The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 74, July 1970 - April, 1971 Page: 127

Book Reviews

liams, a currently popular television figure, or sports stars like Bobby
Morrow, the Olympic sprinter-are unmentioned.
But the writer does a good job of particularizing Abilene history,
such as giving the part of town where a buffalo stampede took place
in 1874, locating forgotten early-day building sites, and furnishing a
nice regional setting for her Abilene local history. Miss Duff does
a notable job also of listing families, officeholders, educators, and other
public figures from the early-day past who usually get left out. As one
might expect of a reporter and longtime newspaper employee, her
chapter on the Abilene Reporter-News and its journalistic ancestry,
is outstanding.
Of course, one loses so much of what a town really is-or was-
when the scandals, the heartbreaks, divorces, murders, are not there
to remind us that all cities are people. But then, such a relation might
not be history so much as just delicious gossip.
Dallas, Texas A. C. GREENE
Dallas Stoudenmire: El Paso Marshal. By Leon Claire Metz. (Austin:
Pemberton Press, 1969. Pp. xii + 162. Illustrations, bibliography,
index. $6.95.)
As a gunman and marshal of El Paso during one of the more turbu-
lent periods in West Texas history, Dallas Stoudenmire has figured
rather prominently in western writing for a number of years. In
Six-Guns and Saddle Leather, Ramon F. Adams notes the titles to
some twenty-five publications that relate in some manner to Stouden-
mire. While this record in no way compares with the coverage
Joaquin Murieta, John Wesley Hardin, Clay Allison, the James broth-
ers, "Wild Bill" Hickok, Pat Garrett, the Daltons, and the Youngers
receive in the same bibliography, Adams' references to the El Paso
marshal are still quite impressive in quantity. No doubt, however,
Stoudenmire would have greatly resented the fact that none of his
references represented a solo biographical study. Through the labors
of Leon Metz and Pemberton Press such a study has been produced,
and the marshal should feel considerably less neglected or deprived
when judged among his peers in the future.
Metz has done well by the subject in the context of the popular
approach and style he uses. Stoudenmire emerges as a kind of repre-
sentative, if not the stereotype, of a frontier lawman with an identity

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