Here is the most detailed and most engaging narrated history to date of the legendary two-year facedown and shootout in Lincoln. Until now, New Mexico's late nineteenth-century Lincoln County War has served primarily as the backdrop for a succession of mythical renderings of Billy the Kid in American popular culture. However, as Robert Utley so convincingly demonstrates, this "war without heroes," the source of scores of books and movies, would have occurred even if Billy Bonney had never existed. Fundamentally, the war was a clash of personalities engaged int eh quest for money and power, involving the employment toward that end of every legal and lethal means available on the southwestern frontier. The Lincoln County Was is a case study in frontier violence. As such it needs to be understood as part of the heritage of Americans as a people inclined to violent pursuit of ambition and violent resolution of problems. Utley recreates the West of the 1870s to pierce the legends spawned by popular culture. In their place, he leaves the reader with a vivid image of the impact upon ordinary people of the code of the West, the cutthroat pursuit of financial fortunes during America's Gilded Age; and the twin harbingers of violence represented by whiskey and guns in the hands of hard-drinking men with hair-trigger tempers. Utley is that rare historian who transforms the past into a compelling , fast-paced, and highly readable story.