angel of retribution.

Feral psychopathic killer, callous criminal, nice kid in bad company or tragic avenger delivering rough justice to a corrupt establishment? The teenager who sang at Sunday school with a lovely tenor or the otherworldly child warrior possessed of the lethal rage of an Achilles?

Whatever William Henry Bonney was in life, in death he was transformed into an incandescent archetype.

Billy the Kid’s legend is forged from the American fascination with guns and violence, from a revolutionary mistrust of authority, and from the lawless frontier myth that frames the nation’s self-perception.

Yet this unstable, anarchic Wild West of American folklore also turns out to be intimately connected to British Columbia and to our own frontier in the years when this province was taking shape amid the tumult and greed of a gold rush.

The B.C. connection is John Henry Tunstall, the New Mexico rancher who hired William H. Bonney as a ranch hand in November 1877 — and in so doing launched Billy the Kid on his epic trajectory into the firmament of myth.

Tunstall had been working as a clerk in his father’s bustling Victoria dry goods store a scant two years before the fateful events that would enter history as the Lincoln County Range War.

Young, ambitious, out to prove himself to a wealthy father by making his own fortune, Tunstall left Victoria to buy a cattle spread in New Mexico in 1876. He found himself entangled in a conflict between ranchers and a Mafia-like business monopoly.

J.J. Dolan & Co. gouged ranchers with high retail prices while simultaneously forcing down prices ranchers could charge for their cows by dealing in rustled livestock. Cattle stolen from ranchers were bought at steep discounts, then sold at inflated prices to the U.S. army and to Indian agents under the company’s exclusive supply contracts.

Tunstall allied himself with the ranchers. Drawing on his merchandising experience from Victoria, he opened his own store, J.H. Tunstall & Co., in Lincoln, N.M., financing his attempt to break the monopoly with family money.

But soon he found himself embattled by a vast conspiracy of corruption from which sheriffs, judges, prosecutors and politicians all profited.

Two years to the day after leaving Victoria, Tunstall was murdered by agents of the conspiracy. Bonney and three other cowboys from Tunstall’s ranch emerged as the core of a group calling itself “The Regulators” and they subsequently descended in a whirlwind of bloody vengeance on the conspirators.

When they were done, more than 30 members of the two factions — including Billy the Kid, most of his companions and most of those who participated directly in Tunstall’s murder — had been slain, including a crooked sheriff, several deputies, desperadoes, lawyers and ranchers.

In all this violence, only one participant, Bonney, was ever convicted of first-degree murder. Despite a promise of amnesty if he surrendered and testified, he was sentenced to hang. Faced with what he deemed official betrayal, he escaped on the way to the gallows. In the end, he, too, was shot down.

In the beginning

Tunstall was the well-educated son of a London merchant who had joined a prosperous import-export business in Victoria. The city was awash with wealth from the Cariboo gold rush. At the age of 18, the young man was sent to learn the family business and keep an eye on dad’s investments.

His arrival in Victoria from San Francisco aboard the SS Prince Albert on Sept. 24, 1872, was noted on page three of the Daily British Colonist.

Billy the Kid was likely a schoolboy in Denver, Colo., at the time. If Bonney’s early days are obscure, Tunstall’s in B.C. are not.

The English youth was a prolific writer of letters and kept a diary. British historian Frederick W. Nolan compiled and meticulously annotated the collection on which this account relies, although other clues and context turn up in almanacs, directories, newspapers, memoirs and scholarly histories.

In just a decade, Victoria had rocketed from sleepy fur trade post through raucous frontier mining camp to provincial capital with genteel pretensions. Turner, Beeton & Tunstall was, in 1872, the premier retail establishment in a city built with placer gold.

When R. Byron Johnson arrived in Victoria on his way to the Cariboo gold rush a decade before Tunstall arrived, he had found a boom camp of log shanties, brightly painted clapboard, false fronts, the tents of “Canvas-town,” flop houses, muddy streets and many, many saloons thronging with “almost every race that can be named.”

