John Henry Tunstall (6 March 1853 – 18 February 1878) was an English-born rancher and merchant in Lincoln County, New Mexico, United States. He competed with the Irish Catholic merchants, lawmen, and politicians who ran the town of Lincoln and the county. Tunstall, who hoped to unseat the Irish and make a fortune as the County's new boss, was the first man killed in the Lincoln County War, an economic and political conflict that resulted in armed warfare between rival gangs of cowboys and the ranchers, lawmen, and politicians who issued the orders. Early life and education Tunstall was born in 1853 in Hackney, London. Although Tunstall has often been depicted in fiction as a member of the English nobility, his family were in reality upper middle-class. Furthermore, Tunstall's father "worked in trade", with business interests in both Canada and in the United Kingdom, and would, for this reason, have been looked down on and excluded from polite society. Tunstall lived some of his childhood in Belsize Park. John Tunstall was always inclined toward Agnosticism and, as he entered manhood, "grew increasingly contemptuous of organized religion" and its "ethical restraints." Emigration and career Ambitions In August 1872, Tunstall emigrated to British Columbia, Canada, at age 19, to work as a clerk for Turner, Beeton & Tunstall, a store in which his father owned a partnership. According to Robert M. Utley, "Three miserable and penurious years of clerking" for his father's partners in Vancouver produced in Tunstall a "firm conviction" that, "the road to riches…did not lie in the mercantile world." According to Utley, Tunstall, in his "dreams pictured an empire of sheep or cattle pastured on a great landed estate", where his herds multiplied and his bank account similarly swelled with ever more and more money. In a letter home, Tunstall wrote that although he knew that "a rugged outdoor life" would have its challenges, he predicted, "I shall be far happier than cuffed in white linen & coated in broadcloth, pedalling trifles to women with slim purses & slimmer education & refinement." With this in mind, Tunstall quit his clerking job in February 1876 and left Canada for California. He spent six months investigating the profits of sheep ranching before he decided instead to shift his inquiries to Santa Fe, the capital of the Territory of New Mexico. There, Tunstall had learned, "a specialized legal profession had grown up