Charley Crockett just dropped a new album, which contains a little Western drama titled Santa Fe Ring. The story is sketched — we get to color it in with our own tale of why the Ring would bring so many men just to watch an outlaw die…
photo by Kyle “Trigger” Coroneos of Saving Country Music.
The Santa Fe Ring — which operated from the 1860s into the 1890s — loomed large in the frontier history of New Mexico. The Ring might serve as an avatar of Gilded Age corruption and self-dealing. Some folks consider it essentially an organized crime outfit, which works if you view politics at its most venal a criminal enterprise. I won’t argue with you. Anyways… it was a classic political machine, comprised of governors, federal territorial officials, attorneys, merchants, land barons — the players in territorial New Mexico. As historian Howard Lamar wrote:
“Although located on the frontier, the ring reflected the corporative, monopolistic, and multiple enterprise tendencies of all American business after the Civil War.”
A big part of Billy the Kid’s appeal came from his perceived defiance of the Santa Fe Ring. William H. Bonney aka Henry McCarty aka Kid Antrim aka Billy the Kid was not a freedom fighter. He was a… well… kid caught up in a conflict between an established commercial monopoly (The Dolan Murphy Faction aka The Store) and an aspiring monopolist (John Tunstall). The Lincoln County War of 1878 was, for all intents and purposes, a cowboy mafia war. That notion did not sit well with an old cowboy poet pal of mine. He didn’t like the notion of his beloved West being considered a stage for doin’s he associated with eastern cities. Nevertheless…
The Store was affiliated with the Santa Fe Ring, so to that extent Billy was arrayed against them. Governor Lew Wallace screwed Billy over in the matter of a pardon, probably influenced by the Ring. But Billy was just trying to survive and get a little payback. His outlawry wasn’t that sophisticated.
Anyways…
We don’t know who the outlaw is in Charley Crockett’s song, who sold him out to the Santa Fe Ring, or why. And that’s cool, cuz we all oughta come up with our own Western Noir take. After all, we’ve got the soundtrack.
Cooter Brown says
Good song. Crockett is an intriguing guy. He has a depth of knowledge of history and music that would seem to defy the circumstances of his upbringing as I understand them.
He seems to be something of a self educated polymath, which is probably the best kind.