Neal Brown: Under Tilghman’s Shadow

Wayne Pounds, Prof. Emeritus

 Aoyama Gakuin Univ., Tokyo

The Dodge City Peace Commission, 1883

Back Row: W.H. Harris, Luke Short, W.B. Masterson, W.F. Petillon

Front row: C.E. Bassett, Wyatt Earp, M.F.McLean, Neil Brown

I once thought of including Neal Brown in a book to be called “Kansas Badasses,” but he was neither a badass nor a badass wannabe. Even so, a man is known by the company he keeps, and Bill Tilghman carried darkness enough for two, not to mention his cohorts in the Dodge City Peace Commission (above). Brown and Tilghman were friends and law-enforcement colleagues working in harness from the time they encountered each other in Dodge City sometime in the late 1870s until their demise in Oklahoma--Tilghman first and famously (or infamously, depending on which version of the story you accept) in Cromwell OK in 1924, then Neal Brown in Chandler in 1926, already too senile to clearly remember Bill when he helped carry his old friend’s coffin.

History books reveal Brown under the shadow of Tilghman, a long shadow that reached more than forty years. Brown was an assistant-sheriff under Tilghman during their Dodge years, and in Chandler during the years when Tilghman was Sheriff, he was the jailer in the Lincoln County lockup. Their very different grave markers in Oak Park Cemetery, however, make an invidious distinction. Tilghman’s is a monolithic marble slab so large that it comparison with its neighbors it seems like one of those great bluestones at Stonehenge, while Brown’s marker is a plain pine board with his name picked out in printed stickers.

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The history books pay Brown little attention. Nor would the Mark Twain part of my brain think that a man who shed so little blood deserves better. Brown is fortunate to be mentioned in a one-sentence list of names in O’Neal’s Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters, and downright lucky to collect four separate references in Miller and Snell’s Great Gunfighters of the Kansas Cowtowns. Murder rates were high in frontier communities, and small time trigger men didn’t rate. Mark Twain, in Chapter XLVIII of Roughing It, based on his residence in the mining boom days of Virginia City, Nevada, indicates three principal ingredients in the highly combustible cocktail of mayhem: guns, booze, and a large population of young unmarried males who achieved social status in the age-old way of males, by proving their proficiency at killing. Says Twain, “a person is not respected until he has ‘killed his man.’ That was the very expression used.” By Twain’s guideline, Tilghman was already a long-tailed hero of the revolver by the time he left Kansas for Oklahoma about 1889, but Neal Brown was a nowhere man. And so, judging by their monuments, they have remained.

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O’Neal’s reference comes as part of his discussion of the county seat war:

Cimarron and Ingalls, two villages situated six miles apart, desperately wanted to become the seat of newly formed Gray Count. Cimarron held possession of the county records; therefore, Ingalls employed several Dodge City gunmen as “deputy sheriffs”: Jim Masterson, Bill Tilghman, Fred Singer, Neal Brown, Billy Ainsworth, Ed Brooks, and Ben Daniels. (218)

That is, gunmen were hired as deputy sheriffs and included Tilghman and Brown. The passage from Miller and Snell reads:

Things remained quiet in Dodge all during the cattle season of 1880. Not one incident involving the city marshal was reported . .. Apparently the town was so tranquil that the city fathers thought $100 a month was too much salary for services received so on October 5, 1880, a reduction was ordered. From November 1, 1880, Marshal Masterson and Assistant Marshal Neil Brown each received $50 a month salary.

Miller and Snell also make other references: an election defeat in 1881 which cost Masterson and Brown their jobs (191); both men attending the horse races (307); a local militia whose members included Tilghman, Brown, and five others (412); and a list of deputized gunmen sent to the 1889 county seat war that included Tilghman and Brown (434).

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Those are the print sources that have taken the measure of Neal Brown’s minor notoriety. Without further ado, here are steps along his path to obscurity and oblivion.

Cornelius “Neal” Brown was born in Henry County, Iowa, in 1844. Tilghman, oddly enough, was also born in Fort Dodge, in the same state, ten years later. Neal’s parents were James M. Brown, born in Tennessee, and Clarissa Jane Wing of the same state. The father had two wives. The first, Martha Houston, gave him four children, and Clarissa Wing gave him five. Neal was still living at home in 1860, but by the next census year he may have wandered to Missouri, for there in 1875 he married Nancy Jane Jones from Buchanan County, who would live together with him the rest of their lives.

