In 1884, a nineteen year old with a badge he made himself held off roughly eighty armed men for a day and a half from inside a mud hut in New Mexico. They fired an estimated four thousand rounds into it and threw dynamite on the roof. On the second morning, he made coffee and tortillas. His name was Elfego Baca, and he was from Socorro. The trouble was in a settlement called Frisco, out in western New Mexico Territory. Texas cowboys working the big ranches around it had spent months terrorizing the Mexican American families who lived there. Among other things, ranch hands had tortured and maimed a local man in a cantina. Nothing happened to anyone, because the law in that county did not exist for those residents. A deputy named Pedro Sarracino was talking about the situation back in Socorro. Baca, who was nineteen and had no commission of any kind, told him that if he would take him along to Frisco, Baca would make himself a self made deputy. Then he did exactly that. He got himself a badge and rode out. In the fall of 1884 a drunk Slaughter ranch hand named Charlie McCarty was waving a pistol around in a bar and shot Baca's hat off his head. Baca disarmed him and arrested him. The cowboys came for him in a group, led by the Slaughter foreman, a man named Young Parham. In the confrontation Parham's horse was shot out from under him and came down on top of him and killed him. That turned an arrest into a war. Baca took cover in a jacal, a small hut built of mud and sticks, belonging to a man named Geronimo Armijo. About eighty cowboys surrounded it. What saved his life was the architecture. The floor of that hut was dug about eighteen inches below ground level. So while thousands of rounds went straight through the mud walls, Baca was lying below the line of them, firing back out through the doorway. It ran about thirty six hours. They shot the building apart. They set fire to part of it. They threw dynamite onto the roof and brought down a corner of the structure. On the second morning the men outside smelled coffee brewing and fresh tortillas cooking, because there was a stove in there and Baca was making himself breakfast. When it ended, four of them were dead and eight were wounded. Baca did not have a scratch on him. When people went inside afterward they found a plaster statue of a saint standing intact in the wreckage. He refused to surrender until he got terms. He wanted to be tried in Socorro rather than locally, and he wanted to keep both of his pistols for the ride. He got both. He was tried for murder and acquitted. His defense hauled in the door of Geronimo Armijo's house and stood it up in the courtroom. It had more than four hundred bullet holes in it. And then Elfego Baca went and had an entire second life. He studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1894. Over the years he was a deputy US marshal, a county clerk, a school superintendent, a district attorney, a mayor, and the sheriff of Socorro County. His method as sheriff was the best thing about him. Instead of riding out after wanted men, he mailed them letters. Each one gave a date and explained that if the man had not come in by then, Baca would consider him to be resisting arrest and would come and get him personally. Most of them just turned themselves in. He later got mixed up in the Mexican Revolution, acted as the US representative for Victoriano Huerta's government, and in 1915 stood trial for conspiracy over a Mexican general's escape from jail. Acquitted again. He died in Albuquerque in 1945. In the late 1950s Walt Disney turned the whole thing into a television serial, which made a Mexican American kid from Socorro, New Mexico arguably the first Hispanic pop culture hero in America. And on the day that actually happened, he was not a deputy at all. He had appointed himself, made his own badge, and gone out there because nobody else was going to.