Meantime, the other party were not thus to be surpassed. In June, 1878, Governor Axtell appointed George W. Peppin as sheriff of Lincoln county. Peppin qualified at Mesilla, came back to Lincoln, and demanded of Copeland the warrants in his possession. He had, on his part, twelve warrants for the arrest of members of the McSween gang. Little lacked now to add confusion in this bloody coil. The country was split into two factions. Each had a sheriff as a figurehead! What and where was the law?
Peppin had to get fighting men to serve his warrants, and he could not always be particular about the social standing of his posses. He had a thankless and dangerous position as the "Murphy sheriff." Most of his posses were recruited from among the small ranchers and cow boys of the lower Pecos. Peppin was sheriff only a few months, and threw up the job $2,800 in debt.
The men of both parties were now scouting about for each other here and there over a district more than a hundred miles square; but presently the war was to take on the dignity of a pitched battle. Early in July, 1878, the Kid and his gang rounded up at the McSween house. There were a dozen white desperadoes in their party. There were about forty Mexicans also identified with the McSween faction. These were quartered in the Montana and Ellis residences, well down the street.
The Murphy forces now surrounded the McSween house, and at once a pitched battle began. The McSween men started the firing from the windows and loopholes of their fortress. The Peppin men replied. The town, divided against itself, held under cover. For three days the two little armies lay here, separated by the distance of the street, perhaps sixty men in all on the McSween side, perhaps thirty or forty in all on the Murphy-Peppin side, of whom nineteen were Americans.
To keep the McSween men inside their fortifications, Peppin had three men posted on the mountain side, whence they could look down directly upon the top of the houses, as the mountain here rises up sharply back of the narrow line of adobe buildings. These pickets were Charlie Crawford, Lucillo Montoye, and another Mexican, and with their long-range buffalo guns they threw a good many heavy slugs of lead into the McSween house. At last, one Fernando Herrera, a McSween Mexican, standing in the back door of the Montana house, fired, at a distance of about nine hundred yards, at Charlie Crawford. The shot cut Crawford down, and he lay, with his back broken, behind a rock on the mountain side in the hot sun nearly all day. Crawford was later brought down to the street. Medical attendance there was none, and few dared to offer sympathy, but Captain Saturnino Baca[H] carried Crawford a drink of water.