The Life of Elfego Baca
by Elfego Baca is among the most colorful and controversial figures in New Mexico’s history. A true Renaissance man of the American Southwest, during his long life he worked as a frontier gunfighter and ruffian (in his youth), a lawyer, sheriff, district attorney, school superintendent, mayor, and perennial candidate for state and national office.
New Mexico Bar admitted him in 1894. A tenacious campaigner for justice, he excelled in the courtroom and soon earned an appointment as district attorney and was elected mayor. Once a friend being tried for murder in El Paso enlisted his help. A local journal quoted Baca as replying, “I’m on my way with three eyewitnesses.” This quote stuck with Baca throughout his life, although he admitted to a newspaper in 1939 that he had never said it.
In his later years, Baca’s stories and folklore became so popular with local residents that he ran for several district offices, and even for the U.S. House of Representatives (unsuccessfully). During one of his campaigns, he printed up a pamphlet highlighting his gunfighter days. It became so popular that he began selling them for ten cents apiece.
In 1928 Kyle Crichton, a local advertising executive, wrote a book titled Law and Order, Ltd.: The Rousing Life of Elfego Baca. He based the work on personal interviews and Baca’s pamphlet but added further embellishments to the already outlandishly mythologized stories.
Elfego Baca died in 1945 at the age of 80. In 1958 True West magazine published yet another brief biography of Baca. According to the article, he had been run over by a fire engine, stabbed with an ice pick, and wounded critically in a knife fight, and he had survived an automobile accident and some 50 gunfights. Thirteen years after the gunfighter’s death, Walt Disney produced a television series titled The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca. The series, starring Robert Loggia, did for Baca’s life what Disney did for many people and events of the western frontier: delivered yet another bigger-than-life mythical being to American popular culture. The mythical Baca can still be seen today on weekly reruns on the Disney Channel.
In 1959 Disney released another film, Elfego Baca-Six Gun Law. It featured a promising young actress named Annette Funicello in her big-screen debut. Recently, the History Channel produced a more factual account of Baca’s life, attempting to demythologize him. In 1994 Howard Bryan wrote Incredible Elfego Baca: Good Man, Bad Man of the Old West, which portrayed both the good and bad aspects of his character. The following year Bryan’s book won the coveted Spur Award from the Western Writersof America, Inc., for Best Western Nonfiction.
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