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“The average Victorian’s sense of bliss apparently consists of the greatest number of drinks in the shortest possible time, varied with cigars and billiards ad lib,” he wrote in his memoir Very Far West Indeed, published in 1872, the same year Tunstall departed London for Victoria. “The number of billiard-tables is simply astonishing to English eyes.”

His first night in Victoria, Johnson wrote, he dossed down with 50 others on the bare floor of a “hotel,” only to be awakened in the wee hours by a brawl between somebody wielding a pool cue and the burly young man who sent him sprawling over the sleepers.

“This caused a great row, in which everybody hit out at everybody else; the lights were put out, somebody fired off a pistol, and amid great confusion the two players somehow got hustled out into the street.”

Those streets seethed with a press of people buying and selling pack animals, loading them with provisions and mining implements, abandoning at the roadside items that had seemed so necessary a few months before and now were deemed useless: dress cases, suits, an iron wash stand with complete fittings.

“Criers paraded the streets, shouting forth the hours of departure of various steamboats for New Westminster ... Parties of sober old miners, clad in blue or red shirts, with their ‘pants’ tucked into knee boots, their belts showing the usual jack-knife and revolver, their heads covered with wide felt hats, and their backs laden with small well put-up packs ... Here and there a green youth fresh from home was toiling along under a load of heaven knows how many pounds ...”

Observing this exhilarating spectacle, young Johnson was astonished when a local lawyer advised him to forget the distant Cariboo diggings because the miners would bring the gold to Victoria – that was where the fortunes were to be made.

“A miner is but the means of conveying money into other people’s pockets: He is simply our agent,” Johnson was told. “We townspeople have nothing to do but sit on our beam-ends, and wait for these hard-working, deluded creatures to

come and pour wealth into our laps.”

Johnson was offered a couple of waterfront lots for less than what would now amount to $10,000. He looked them over, concluded the rocky outcrops would never amount to more than an eyesore and demurred. Five years later, he was amazed to discover they were worth more than the equivalent of $700,000 and were the site of the biggest warehouses in Victoria.

Those would have been the Wharf Street warehouses of Turner, Beeton & Tunstall, shrewdly founded to intercept that river of wealth flowing back from the Cariboo.

While Tunstall was working there in 1874, the establishment’s price list, preserved on microfilm at the University of Victoria library, featured:

French silks of all descriptions, organdies, muslins, fine shawls, bolts of Italian cloth, women’s undergarments, the best corsets brought in by express steamer from London via San Francisco, steel bustles for fashionable dresses with trains, parasols, silk handkerchiefs from Japan, white moleskin trousers, hats, laces, kid evening gloves, agricultural tools, Guinness, Bass’s Ale and Fawcett’s Royal Crown Irish whiskey.

Steamboats from San Francisco tied up at the store’s own docks and an express letter could be posted to Canada for two cents, to the U.S. for five cents and England for eight cents. To China or Australia it was 50 cents and to Switzerland (via Belgium) 64 cents.

Victoria evolves

By the time Tunstall arrived, the torrent of money from the placer creeks around Barkerville had worked its magic. Masonry had replaced clapboard.

Turner, Beeton & Tunstall was an immense two-storey brick building and young John’s accommodation was not a flophouse floor but a pleasing room in the home of John Herbert Turner, founding partner in the company, and his wife Elizabeth, a leading socialite.

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The thriving company was very much a family affair. Turner’s principal business associate before Tunstall’s father joined the firm was Henry Coppinger Beeton, married to Tunstall’s aunt.

Turner was wealthy, successful and politically prominent, “the Mr. British Columbia of his day,” wrote historian Ainslie Helmcken. Turner would later serve as mayor of Victoria, then minister of finance under four premiers and would eventually become premier himself.

His career would end as B.C.’s agent-general in London, where he successfully negotiated a large loan to the new provincial government and established British Columbia House, still in service today.

Across from Turner’s gracious home on Pleasant Street stood equally gracious Point Ellice House — the residence of gold commissioner and magistrate Peter O’Reilly, whose wife Caroline was the sister of Joseph Trutch, the new province’s first lieutenant-governor. They often entertained the social elite.

