The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 93, July 1989 - April, 1990 Page: 553

Book Reviews

to connect the Anglo settlements with the interior of Mexico through
the military-sponsored exploration of the route to the merchant wagon
trains, continuing up to the advent of the railroads. He gives attention
to the ports, the wagons and other equipment, and especially to the
people; one whole chapter is devoted to August Santleben, a German
immigrant who developed a major freighting company.
Primary weaknesses of the book are twofold. There is a lack of re-
liance on any Spanish sources; thus the view of the traffic between San
Antonio and Chihuahua is only from the Texas end. The second short-
coming is a lack of adequate maps. There is one illegible reproduction
of a map of Chihuahua and an endpaper map of the three roads. The
latter lacks the level of detail presented in the text, so only a West Texas
native has a chance of picturing the routes of the early expeditions.
This is disappointing in what is otherwise an excellent study in histori-
cal geography.
Wichita State University DONALD J. BLAKESLEE
Guardian of the Law: The Life and Times of William Matthew Tilghman. By
Glenn Shirley. (Austin: Eakin Press, 1988. Pp. v+546. Preface, il-
lustrations, notes, index. $24.95.)
Bill Tilghman never attained the national reputation and renown of
a Pat Garrett or a William Hickok, both of them law officers, but in his
own way he was just as significant and probably more deserving. Fol-
lowing his boyhood in Iowa and Kansas, he hunted buffalo, associated
with some hard-cases, and hired on as a deputy sheriff in Dodge City.
Even there he was off to a bad start, as he operated a saloon and was
arrested for separate counts of train robbery and horse stealing. Both
times he was exonerated.
By the mid 188os he had become city marshal of Dodge City and was
involved in the "county-seat wars" before moving to Oklahoma. There
he served as a lawman in Guthrie, and when the Cherokee Strip opened
in 1893, he became chief of police in Perry. As a deputy United States
marshal he teamed up with Chris Madsen and Heck Thomas, the trio
known far and wide as "the Three Guardsman." Tilghman captured
the Bill Doolin gang, and in 1898 arrested mob members responsible
for the lynching of two Indian youths.
Throughout a long and varied career, Tilghman was a sheriff, a spe-
cial Mexican representative for President Theodore Roosevelt, an Okla-
homa state senator, and chief of police in Oklahoma City. He made a
movie called The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaws and toured with it.
Tilghman was murdered in I924 when, as a city marshal of Cromwell,
Oklahoma, he attempted to arrest a drunken prohibition agent.

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