BILL TILGHMAN: Marshal of the Last Frontier

by Floyd Miller ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 10, 1968

Tilghman was almost too good to be true as this legend hath it. And it's been heartily romanticized with that old frontier tough talk which adds to the feeling that this just has to be fiction. But it's not. . . the old boy's life was the stuff of which pulp westerns are made. . . and made. As a youngster he was a top buffalo hunter; he was a tough cowhand who never drank, later he became the under sheriff of Dodge City under Wyatt Earp and eventually earned a City Marshal's badge; he forced order in the overnight boomtown of Guthrie, Oklahoma during the momentous landrun; was made Deputy U.S. Marshal of the Oklahoma Territory; broke up the Dalton/Dolen gang and singlehandedly captured Dolen after a four year chase; was called in for conferences by President Roosevelt who considered him ""Bully."" He had a singular run-in with the Ku Klux Klan and finally, at the age of seventy, was brought out of retirement to clean up a roaring twenties boomtown. . . Cromwell, Oklahoma with its pointy-toed terrorism and protection rackets. He was finally shot down by a treacherous, corrupt Federal Agent, in the best of the Western melodramatic tradition. Quite a saga and one can almost hear John Wayne thundering down from his Hollywood Ponderosa to take a crack at the role.

Pub Date: May 10, 1968

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1968

Categories: NONFICTION