San Francisco Plaza is name of three…

San Francisco Plaza is name of three towns in Catron County, New Mexico, United States.

Located in the San Francisco River Valley, the towns had been settled by Spanish settlers in the 1860s.

The present town of Reserve had been named Upper San Francisco Plaza by its original Hispanic settlers in 1874.

Apaches had made frequent attacks on the community, which sit within Apache hunting lands.

In the late 1870s, Anglo settlers had begun arriving, and have renamed Upper Frisco Plaza as Milligan's Plaza after a town merchant and saloon owner.

Near Frisco, self-appointed deputy sheriff Elfego Baca holds off a gang of eighty Texan cowboys who want to kill him for arresting cowboy Charles McCarthy (the cowboys had been terrorizing the area's Hispanos and Baca has been working against them).

Shortly after Baca's arrest of a cowboy who had been shooting into the air and into buildings at random while intoxicated, Baca had been confronted by a large number of the cowboy's friends.

Baca had taken refuge in the house of local resident Geronimo Armijo.

A standoff had ensued, during which the cowboys increase in number to around eighty men.

Legend has it that the cowboys fired more than four thousand rounds into the house, but there is little way of confirming just how many rounds were fired exactly.

Baca is not wounded by any of the rounds fired, but does return fire killing four of the cowboys, and wounding eight others.

The standoff ends when the cowboys are unable to acquire more ammunition.

With their ammunition supply depleted, they simply withdraw.

The fight had lasted thirty six hours.