The Fountain saga told through historical fiction

The Fountain murders, which took place in southern New Mexico in 1896, are one of the most famous unsolved crimes of the Old West. They’re tightly connected to land disputes, political corruption, and the lingering violence that followed the Lincoln County War.

On Jan. 31, 1896, Col. Albert J. Fountain, a former Union Army officer, lawyer, and federal prosecutor, and his 8-year-old son, Henry, disappeared while traveling by wagon from Lincoln, New Mexico, toward Las Cruces after attending a court session. Fountain and his son were last seen near White Sands, traveling along a remote desert road. They never arrived in Las Cruces.

Search parties later found Fountain’s abandoned wagon, bloodstains, and personal items, but no bodies were ever recovered, which added to the mystery.

Fountain was aggressively prosecuting cattle rustlers and corrupt ranchers, many of whom were powerful figures in southern New Mexico, and had recently secured indictments against several prominent men connected to organized cattle theft. Rancher Oliver Lee and his foreman Jim Gilliland were suspected in the disappearance and were arrested and tried for murder.

The trial was held in 1899, and despite strong circumstantial evidence, Lee and Gilliland were acquitted. Many historians believe the verdict reflected power dynamics rather than innocence. Oliver Lee later became a respected businessman.

Award-winning local author Mary Armstrong was intrigued by the story while researching the Fountain family after relocating to Las Cruces in 2010. The result is a historical fiction book series backdropped by the 10 years leading to the murders. The main plot is a coming-of-age story for her protagonist, the fictional nephew of the colonel.

At 14 years old, Jesus ‘Chuy’ Perez Contreras Verazzi Messi leaves the family farm near the Rio Bravo in Mexico and ends up being tutored by his uncle. Jesus studies law with his uncle and shares adventures and adversity with the Fountains and other historic Mesilla and Tularosa Valley citizens.

His story takes a dive into the wild southwest, a brewing range war, a territory struggling toward statehood, courtroom dramas, and the adventures and adversities of a boy’s quest for manhood. Armstrong creates a fictional memoir through the eyes of Jesus.

Armstrong worked for three decades designing golf courses, mostly in the northeastern United States. When that business took a turn, she and her husband moved to New Mexico, and within a few years, she found writing and created this self-published series of books that meld historical facts with a fictional storyteller.

Armstrong enjoyed creative writing when she was young but didn’t consider herself particularly good at it. Her parents leaned into sports when she was young.

“I did every sport they offered when I was in junior high and actually was athlete of the year in my ninth grade, but I also was really into the arts and I loved writing and I did some painting and I did lots of different things, creative outlets,” Armstrong said. “I don't think my parents really knew what to do with me, especially my dad.”

During her professional career, technical writing was more her thing. In Las Cruces, she embraced the creative process in a different way.

“I had a gig with the Las Cruces Sun News writing a weekly golf column and I did that for a couple of years,” Armstrong said. That kind of helped me. People would come up to me and tell me they liked my writing. I don't usually get this much attention. That was my first venture into more creative writing.”

Then, she came across the story of the murders.

“I was at Instacopy doing some work and he had a copy of a book called Las Cruces Multicultural Crossroads on the counter,” she said. “I bought it and I read it and I was really hooked with the Fountain situation. I continued to read everything I could find, and I got to the point where I thought people around here really don't know about the murders. They have their opinion about who did it and that kind of thing, but they don't really understand what happened back then and how it all developed.”

In 2017, Armstrong wrote a play for the One-Act Play Festival. It was called "It Is Blood,” which is one of the headlines that was in the Rio Grande Republican Weekly newspaper just after the murders.

“It was pretty well received, and I wanted to do more with it,” Armstrong said. “I wanted to present it as fairly as i could because people on both sides are just really close-minded about their opinion and it gets pretty nasty.”

In seeking a way to share the account with an open mind, Armstrong settled on historical fiction. It was in 2019 that she created the fictional nephew through whose eyes she could share the story.

“Colonel Fountain's wife was a Mexican and she did have sisters and so I created a sister who lived in Mexico. She had a son who was kind of a small boy who couldn’t work in the fields, so they decided to send him off to study law, they thought,” Armstrong said. “It turned out that that's what he did. He arrives there when he's 14 in 1886, and the murders happened in 1896. All through that time, he reads law, he becomes a lawyer, he actually ends up having an incident that causes Oliver Lee to rescue him, and he ends up living with Oliver Lee for a short time and so he gets that perspective of how things worked.”

That’s where the story begins “The Mesilla, the Two Valleys Saga” complemented by the prequel, “When the Doves Coo.”

The rest of the books in the series follow Jesus as he tries to deal with how to understand the situation between these two men who have very different ideas about society, about how the law should function, all these things that are important to how you live your life.

“That’s the way I presented it,” she said. “I think I did a pretty good job of having an open mind.”

The storyline relies on Armstrong’s research, which drew heavily on reporting in the Rio Grande Republican newspaper.

“It’s fiction because a fictional person is telling the story but really, almost all of it is really, truly historical,” Armstrong said. “The way I see it is that there are very few people who will read what I read to find out what the history but there are a lot more people who will read a good story that will let them experience the times as they were. Then if they want to read more about the actual history then that's great. That's really my objective.”