Lawyers, Guns and Money

The Dowager Viscountess left this comment on the Warren Zevon video I posted yesterday:

"Lawyers, Guns and Money" is my favorite.

Zevon was a man with a gift for music and a dark, sometimes sick sense of humor that I found strangely delightful. His lyrics made me read up & learn on the historical references he would make in songs such as 'Roland'. How many rock bands can make you do that?

He will be missed.

All true, except I think of his sense of humor as being normal and the rest of the world's as being incredibly bland. Lawyers, Gun and Money is my favorite as well.

This song puts me in mind of something which happened to my grandpa McIntyre before the First World War. It seems that he and his two brothers and a cousin were in the US Army and stationed somewhere close to the US/Mexico border. The closest town was in Mexico and the men were accustomed to going there for liberty. It seems that there was a woman who lived there who would earn extra coin by "entertaining" men in her bedchamber while her husband toiled in the fields. One day the husband came in early from his labors in the fields and caught one of grandpa's brothers being so "entertained". He stated his intention to hack them apart with the machete which all Mexican men apparently carried in that era. Great uncle McIntyre grabbed his .45 caliber single action revolver, which US Calvary soldiers were accustomed to carry in those days and the fight was on.

Well, it wasn't much of a fight. You've all heard the one about not bringing a knife to a gunfight? Well it is true even if the knife is a really long one.

Bottom line, One dead Mexican, One naked Mexican woman in tears, One gringo soldier with enough Scottish blood to be pissed off that he wasn't going to get his 50 cents back.

And one murder charge when the Mexican police got there.

Grandpa his other brother and their cousin were not about to allow their kin to be hung by Mexicans for doing no more than defending himself so they attended the trial with four revolvers each hidden under their clothes. The plan was to shoot the police who were in the courtroom, the judge and the prosecutor (plus anyone else who got in the way) then mount the horses they had tied outside the courthouse (there were Springfield 30-06 rifles and 12 gauge shotguns as well as dynamite with the horses) and ride for the border.

They did this secure in the knowledge that the US government and the US Army would not hand them over to the Mexicans to be railroaded once they were safe in US territory. In that better vanished time they were right.

As it happened none of this was necessary as the woman's prostitution was just a little too well known for the court to pretend that the situation was anything other than what it was. It also didn't hurt that the Army would have made the town off limits and that the loss of the silver and gold (they made money out of gold in those days) that the gringos spent would have put a major dent in the towns economy.

All's well that ends well. A few years later all four of them were sent to Europe where they learned the lesson that it is better to have a division of Germans in front of you than a platoon of French behind you, but that's a story for another day.