The flamboyant O’Reilly brought British authority to Americans in the Kootenay gold camps with the announcement: “Now boys, there must be no shooting, for if there is shooting, there will surely be hanging.”

The Turner residence where Tunstall boarded is gone, but the O’Reilly house still stands. It’s now a historic site surrounded by the clatter and dust from industrial recycling yards, depots piled high with bulk landscaping materials and weedy vacant lots behind link steel fences. But the lush grounds provide an oasis of high Victoriana where visitors may still take cream tea as Tunstall surely did.

Work and play

Tunstall worked hard during his sojourn with his father’s company. He also enjoyed himself. He had a passion for quality horses and in the morning, at first light, he’d usually take a horseback ride. He went hunting with his hounds in the Cowichan Valley. He shot beaver and ducks at Swan Lake.

He attended a potlatch, wrote about it with more broad-minded perception than many of his peers, and visited with Chinese families at their New Year.

“I must say they ‘knock Christians endways’ at hospitality,” he wrote. “We called upon a butcher who is a friend of our ‘Celestial’ & really, he was a prince in his welcome, he gave us champagne & sweets & treated us as no Christian of his caste could have done.”

The business association with Turner doubtless opened doors for the well-heeled and very eligible bachelor although, as he put it, he had no desire to be “netted” by some young lady. Tunstall attended naval balls on the admiral’s flagship, dinners and dances. At one soirée he flirted with Fanny Palmer, a popular and musically talented 17-year-old whom he described as the best dancer at the party, and “one of the prettiest.”

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He subsequently went riding with Fanny and took her skating but later noted in his diary that the local gossip assumed he was lovestruck. He wasn’t. He promptly began to broaden his field of female companionship, since marriage was far from his agenda.

After a few years, the restrictions of life in the outpost began to chafe. There was growing friction between Tunstall and the Turners. He moved out and took lodgings with an old friend of his father’s, who was the American consul in Victoria.

“Victoria is such a small place, that there is not really enough room to think, without other people’s knowing it,” Nolan records him as writing. “You can quite imagine that Victoria to a young man must present a very dull prospect, the future of it appears to be one long slow unsatisfactory pilgrimage & you can also imagine that leaving such a place does not call forth very many sighs of regret.”

Tunstall began making business plans of his own. He wanted to prove himself by increasing the family wealth and considered, then rejected, possible ventures in Oregon, Australia and Alaska.

By October 1875, Tunstall was yearning for a life beyond merchandising.

“I shall be far happier than cuffed in white linen & coated in broadcloth, pedalling [sic] trifles to women with slim purses & slimmer education & refinement,” he wrote. “I shall be much happier in the roughest seasons of this enterprise than I ever am in this dry goods business.”

Then, in November, the paddle steamer SS Pacific foundered after colliding with the sailing ship Orpheus off Cape Flattery. Fanny Palmer — the young woman Tunstall had flirted with years earlier — was aboard the ship, travelling to San Francisco to visit her sisters. She drowned.

Only one passenger survived. Among the dead: Sewell P. Moody, the founder of Moodyville; the ship’s captain, Jefferson Davis Howell, brother-in-law to former Confederate president Jefferson Davis; and Wells Fargo agent Francis Garesche, reputedly escorting $500,000 in gold dust to the San Francisco mint.

Fanny’s body washed up on San Juan Island weeks later. Her funeral, held in a blinding snowstorm, was attended by almost everyone who was anyone in the capital.

Fanny’s death closed a chapter. Within three months, on Feb. 18, 1876, Tunstall was aboard the SS City of Panama and himself bound for San Francisco.

A home in New Mexico

After visiting a number of California ranches that summer, Tunstall was in Lincoln, N.M., by November, owned a ranch, had employed the teenage William H. Bonney and had the

J. H. Tunstall & Co. Store operating in direct competition with the Mafia-like conspiracy he called the “Santa Fe Ring.”

The brash young Tunstall had come looking for investment prospects. Suddenly he was battling for survival with an organization whose web of kickbacks, payoffs, intimidation and captured officials extended from Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady into the highest offices of the territorial government.

