In the years since the war, Stiles and the surviving remnants of his partisan rangers didn’t abandon their raiding, robbing, and killing. This, in itself, was not particularly unusual. Many Confederate guerrillas, such as the James and Younger gang, continued their wartime activities after the war ended, as outlaws instead of soldiers, without the cover of a flag or uniform. But what singled Stiles and his gang out from other renegade bands of veteran guerrillas was the scale, savagery, and sheer bloodlust of their criminal acts.

All of the crimes committed by Stiles resulted in needless deaths. In the Arizona Territory in 1868, instead of merely robbing the passengers, they tore up the railroad tracks and derailed the train. The ensuing crash killed over twenty people. In 1870, in the New Mexico Territory, they robbed a bank in Las Cruces. The townspeople, led by the sheriff and two deputies, put up a valiant fight. When it was over and the gun smoke cleared, twenty-two men, three women, and a five-year-old boy lay dead in the streets.

The U.S. Army, composed of too few soldiers in the territory, too thinly spread out, and too busy dealing with the warring Apache, were no more effective against Stiles’s highly mobile band of raiders than they’d been during the war. After each bloody raid, Stiles and his horsemen simply vanished into the vast, untamed New Mexico or Arizona territories, where they would remain hidden until reemerging to commit their next murderous crime.

New Mexico Territorial Governor Marsh Giddings, a former civil judge from Michigan with no military or law enforcement experience, was utterly unprepared and completely at a loss as to how to deal with the widespread lawlessness pervading his jurisdiction. He was especially vexed by the Stiles Gang.

After the Magdalena Mine Massacre, as it had come to be known, which occurred in December of 1872, the frustrated Giddings, in desperation, reached out to the Texas governor for help.

On Christmas Eve, just after dawn, twenty members of the Stiles Gang rode into the silver mining town of Magdalena. Instead of robbing the bank, which was heavily fortified because it was stuffed with silver, they converged on the mine. After placing dynamite at the entrance, Major Stiles sent an emissary into the town with a simple demand.

Every citizen was to surrender all their valuables, including everything in the bank, to Stiles’s men in the town square by noon. Failure to comply would result in a detonation at the mine’s opening, which would turn Magdalena’s sole economic engine into its largest grave.

Since almost all the townsmen were working down in the mine, and Stiles’s riders had taken the liberty of killing the town marshal and his deputies upon their arrival, the people of Magdalena had little choice but to comply. They dutifully began to pile their money, jewels, and silver in the town square.