The Story of the Lincoln County War by Rick Geary

I almost wish I'd held onto Louis Riel and reviewed that together with Rick Geary's The Story of the Lincoln County War: both are stories in comics about 19th century rebellions, mostly for good reasons against corrupt and nasty rulers, that ended with the destruction of the rebellion and the loss of its cause. Louis Riel was a Canadian, and his story had a racial element that eventually turned that story into one of the important lessons of that nation.

Rick Geary, though, has a more sordid story to tell: one motivated by greed and lust for power on one side, and a slightly purer desire to make a living (or, maybe, to push out the old cabal and supplant it with a new corrupt cabal, in someone's wildest dreams) on the other. The place is Lincoln County, New Mexico, in the late 1870s -- a huge expanse of mostly empty land, with ranchers, farmers, and a few townspeople. The current cabal extends all the way up to the territorial governor, and is anchored by the shopkeeper/merchant to the local fort. (He has an admirably compact supply chain, with hired rustlers stealing local cattle for him to sell as beef to that fort, plus a near-monopoly on most staples and the kind of predatory credit that soon afterward gave rise to the company town.)

On the other side is a new shop-owner, trying to get into the business, and a local lawyer who used to work for the cabal and either was kicked out or smartened up. Eventually, it turns to violence, because it always does.

This is "war" in the local-history sense; at no time is there a pitched battle or real tactics, though an army detachment does get into the fray at one point, with the expected results. The fighters in this "war" are close to the conventional idea of cowboys: well-armed young men in bands riding around a semi-barren landscape and shooting at each other. And, since one side of this "war" does have control of the local government, meaning both the apparatus of the law and the assistance of that army detachment, the outcome is not really in doubt.

Over a long period of time, they say, the arc of humanity does bend towards justice. But any story about individual people doesn't have that luxury of time, and this arc was bent in an entirely different direction. The best thing you can say about this "war" is that it was short and, as far as Geary tell us, didn't claim any civilians. It did spawn a few outlaws, most notably someone Geary here calls by his "real" name, William Bonney. (And so this book is something of a prequel to Geary's The True Death of Billy the Kid from a couple of years ago. Like that book, The Story of the Lincoln County War was funded through Kickstarter. It's not yet on Geary's web store, but that would be the most likely place to find it.)

This is Geary in his usual mature sombre-historical mode, not the madcap Geary of his early career. (Though that wild-hair Geary still does make occasional appearances, once in a while.) As always, he's very good at 19th century faces, at physical spaces from maps to rooms to dusty streets, and at explaining complicated, violent, nasty bits of history to a modern audience. Again, this was a Kickstarter project, presumably because it was considered to have less wide of an appeal than Geary's usual books about historical murders. But this is an interesting bit of unpleasant history -- another tale of capitalism run riot and corrupt, in case we need one more in these fallen days -- told well by a master of comics. If you can find it, it's worth it.