Old Lincoln Days

At the 2025 Old Lincoln Days, the Marrow Bone Springs Gunfighters, a troupe out of Fort Worth, staged a fight on the ground where Alexander McSween’s adobe house once stood. Smoke filled the yard. The Regulators broke from the burning house with a gun in each hand and ran for the cottonwoods along the Río Bonito. When it cleared, Billy and two companions were gone, and McSween and three others lay in the grass. A man wearing a tin star stepped out to the crowd. “The death of Alexander McSween marked the end of the Five-Day Battle,” he announced, “the climax of the Lincoln County War.” Then he gave the next show: the capture of Billy the Kid at Stinking Springs, 3 p.m., in front of the Aragon Store ruins.

Old Lincoln Days takes over the village on the first full weekend of August, as the Friends of the Lincoln Historic Site put it. The 2026 festival ran Friday, August 7, through Sunday, August 9. It commemorates the Lincoln County War, the feud between the Murphy-Dolan mercantile, known as the House, and the Tunstall-McSween partnership that drew in young Billy the Kid. Lincoln Historic Site, the Friends, the Billy the Kid Pageant committee, and the people of Lincoln present it together. The streets, vendors, music, and parade are free.

Calle la Placita by day

Lincoln is one street. The historic site stretches along roughly a quarter mile of US 380 and takes in 17 structures dating from the 1850s to the 1880s, in a village of fewer than 200 residents. The Friends’ members once counted the “dusty frontier-era street” at about a mile. During the festival a free horse-drawn wagon runs its length. There is no cell service.

The long adobe Tunstall Store, built in 1877 as John Tunstall’s headquarters, is a museum now, its shelves stocked with original 19th-century goods: coffee tins, Balmoral boots, tonic bottles. In 2025 Ren Dubois, in his first year as Billy for the Marrow Bone Springs troupe, posed for pictures near the back. Brian Sanchez of Carrizozo stopped in with his son Ryan. The Sanchezes descend from José Chávez y Chávez, one of the Regulators. “Everyone here is related to somebody,” Brian said. Of the weekend he said: “It’s the Super Bowl. It’s romanticized, of course, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing—but the real thing is just as gripping.”

Lectures in the 2026 festival met in the Billiard Hall of the Old Lincoln County Courthouse, two a day on Friday and Saturday. Lori Goodloe spoke on the last escape. John LeMay spoke on the rivalry between John Chisum and the Kid. Brandon Dickson took up “the Most Dangerous Street in America,” and Johnny Boswell presented new research on the Kid’s true age. At 5:15 each evening the same hall showed Young Guns. Children’s activities were held outside the Convento, and the state’s Wonders on Wheels Mobile Museum parked in town with its exhibition “The Arts of Democracy in New Mexico.” The 2025 festival also saw the reopening of the Dr. Woods House as a living-history space after a long interior restoration, and the opening of the Billy the Kid Gift Shop by Charles “Billy” and Tammy Rogers two weeks earlier. “You don’t choose Lincoln, it chooses you,” Tammy said.

Lincoln has no restaurant and no grocery. For the festival, food trucks set up through town selling barbeque, smashburgers, and tacos. There is also a petting zoo. The one bar is Bonito Valley Brewing Company, in a former livery and residence built in 1866, where Billy the Kid is said to have hidden from Fort Stanton soldiers inside a flour barrel. John and Melissa Boutte opened it in 2017. “It’s the busiest weekend of the year for us,” Melissa said. “I usually don’t even get to step foot outside.” Over L.G. Murphy Dry Irish Stout and Lincoln Logger lager, drinkers argue over how many men the Kid killed and whether Pat Garrett really shot him. In 2025, as the sun went down, a man in period dress with a white handlebar mustache led the patio in a chant:

“Come on, rain! Do it well! We live in New Mexico And it’s hot as hell!”

Then he fired a volley of blanks into the sky. For the 2026 festival the Friends shared a poster by Bad Hoss Map Company charting rainfall over the last 45 years of Old Lincoln Days, with the advice: “Bring your hat!”

The Last Escape on the pageant grounds

The wagon passes the Torreón and the Convento and lets riders off at the Old Lincoln County Courthouse. This is the two-story stuccoed adobe from which the Kid escaped in 1881. It is now a history and art museum, and one wall bears what are said to be bullet holes from the jailbreak. The pageant grounds lie just beyond.

The audience sits on tiered benches above an open-air stage built as a miniature Lincoln, with wooden facades, a plaster Torreón, and flickering streetlights. The 2025 performance opened with a Spanish folk hymn sung live while local schoolchildren carried crosses and luminarias in procession toward a set piece of the San Juan Mission. Then riders raced real horses through the dust, and their gunshots cracked off the hillside. At the climax Billy slipped his shackles, took a horse, and rode into the night. The narrator closed: “Among these dusty streets still walk the memories of men who lived when the West was young, and the same life—without its tragedies—is lived today in Lincoln.” The show runs about 90 minutes.

