Bill Tilghman: The Frontier Lawman Who Played Himself on Film

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Bill Tilghman was born in Iowa in 1854 and raised in Kansas territory, where at 17 he took a contract to hunt buffalo for railroad labor camps and claimed more than 3,000 in a single year. That hard schooling carried him to Dodge City, where he opened a saloon called the Crystal Palace and pinned on a deputy badge under Bat Masterson. The line between lawman and outlaw was thin: Masterson himself arrested Tilghman for horse theft. The charges were dropped, and by 1884 Tilghman was Dodge City marshal, honored by citizens with a solid gold badge.

The blizzard of 1886 wiped out his ranching investments and pushed him into the 1889 Oklahoma land rush, where he staked a commercial lot in Guthrie. By 1892 he was a deputy U.S. marshal, riding with Chris Madsen and Heck Thomas as the Three Guardsmen of Oklahoma. This episode follows him from the pursuit of Bill Doolin and the Wild Bunch to politics, a meeting with Theodore Roosevelt, and the Eagle Film Company, where in 1915 he starred as himself in The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaws. It ends in the oil town of Cromwell in 1924, where a 70-year-old Tilghman met a kind of corruption his old code could not handle.

• While serving as a Dodge City deputy, Tilghman was charged as an accessory to an attempted train robbery and, barely two months later, with horse theft. Both cases collapsed for lack of evidence.
• In January 1896 he tracked Bill Doolin to a bathhouse in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and tackled him in the lobby without firing a shot. A crowd of 2,000 met their train in Guthrie.
• Doolin broke out of jail less than six months later, and Oklahoma used the escape as a technicality to refuse Tilghman his reward money.
• To sell the film, Tilghman toured with the reels and lectured live on stage. Its promotion invented the tale that Doolin once ordered his men not to shoot Tilghman in the back out of respect.
• On Halloween night Tilghman disarmed a drunken Prohibition agent, Wiley Lynn, with his bare hands, only to be shot with a concealed second pistol. Lynn was acquitted, and Tilghman's body lay in state in the capitol rotunda.