By most accounts, the death of 24-year-old John Tunstall was little more than a cold-blooded assassination. His murder was the spark that ignited the Lincoln County War, a conflict that got so bad that President Rutherford B. Hayes stepped in, ousting New Mexico’s corrupt territorial governor and replacing him with Lew Wallace, a former Civil War general, who spent his spare time writing his novel Ben-Hur. Like most conflicts in the Old West, the Lincoln County War was about money and power
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