In the spring of 1878, New Mexico Territory was consumed by open warfare. The Lincoln County War had erupted after the murder of a young English rancher named John Tunstall, and a vigilante band calling themselves the Regulators had formed to fight the monopoly that controlled the county. Among those riders, carrying a rifle and braving the gunfire, was a quiet man who never sought fame: Josiah Gordon “Doc” Scurlock. At age twenty-nine, Scurlock stood at the heart of one of the Old West’s most brutal conflicts, and he would rise to lead the Regulators before the violence finally wore him down.
Scurlock’s path to that dusty war had been long and marked by violence. Born on January 11, 1849, in Tallapoosa County, Alabama, he was the sixth of eleven children born to Norman and Esther Scurlock. As a young man, he briefly attended medical school in New Orleans, where the nickname “Doc” followed him for life. He was a lean man, standing five foot eight and weighing about 150 pounds, with dark hair and brown eyes, and while his medical training never became a profession, his skill with a gun certainly did.
That skill was tested first in Mexico in a game of cards. An argument broke out in a tavern between Scurlock and another player. Words turned to gunfire, and when the smoke cleared, the other man was dead. Scurlock had taken a bullet to the mouth, shattering two front teeth, with the round passing out the back of his neck.
Remarkably, he survived, and in 1871 he returned to the United States and found work under cattle baron John Chisum in Texas. A few years later, Scurlock was riding with a cowboy named Jack Holt when the two were ambushed by a band of Indians. Holt was killed instantly, but Scurlock took cover behind rocks and held off the attackers alone for hours. He killed the Indian leader, then slipped away in the darkness and walked nearly twenty miles to find help.
By May 1875, Chisum had moved his operations to New Mexico, and Scurlock joined the cowboy ranks near Roswell. Then, in September of that same year, tragedy struck again. A close companion was killed by Indians, and the grief pushed Scurlock to leave the cattle business. He asked Chisum to pay him what he was owed, but Chisum refused to hand over the money, hoping to keep him.
Scurlock was firm, and finally secured payment—not in cash, but in three horses, two saddles, and a rifle. Some of Chisum’s men deemed this theft and chased after him as he fled to Arizona. When they caught up, Scurlock explained the circumstances of the arrangement, and the cowboys let him go. In Arizona, Scurlock ran into Charlie Bowdre, a man who would become his closest friend and brother-in-law.
The two decided to try their hand at the cheese business, establishing a factory along the Gila River. It is said they even briefly recruited a young man named Billy the Kid as a hand. But the cheese factory failed, and the partners moved to Lincoln County, New Mexico. There they acquired a farm on credit from Lawrence G.
Murphy, head of the powerful Murphy & Dolan mercantile monopoly that dominated the county—a loan that tied Scurlock to the very forces he would later fight. Life took a dark turn on an unlucky September day in 1876. Scurlock accidentally fired a shot that killed his friend Mike Harkins, a store manager at Blazer’s Mill owned by John H. Riley.
Harkins was examining a pistol when it went off, and the death was a heavy blow. Just a month later, on October 19, Scurlock married Maria Antonia Miguela Herrera. In a stroke of fortune, Charlie Bowdre was already married to Maria’s sister, cementing their bond as brothers-in-law. The couple would eventually raise ten children.
At this time, Lincoln County was plagued by horse and cattle theft. Scurlock served on several posses dedicated to pursuing the thieves, some of whom were hanged for their crimes. In January 1877, though, he found himself on the wrong side of the law. Scurlock and his neighbor George Coe were arrested by Sheriff William Brady, who suspected them of harboring Frank Freeman, a wanted murderer allegedly linked to the Jesse Evans gang.
For several days, the two men reportedly endured brutal torture before they were let go. Through these turbulent times, Scurlock built friendships with ranchers John Tunstall and Dick Brewer. Tunstall, backed by attorney Alexander McSween, had opened a rival store to challenge Murphy & Dolan’s stranglehold on Lincoln County. Scurlock openly sided with the newcomers, publicly confronting Lawrence Murphy and James Dolan themselves.
Desperate to protect their profits, Murphy and Dolan began a campaign of retaliation that ended on February 18, 1878, when John Tunstall was brutally murdered. That killing ignited the county into all-out war. A faction of gunmen, the Regulators, rose up to combat the monopoly, and Scurlock became one of its founding members. The group’s aim was simple: break the oppressive control of Murphy and Dolan.
At the Battle of Blazer’s Mill on April 4, 1878, Scurlock was shot in the leg by Buckshot Roberts. Worse still, the Regulators lost their respected leader, Dick Brewer, in the same fight. Undeterred, the war ground on. Frank McNab took command of the Regulators, but he too was soon killed, and Scurlock stepped into his place as the third leader of the band.
During the height of the conflict, a political shift briefly favored the Regulators. Sheriff William Brady, who had ties to the Dolan-Murphy faction, was replaced by John Copeland, a McSween supporter. Taking advantage of this change, Scurlock served briefly as deputy sheriff. But the advantage did not last, and the bloodshed continued.
The Lincoln County War finally came to a close in November 1878, when the territorial governor intervened. Threatening martial law to restore peace, he issued a stern warning to lay down arms and extended a pardon to all those involved who had not yet been indicted. The amnesty explicitly excluded Billy the Kid, but neither he nor anyone else could keep the war alive. By the time it was over, nineteen men had been killed in the conflict.
A year later, Scurlock made his decision. He gave up his gun and left New Mexico for Texas, seeking a peaceful existence. He deliberately kept his distance from his gunfighting past, rarely speaking of it. He took a job running a mail station in Potter County, Texas, according to the 1880 census.
When he was not working, he read classical literature and even tried his hand at poetry. Doc Scurlock, who had survived a bullet through the face, hours of lone gunfights, and an entire range war, died quietly at the age of eighty in Eastland, Texas, of a heart attack. He was buried at Eastland City Cemetery beside his wife and family, a man who had outlived the violence that had once defined him.