15 Facts About Elfego Baca

Elfego Baca was a gunfighter, law enforcement officer, lawyer, and politician in New Mexico, who became an American folk hero of the later years of the New Mexico Territory frontier.

Elfego Baca is known for his involvement in an 1884 shootout in Frisco, New Mexico, as well as later fictionalized representations of his life in Westerns released during the mid-20th century.

Elfego Baca's family moved to Topeka, Kansas, when he was a young child.

In 1884, at the age of 19, Elfego Baca acquired some guns and became a deputy sheriff in Socorro County, New Mexico.

In October 1884, in the town of Middle San Francisco Plaza, Elfego Baca arrested a drunk cowboy named Charlie McCarty, flashing his badge at him and taking his gun.

In May 1885, Elfego Baca was charged with murder for the death of John Slaughter's foreman and Bert Hearne, and was jailed awaiting trial.

Elfego Baca officially became the sheriff of Socorro County and secured indictments for the arrest of the area's lawbreakers.

Elfego Baca served for two years and then began studying law.

Elfego Baca practiced law on San Antonio Street in El Paso between 1902 and 1904.

From 1913 to 1916, Elfego Baca served as the official US representative of Victoriano Huerta's government during the Mexican Revolution.

When New Mexico became a state in 1912, Elfego Baca unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a Republican.

Elfego Baca worked closely with New Mexico's longtime Senator Bronson Cutting as a political investigator and wrote a weekly column in Spanish praising Cutting's work on behalf of local Hispanics.

Elfego Baca considered running for governor despite his declining health, but he failed to secure the Democratic Party's nomination for district attorney in 1944.

Elfego Baca was often arrogant, and, of course, he showed no compunction about killing people.

One often-told story says that once when he was practicing law in Albuquerque, Elfego Baca received a telegram from a client in El Paso, Texas.