A number of accounts claim that in the late 1870s Tilghman had a ranch on Bluff Creek, twenty miles southeast of Dodge, and that Neal Brown was his partner and also had a ranch in that location. These ranches were supposedly burned by the Dull Knife band of Cheyennes in 1878. This story is pure fancy and should be stifled. There are no land claims for either Tilghman or Brown. All of the accounts of the Dull Knife raid that make any mention of any involvement by Tilghman or losses sustained by either man rely on Zoe Tilghman’s biography of her husband, which is an unreliable source of information. There is no record that Brown owned land in this area.

A similar myth dates to this same period, 1876, which is supposed to be the year Ned Buntline presented five Dodge city lawmen--Wyatt Earp, Charles Bassett, Bat Masterson, Bill Tilghman, and Neal Brown--with his Buntline Special sporting its awkward twelve-inch barrel. Neither Tilghman nor Brown was an active police officer in 1876, and the whole story originates with Stuart Lake’s immensely popular Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal of 1931

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(145-46). Lake’s story is enjoyable, but as history it should go down the same drain as Dull Knife’s fights with Tilghman and Brown.

After the birth of a second child in 1878, Brown ceased using the name “Cornelius” and began to call himself “Neal,” and the year also corresponds closely to the family’s move to Kansas. There,

on November 4, 1879, he was appointed assistant marshal of Dodge City with a $100 per month salary. He served under City Marshal James P. Master [brother of the more famous Bat]. Both Masterson and Brown were reappointed to their positions by the city council on May 4, 1880. (DeMattos 14)

And it was there in Dodge where Neal Brown had his first known ruckus with the law. The Assistant Marshal got into trouble for pistol-whipping an irascible German land owner named Dr. Samuel Galland during an arrest. The cause of this fight had been the opinionated Galland’s published letter in the Dodge City Globe stating that the city was in the hands of confidence operators and accusing the city attorney of “receiving fifty dollars per week for not prosecuting the gamblers” (14 Sep 1880, p. 2). When the case was concluded, Brown was fined $10 and court costs (DeMattos 14).

It will come as no surprise to learn that as an assistant marshal/sheriff, Brown was handy with a pistol, though the source of this information is unexpected. It comes from The National Police Gazette, a magazine dedicated to crime reporting but also to sports and entertainment. Begun in 1845, it still has a present-day avatar that claims to be “the official sanctioning body of

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professional bare-knuckle boxing through the Police Gazette Boxing Corporation.” The 21 July 1883 issue reports on “Dodge City’s Sensation” (i.e., the Luke Short affair, which we’ll get to further down) and states: "Neal Brown was formerly a marshal of Dodge city, and is a wonderful snap shot with both hands at once, with a cool and determined head in a fight. He came from his cattle ranch forty miles south of here to look out for Luke Short's interests." The implication that Brown was an ambidextrous gunny is pure persiflage--the invention of an overheated Eastern imagination contemplating the Wild West.

The time has now come to reveal Neal Brown’s one indisputable claim to fame. He’s in that famous 1883 photo of the Dodge City Peace Commission, seated at the extreme right of the group. And better yet, as we learn from DeMattos’ research, this famous photograph first appeared in the pages of The National Police Gazette. The photo was taken on June 7th. Then forty-four days later it appeared in the Gazette, with this statement: "the 'peace commissioners,' as they have been termed, accomplished the object of their mission, and quiet once more reigns where war and rumors of war were the all absorbing topic. All the members of the commission, whose portraits we publish in a group, are frontiersmen of tried capacity." “Tried capacity” is one phrase for it. Some of them, like Wyatt Earp and Luke Short, could also be termed professional gunmen.

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Brown’s activities in this period weren’t restricted to deputy work. Like Tilghman, he loved horse racing, which included the raising and training of the horses and betting on the races. From the earliest period in Kansas through the Chandler Oklahoma years, Tilghman and Brown had farms that adjoined or were very close, permitting them to work their race horses together. They also enjoined hunting, and several news articles in their Kansas years report on their antelope killings in counties across Kansas.

But hunting wild game was for pleasure. For work they hunted men. While living in Kansas, Neal Brown was involved in two major armed confrontations, both of them fought at Tilghman’s side: the 1883 Dodge City War, which

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centered on a dispute involving Luke Short; and the county seat war of 1889, which focused on the village of Cimarron.