The Friends call it a “campy retelling” played from a script “largely unchanged since the 1940s.” More than 100 local volunteers sew the costumes, wrangle the horses, run the lights, and take the parts, some playing their own ancestors. Kent McInnes grew up in Lincoln and was president of the pageant for nearly 30 years. In 2025 his son Brett played Billy, and Kent worked from the announcer booth, voicing several of the male characters. “You’re not going to find [another] true folk pageant where they have voices and actors that are totally separate,” he said. “We do that out of tradition.” Of the cast he said, “It’s almost like a family reunion. You have to really trust someone that’s got a .44 or .45 pointed in your direction.” His favorite moment comes at the end, when children are let up to talk to Billy.

For 2026, the Ruidoso tourism office listed performances at 8:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, after a 7:00 p.m. concert. The Friends described the pageant as “performed daily over the three day event weekend.” In 2015 the Sunday show was at 3 p.m.

Peter Hurd in the title role, 1940

The pageant began with the 1940 statewide commemoration of the four-hundredth anniversary of Coronado’s entrada. The state’s Coronado Cuarto Centennial Commission asked communities for historic pageants. According to the Friends’ history, Lincoln County residents led by state Senator Louise Coe and the Roswell-born artist Peter Hurd proposed an outdoor folk pageant about Billy the Kid on the courthouse grounds. Hurd was artistic director and star. He adapted Sure Fire: Episodes in the Life of Billy the Kid, which the Santa Fe novelist Phillip Stevenson had written in 1931 for the Santa Fe Fiesta, and retitled it Billy the Kid Lives Again. Another account says the first script was written under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration. Organizers set the debut for June 22, 1940. The magazine El Palacio adds that the townspeople also staged a re-creation of Coronado’s expedition that year.

Hurd was trained at the New Mexico Military Institute and West Point. His friend Paul Horgan wrote that “Hurd’s horsemanship deserves a word to itself, for it is extraordinary in its physical expertness and grace.” He played the Kid on the spot where the real escape had happened fifty-nine years before. For the first years, El Palacio says, the action moved through the whole town, and the single road was shut so actors and spectators could follow it from place to place. The early festival had a parade, Mescalero Apache dances, a fiddling contest, and a Pony Express race whose riders carried real mail, which was then postmarked and sent on. Early casts used live rounds.

The sources differ on what came next. El Palacio says the pageant has run every summer since 1940 apart from a brief pause for World War II, and New Mexico Magazine calls it the oldest continuously running folk pageant in the nation. The Friends’ history records that in 1949 the new Old Lincoln County Memorial Commission and the Lincoln County Historical Society held the pageant and festival “for the first time since 1940.” In that revival Hurd took the part again, under the new title The Last Escape of Billy the Kid, and the festival went by the name “Day in Old Lincoln.” The commission ran it as a fundraiser for the courthouse museum, and it became annual. In 1952 the pageant moved to the stage beside the courthouse, with bleachers for hundreds and room for sixteen horses and a longhorn steer. For the seventy-fifth anniversary in 2015, about 7,000 people came, and the program listed chuck-wagon cooks, blacksmiths, a medicine show, cornhusk-doll making, and an amateur radio station, K5B, broadcasting in front of the Convento.

La Placita del Rio Bonito

The Mogollon lived in this valley first, then the Piros, then the Mescalero Apache. Hispano farmers from the Rio Grande came about 1854, according to the National Register nomination. They built pole-and-mud jacales around a plaza with a stone torreón for defense against raids. They called the place La Placita del Rio Bonito, which the state historic site translates as “the place by the pretty river” and the National Register form as “the little town by the beautiful river.” In 1869 the new county took the name of the late President Lincoln, and the town became its seat under the same name.

L.G. Murphy’s store, called the House for its hold on county trade, dates from 1873. Its 1874 building became the courthouse in 1880. When John Tunstall opened a rival store and allied with McSween and John Chisum, the quarrel turned to killing. A sheriff’s posse shot Tunstall in February 1878, by El Palacio’s account, and his men became the Regulators. The National Register form gives the war five months, ending in a three-day battle in the streets. Local reenactors call that fight the Five-Day Battle. President Rutherford B. Hayes named the road through town “the most dangerous street in America.”

In April 1881 the Kid was held upstairs in the courthouse under sentence of death. After a walk to the privy, El Palacio relates, he wrestled Deputy Robert Bell to the floor and shot him with his own gun. Still shackled, he took a shotgun from Bob Ollinger’s office and killed Ollinger in the road below. He then talked a while with people in town before riding out. Garrett killed him months later at Fort Sumner.

Voters moved the county seat to Carrizozo in 1909, and residents soon began working to keep the old town whole. In 1934, with Works Progress Administration money, the Torreón became Lincoln’s first restoration. The Memorial Commission later opened the Tunstall Store as a museum in 1957. The Wortley Hotel had burned in 1936, and the commission rebuilt it and reopened it in 1960. On December 19, 1960, Lincoln was named a National Historic Landmark. In the spring of 2026 Cornerstones and the Rocky Mountain Youth Corps replastered the Torreón’s stone with mud, with help from the town. The Friends supplied the dirt, earth dug up during a recent upgrade of Lincoln’s water system.