Families Still Feuding 100 Years After Mysterious Range War Killings

It’s an Old West feud that had all the elements: an ambush along a lonely trail, a trial that made headlines, even a range war rooted in politics as well as cattle.

And it’s a feud that never died.

The Fountains still blame the Lees for the 1896 deaths of Col. Albert Jennings Fountain and his 8-year-old son, whose bodies were never found.

The Lees still protest their innocence. Oliver Lee, prominent Democrat and major landholder, was acquitted in 1899 of murdering the Republican Fountain, but that didn’t end the controversy.

A great-granddaughter of Fountain says a great-grandson of Lee refused to shake hands during a 100th-anniversary event.

“They all sat in their own little sections of the room, and there wasn’t much interaction between them even 100 years later,” recalls Gordon Owen, a New Mexico State University professor who wrote a book about the slayings.

“You could have sectioned them out in the dark. It wouldn’t have been hard,” agrees Oliver “Grem” Lee IV, Lee’s great-grandson, who attended the 1996 reunion.

Fountain’s great-granddaughter, Mary Alexander, insists that she holds no grudges--but still believes that Lee was among those who waylaid the colonel.

“I’m just telling you what my people have told us all our lives,” she says.

It’s hard to pinpoint when the bad blood originated.

Col. Fountain, a lawyer for the Southeastern New Mexico Stock Growers Assn., had hired a detective to seek rustlers among Lee’s cowhands.

Evidence that the private eye turned up spurred an indictment against Lee, and eventually he and 25 other ranchers faced charges of rustling or brand-altering.

After attending a court session in Lincoln, N.M., Fountain and his son left town on Jan. 30, 1896. About the same time, 20 of those charged also left Lincoln. The Fountains vanished a day later. Three riders were seen following them.

Lee was not among the riders, according to retired New Mexico State University historian David Townsend. He quoted the late Claire Snow, whose parents were on the trail that day and recognized the riders. She never revealed who the riders were.

Grem Lee says there was no way that his great-grandfather killed Fountain.

Nonetheless, Sheriff Pat Garrett, famous for killing Billy the Kid in the same area 15 years earlier, went after Lee and two others.

A posse member claimed to have tracked a horse from the ambush site near Chalk Hill to one of Lee’s ranches. Among evidence found near Chalk Hill was young Henry Fountain’s bloody bandanna, with 15 cents folded inside, change from candy that the boy had bought the day before.

Roots of the feud lay in the Civil War. Returning Union veterans, often Republicans, clashed with Confederate vets, usually Democrats.

In August 1871, 25 years before the Fountain ambush, Republicans and Democrats opened fire on each other during a candidates’ forum and impromptu parade on the town square in Mesilla, N.M. Nine people died and nearly 50 were wounded.

Fountain, who came to New Mexico with the Union Army’s California Column in 1862, was a Republican legislator first in Texas and later in New Mexico. He founded a Las Cruces newspaper, The Republican.

On the Democratic side with Lee was Albert Bacon Fall, a onetime federal judge who appointed Lee as deputy U.S. marshal. Fall was Lee’s defense attorney in the murder trial. Some in the Fountain faction asserted that Fall was behind the ambush.

The jury deliberated just seven minutes before Lee and the others were acquitted.

Owen, the historian, says jurors were probably right. “Lee and Fall and his men were not sorry, but I don’t think they were directly involved,” he says.

In a book he wrote about the case, Owen offers a different set of possible conspirators, including one who had sworn to kill Fountain, another who couldn’t account for his whereabouts, and someone identified only as Brady.

In the end, the truth may never be known.

But as succeeding generations keep the feud alive--a reenactment of Lee’s 1899 trial is planned for next year--there’s an irony.

Time smoothed the political edge that aggravated the range war, and Lee the Democrat joined the GOP and served in the Legislature from 1918 to 1930 as a Republican.

“Things have kind of swapped ends,” Grem Lee says on his 42,000-acre ranch north of Bingham, near White Sands Missile Range.

Lee, a collector and illustrator of Old West folklore whose nickname is short for Gremlin, appreciates this twist in the family tale.

He stops short of saying that Lee and Fountain would be friends today but concedes: “They probably would have a lot in common.”