The story of Luke Short is also called the “Dodge City War” and can be perused in Wikipedia, but here we will look at other sources. The ruckus was at its height between April 28 and June 7, 1883, which is just over two months, but a lot of ink can be spilled in two months. It started when a self-righteous faction came to power in the city and outlawed prostitution and gambling. The new law itself was illegal, since it was never voted on but was merely passed by fiat of the Mayor, but men were deputized in large numbers and Short was forced to leave his profitable Long Branch Saloon and “get out of Dodge,” as Matt Dillon would later teach us to say. Short was given the usual choice proposed to those expelled from the town. He could take the westbound train or the eastbound. He chose the eastbound, going to the state capitol in Topeka. There he would have legal recourse, naturally, but such recourse was expensive and time consuming. Instead, arguing that the new law was merely mob rule, he called on his friends, whom we have already met. This is the group of men who had their photograph taken in 1883 as the Dodge City Peace Commission. The war itself was a bloodless affair fought in newsprint, not with guns, but it is remembered because of the iconic photograph.

Still, the threat of violence was real, and shots were fired. The Dodge City Times for May 3, 1883, reported as follows.

The city has been under an intense commotion for several days, growing out of the ordinance in relation to the “Suppression of gambling and prostitution.” On Saturday night an

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additional police force was put on, and the work of enforcement was commenced. Three prostitutes pretendedly employed in Harris & Short’s saloon, as “singers,” but employed evidently to evade the ordinance in relation to prostitution, were arrested and put in the lock-up. The action engendered bitter feeling, and City Clerk Hartman who was on the police force, was afterward met by Luke Short, and his assassination attempted. Short fired two shots at Hartman, the latter replying with one shot, none of the shots taking effect.

Short must have been shooting over Hartman’s head. Had he been trying to hit the target, he wouldn’t have missed.

Short was arrested and placed under $2000 bonds. Mayor Deger, learning that a conspiracy had been formed, which had for its object the armed resistance to the enforcement of the law and consequent murder of some of our best citizens, organized a police force on Sunday, and on Monday the plan was carried out. Luke Short was the first one arrested and placed in the calaboose. Subsequently, four others were arrested, as follows: W. H. Bennett, a former New Mexico desperado, Dr. Niel, a Mobeetie gambler, Johnson Gallagher, a gambler, and L. A. Hyatt, a gambler. These

men . . . were given “the choice of trains,” and on Tuesday, under orders of Mayor Deger, were sent out of town. Short, Lane, and Gallagher went east, Bennett went west, and Niel went south.

This feels like a comedy enacted with loaded pistols. If Short missed his man twice, he wasn’t aiming to hit him,

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but his bail bond, posted very high at $2000, indicates that the courts were taking better aim.

Other factors were in play here. Mayor Deger's action during the height of the seasonal cattle drive could well have ruined the business of the saloons and related merchandisers. Moreover, rumor had it that the exiled Short would be returning with his friends, known to be gunmen like Short himself. Nobody was anxious to face them. The state governor and the Santa Fe Railroad, which did considerable business in Dodge, urged the mayor to quickly resolve the conflict. However, Short and his friend Earp, and probably some others refused to compromise. Seeking to avoid a confrontation with the deputized gunmen, and under pressure from the Governor and the Santa Fe Railroad, the mayor and city council backed down. On June 9 they allowed the gambling halls, dance halls, and saloons to reopen, including the Long Branch. Both sides met in a dance hall that night and resolved their differences.

The following day – June 10, 1883 – eight men gathered and posed for what has become one of the most reproduced Wild West history photos. The group was immediately dubbed the "Dodge City Peace Commission." The eight men in the historic photo were: William H. Harris, Luke Short, Bat Masterson, William F. Petillon, Charles E. Bassett, Wyatt Earp, Michael Francis "Frank" McLean and "Neil" Brown. Immediately after the photo was taken, Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp departed on a west bound train for Colorado. It was profit-and-loss calculations - rather than bloodshed - that started the "Dodge City War," and it was profit-and-loss that resolved it.

