Martin Gallegos: Deputy Marshal Who Shot Out a Lamp to Save Six Lives
After midnight on election day in San Rafael, New Mexico, Dumas Provencher leaned over to Deputy Marshal Martin Gallegos to whisper a warning about a plot to kill the judges and seize ballots. [1][3] Instantly, six hired murderers at the open window fired, striking Provencher in the aorta; the blood splattered Gallegos's face and body. [2] Without turning, Gallegos snatched his six-shooter revolver from his belt and shot out the flickering lamp thirty feet away, all in less than two seconds, leaving the room in darkness and the six occupants in safety. [4][5] The baffled assassins fled. [5]
Sources
- Shortly after midnight, of election day, the… (1891)Shortly after midnight, of election day, the ballots of that precinct were still being counted by a flickering lamp, in a long, low room in the plaza of San Rafael, and poor Provencher was there. He had just …
- Silver City Enterprise — 1891 (full OCR, Internet Archive) — 1891-05-01 (1891)hal, Martin Gallegos, to whisper a warning. Gallegos is hardly more than a boy — a common, illiterate Mexican youth, at whose awkwardness and ignorance most of us would turn up our noses. But that he had in …
- Silver City Enterprise — 1891 (full OCR, Internet Archive) — 1891-05-01 (1891)active in the movement to overthrow the evil men who had for years exercised a reign of terror over “Bloody Valencia," was gentle, gen- erous Dumas Provencher, one of the pioneers of the territory, and he w…
- Silver City Enterprise — 1891 (full OCR, Internet Archive) — 1891-05-01 (1891)ad against Gallegos, whose face and body were drowned in the spurting deluge. The click of another rifle came from the window. There were still six living targets in that lighted room for the marksmen so …
- they were invisible, and could kill every man… (1891)they were invisible, and could kill every man in the room before one could lift a finger against them. There was but one thing to be done — to put out the betraying lamp. But that was thirty feet away; and …