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M
John Middleton
(1854?-1882?) - Born around 1854, Middleton arrived in Lincoln County,
New Mexico from
Texas in the mid-1870s and went to work as a cowboy for John
Tunstall. When Tunstall,
along with Alexander McSween got into a
feud with the
Dolan-Murphy
faction of
Lincoln, New Mexico, Middleton
obviously sided with Tunstall. After Tunstall was killed, Richard Brewer
was appointed as town constable and put together a group known as "The
Regulators,” which included not only Middleton, but also
Billy the Kid
and other deputies. As the
Lincoln County War erupted, Middleton utilized his
excellent shooting skills to participate in many of the battles. On
April 4, 1878, he was seriously wounded in the chest during a
gunfight with Buckshot Roberts at Blazer's Mills. When the "war" was
finally over, the
Regulators split up. Where he went remains a mystery.
Some say that he remained in the area, dying of smallpox on
November 18, 1882. Other accounts say he moved to
Kansas, where he
married and worked as a cowboy, dying in 1885.
James "Jim" Moon
(18??-1881) - Jim Moon was a frontier gambler and saloon owner in
Ellsworth and
Dodge City,
Kansas before making his way to Denver,
Colorado. During the Chinese riots in Denver in 1880, an angry mob began
beating and lynching the Chinese. Moon stood outside a Chinese business
with a gun in each hand and held off the mob alone. He would later
state: "These Chinks do my laundry and I was there to see nobody
bothered them." Though he stood up on the immigrants' behalf, he was a
man with a violent temper and abuse manner. On June 16, 1881, he was
killed in a gunfight outside his Ocean Oyster Saloon.
N
O
John
O'Rourke, aka: Michael O' Rourke, Johnny Behind the Deuce - (1862-1882) -
O'Rourke began his life as a gunman and gambler when he worked as a hotel
porter. In 1878, at the age of 16, he turned up in Tucson,
Arizona, and by 1880 he
had earned a reputation as an expert card player. At the same time he was also
suspected of stealing, most often from the many drunks he encountered in the
gambling halls. However, few were willing to challenge the young man, as he had
sharpened his shooting skills to the same degree as he had his card playing
skills. In 1881, when he was caught by a miner stealing his pack, the miner
challenged him and received a bullet between his eyes. Taken to jail in Tombstone,
a miners' mob intended to lynch him until
Wyatt Earp
held them off. O'Rourke was then moved to the Tucson jail but soon escaped. The
following year, when O'Rourke was gambling in Sulphur Springs Valley,
he was accused of being a card cheat and a murderer. In the ultimate
gunfight
that occurred, Johnny Behind the Deuce was to slow that time, and was killed.
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 Commodore Perry Owens (1852-1919)
- Born in Tennessee on the anniversary of the great naval commander, Commodore Perry's victory over British naval forces in 1813, he was named for the naval officer, whom his mother admired. Later his family moved to Indiana, but he ran away fro home when he was just 13 years old and was soon working as a cowboy in Oklahoma and New Mexico. By 1881, Owens had moved on to Arizona where he homesteaded near Navajo Springs. In 1886, he was elected sheriff of Apache County and is credited with taming the lawless town of Holbrook. In September, 1887, while trying to subdue a
one of the factions involved in the Pleasant Valley War, a
gunfight ensued. Referred to as the
Owens-Blevins Shootout took on several men
and came out unscraped. However, rather than seeing Owens as a hero he was relieved of his commission. He moved on and was later in Seligman, Arizona where he ran a
saloon. In 1902 he married and in 1919 he died at the age of 66. He is buried in Flagstaff, Arizona.
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