The next armed conflict in which we find Neal Brown involved is usually referred to either as “the county seat war” or “the Cimarron war.” With the potential profits

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accruing to a town chosen as the county seat, there was often disagreement and sometimes violence in settling the choice. Well known county-seat wars include those of Baldwin County, Alabama, and Castro County, Texas (https://web.archive.org/web/20140407153015/http:// historydepot.wordpress.com/2014/03/28/feudin-and- fightin-friday-county-seat-wars/). The Cimarron war was not the most violent of these, but in terms of armed men with badges (“deputies”) on both sides and wealthy backers, it had the right ingredients.

The best overview of the county-seat wars in Kansas is provided by DeAment’s Bullets and Ballots: The Bloody County Seat Wars of Kansas (2006). Kansas experienced at least twenty-nine bitterly contested fights over the locations of county seats. They occurred in all sections of the state but were most intense and bloody in the western counties between 1885 and 1892. DeAment writes:

During those years upwards of a dozen men, including a town mayor and two elected sheriffs, were killed in county seat disputes in the western counties, and a score or more received non-fatal gunshot wounds . . . . Kansas governors found it necessary on six occasions to call out units of the National Guard to bring order to the riotous counties. . . . During those years upwards of a dozen men, including a town mayor and two elected sheriffs, were killed in county seat disputes in the western counties, and a score or more received non- fatal gunshot wounds . . . . Kansas governors found it necessary on six occasions to call out units of the National Guard to bring order to the riotous counties. . . . the basic cause of the deadly battles

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was unrestrained avarice and greed on he part of town promoters, who saw in the opening of new lands an opportunity to acquire quick riches. (5)

The war in question centered on Gray County, founded in1881 and named after a Kansas politician. The town of Cimarron, located on the Santa Fe Trail, served as the first county seat. In 1887 three towns vied for the county seat designation: Cimarron, Ingalls and Montezuma. A few years before, Asa T. Soule had come to the area to invest in a venture proposed by two brothers which would form a vast irrigation system by diverting water from the Arkansas River. Soule was a Rochester, New York millionaire who had made his fortune mostly in the lucrative patent medicine business. Like the majority
of medicines peddled as cure-alls in that era, Soule’s Hop Bitters consisted mostly of alcohol.

The citizens of Cimarron continually harassed by Soule, Gilbert and their cohorts. An attorney, George Dunn, came from Missouri and settled in Cimarron just before the election. In reality he was a “hireling” of Soule and Gilbert. Ingalls placed Dunn on the ballot for county attorney, which he won with the backing of Soule and Gilbert money.

Meanwhile, back in Dodge, the Dodge City Times for 17 January 1889, gave this view of matters in an article entitled THE COUNTY SEAT WAR:

Of the battle at Cimarron on last Saturday between the deputy sheriffs of Gray county [bolstered by Tilghman’s paid volunteers] and citizens of Cimarron, an eye witness gives the following particulars of the fight:

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On last Saturday morning the Sheriff of Gray county, with Fred Singer, Neal Brown, Jas. Masterson, Edward Brooks, Benj. Daniels and Wm.Tilghman as deputies went to Cimarron with a wagon to convey the county records to Ingalls, for which they had an order from the Supreme Court. On their arrival at the building used for a court house at Cimarron, four of the deputy sheriffs stood guard over the wagon while he sheriff and the balance of his men carried out the books. After they had got all the books loaded and were nearly ready to start, the Cimarron people, who in the meantime had been arming themselves, fired upon the officers. This commenced the battle, and the officers returned the fire.

After Tilghman was offered $1000 for him and his men, he enlisted several veterans of the Gray County conflict who were still in Dodge, including Neal Brown and the experienced gunman Ben Daniels (DeAment 49).

The Dodge City Times continues in its one-sided support of Tilghman and his “team” (gang):

The team was started for Ingalls as soon as the shooting began and was protected on its way out of the city by the four deputies who were left in charge, viz: Ed Brooks, Benj. Daniels, Wm. tilghman and Neal Brown, and although lead was flying as thick as hail around them they succeeded in getting away. Fred Singer, Jas. Masterson and Wm. Ainsworth who were in the court house when the firing commenced, were unable to escape on account of the mob surrounding the building and who riddled the windows and floor of the room in

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which they were with bullets. The deputy sheriffs with the records drove to Ingalls as fast as possible, and then telegraphed to Dodge City for aid in order to release the other officers imprisoned at Cimarron. Upon the receipt of the dispatch a number of the friends of the officers took the afternoon train for Ingalls, but in the evening Sheriff Bell and a number of our influential citizens went on a special train to Cimarron and obtained the release of the Ingalls officers.