The conspirators began to harass this new threat to their financial interests. Rustlers stole his livestock. When Tunstall’s cowboys, deputized by a justice of the peace, caught them, the sheriff arrested the deputies and held them while the rustlers “escaped” from the Lincoln jail.

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Next, deputies loyal to the conspirators seized the Englishman’s store and its contents, ostensibly to cover a debt owed by one of Tunstall’s business partners. Backed by Bonney and two others, Tunstall took his store back.

Tunstall now put his experience in Victoria to work: he followed the money.

On Jan. 18, 1878, he revealed that cheques submitted to Brady by ranchers as territorial taxes were actually being cashed by J.J. Dolan & Co. to buy cattle — from known rustlers.

Dolan was incensed. He challenged Tunstall to a gunfight. Tunstall declined.

A month later, on Feb. 18, Tunstall and four ranch hands were moving a herd of horses when they encountered yet another posse deputized by the sheriff.

Accompanying the posse were Jesse Evans, William Morton and Tom Hill, three notorious outlaws who were among those who had “escaped” after being jailed for stealing Tunstall’s livestock. Dolan, the Englishman’s mortal enemy, also was with the posse.

Historian Frederick W. Nolan says there was “evil intent” on the part of Brady’s posse.

Tunstall’s cowboys knew instantly what was coming and scattered for cover. Despite his men’s urging, the young, self-confident rancher rode slowly down to meet his pursuers.

As he approached, Morton shot him with a rifle. While he writhed on the ground, Evans pulled Tunstall’s own revolver from its holster and shot him through the back of the head. Then he shot Tunstall’s prized horse. A coroner reported that after the shooting, Tunstall’s skull was smashed in. The body was left in the dust. The posse rode off.

Tunstall was brought in by his cowboys and buried behind his store. What became known as the Lincoln County Range War had begun.

When it was over, almost all the men who had participated in killing Tunstall and all but one of the cowboys who initially sought to avenge him, including Bonney, Brady and several deputies, would be dead.

The teenager — he might have been as young as 16 — emerged from the whirlwind of violence begotten by the murder of the young Victoria dry goods merchant. William H. Bonney, or William Antrim, or Henry McCarty left behind his mundane names and entered folklore as Billy the Kid.

How pervasive is the legend that Tunstall’s murder helped create? Since he was shot dead 130 years ago this summer — ambushed unarmed and barefoot while visiting his sweetheart at midnight by Pat Garrett, a lawman of ambivalent virtue who was later shot dead himself — Billy the Kid has been the subject of 70 or more movies, has spawned hundreds of biographies, histories, memoirs, plays and novels from pulp “penny dreadful” to high literature. There’s even a ballet.

Politicians, professors, lawyers, poets, judges, pop stars, reporters, classical composers, former sidekicks, even the man who bushwhacked Billy the Kid in the dark of night have all contributed their accounts.

The portrayals range from the austere to the outrageous, from the dry as dust to the ridiculously melodramatic. But like all good hero tales, the actual history is shrouded in vagueness and uncertainty from beginning to end.

What’s thought to be Billy the Kid’s grave — the original wooden headboard was lost, its replacement stolen, the cemetery flooded and the grave unmarked for half a century — is now said to be the most visited site in New Mexico.

Of John Henry Tunstall and his ambitions, all that remains is a plaque by a dusty New Mexico byroad and the letters in Nolan’s compilation. Few in B.C. have even heard of the young man who once hired Billy the Kid and who set him on the trail to an early death and immortality.

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Billy the Kid, a criminal and gunfighter who started his 'career' when he was 12, was born on 1859 in New York City, as Henry McCarty or William H. Bonney




Steamboats such as the SS Amelia and SS Olympian would dock at the Turner, Beeton and Tunstall wharfs in Victoria, where John Henry Tunstall worked for his father.



This reproduction of a circa 1880 photograph obtained November 12, 2010 from the Library of Congress shows the infamous 19th century Wild West outlaw Billy the Kid.

John Henry Tunstall was murdered in 1878.