McCabe & Mrs. Miller : One thing that bothers me

So, Harrison & Shaughnessy could not make a deal with McCabe, so they sent assassins to kill him. How is that going to work out? Are they just going to then move into his business afterwards? How are they going to deal with Mrs. Miller when they find out she was his partner? Or are they just going to let McCabe's business dry up and die? To me the idea of just killing the McCabe seems a little extreme, with no real benefit to anybody

I think it was less about McCabe's actual businesses (saloon, whorehouse, bathhouse) than it was about McCabe being the town's leading citizen. If they remove McCabe they remove what they perceive is the main source of resistance to the company coming in and taking over.

But I think the last sequence with the townspeople putting out the fire posits that McCabe has inadvertently facilitated the creation of a real and invested community that might not capitulate so easily. The company is going to come back - they own all of Sheehan's holdings - but they might not come back to a town so easily pushed over. In any event I don't see Mrs. Miller making much of a go of it, regardless of any kind of legal right she may or may not have to McCabe's interests.

Thanks for the response. When Constance left him in the middle of the night, and we find out at the end she's off in the Chinese area smoking opium while he's been fighting for his life, I took that to mean she'd given up, and had abadoned McCabe; opium is her escape. If and when the Company moves in, she'll probably run the whorehouse as their employee

Sheehan had sold his portion of the town, so once McCabe was dead the company could just move in and buy up the rest cheap.

BUT - the original script makes clear that the town became a ghost town three years after McCabe's death. In the original opening scene - which was not filmed but is spelled out in the script - the camera pans the "town" in 1970, a ghost town with the burned-out remnants of the church still visible. The shot then dissolves into the past to tell of this ghost town's founding, which is the tale of McCabe & Mrs. Miller.