This battle-front report was followed by a list of the MIAs and KIAs.

With a casualty list for both sides published that included Bill Tilghman’s sprained ankle, the editors uplift us by considering the rights and wrongs of the matter.

It is very much regretted that the shooting took place, but there is no question but what the Cimarron people were to blame, as they started the fight with the officers from Ingalls, who went there with the proper authority to take the records. It is a wonder to all that any of the officers escaped when fully 75 men were firing upon them; none but brave and determined men would have lived to tell the story of how they were attacked.

Now that we know which side to blame, we may consider the manner in which the fight was reported.

Most every paper in the east has been filled with news of the fight written by Cimarron people in which they place the Ingalls men in the light of murderers and heap a great deal of abuse on Dodge

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City, but a true statement of the fight is given above. The citizens of Dodge, though they do not believe in county seat fights, cannot help but sympathize with the officers of Gray county where were fired upon by the Cimarron mob while doing their duty. They Mayor of Cimarron telegraphed for state militia which was at once responded by by Gen. Murray Myers and two companies of militia who arrived at Cimarron Sunday and remained until Tuesday morning. No further trouble is now anticipated.

Nor did further trouble occur. To add finitus to this overly- long story, we return to DeAment’s account in Bullets and Ballots.

On June 12, 1889, six months to the day after the Battle of Cimarron, the four men who had been besieged in the courtroom on that eventful day were arrested by Sheriff Reynolds and charged with the murder of Will English, the only man killed in the shootout. . . . Later, Neal Brown and Ben Daniels were also arrested on the same charge. . . . [Bill Tilghman] had left the county and could not be found. (65)

As a postscript to this ruckus, we may note two events. The original irrigation scheme which brought A.T. Soule to Kansas turned out to be a bust, becoming known as Soule’s Folly. And in the wee hours of June 10, 1893, just as tranquility had returned to the land, Bill Doolin and four members of his gang robbed a train one-half mile east of Cimarron. (DeAment 9).

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The remainder of the story of Neal Brown, like that of Bill Tilghman, takes place in Oklahoma. Brown was not part of any recorded armed confrontations in the latter state, though of course Tilghman was. About 1899 both men seemed to have left Dodge and moved to Guthrie, which would be the first seat of government for the new territory.

A very late biography of Brown states, “Apparently, Brown and Tilghman experienced little or no repercussions for their actions in Gray County. When Indian Territory (Oklahoma) opened to settlement in 1889, Brown, Tilghman and Fred E. Sutton opened a mercantile store in Guthrie. In 1891, Neil Brown began homesteading on a farm a mile west of Chandler,
Okla” (Bell, unpaginated).

An 1890 article from the Guthrie Democrat makes them sound like Sooners arriving too early.

Yesterday afternoon Special Agent Schofield received a message from Commissioner Goff at Washington saying: “Revoke all notices ordering parties off school lands.” Immediately after this news reached here Postmaster Flynn, J. W. McNead, Wm.Tilghman and Neal Brown went and made settlement on a section and resided on their farms all night. This morning about 2 o’clock Winfield Smith, John Parson, and J. P. Murray very quietly drove out and commended to make settlement by fencing the whole section, and on the discovery of the other gentlemen raised the cry of “SOONERS.”

Whatever happened at the cry of “Sooners!” an element of confusion enters here, because the Bureau of Land Management shows that Tilghman homesteaded about five

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miles east of Chandler and a mile south, whereas everyone familiar with Chandler knows his farm was northwest of town. The BLM also gives the legal description of Brown’s farm, in section 8 of 14N-4E, placing it just west of town in a large acreage known as Tilghman Park. Tradition has it that the park was dedicated on land Tilghman had once owned. The matter is unclear but it seems clear that Brown must have given land to the park, since he was the original owner of a quarter section of it.

The two men are next picked up in the Chandler News for October 1891, where it is implied that they are living close together.

William Tilghman and Neal Brown are in the city. They have fenced their claims and are building good houses thereon. Both were entered for the great hurdle race and they took the premium medal and blue ribbon.

It also appears that the horses that they brought with them from Kansas were running well.

Next we hear about an event that will be reported frequently in the spring for some years, and that is the flooding of Bell Cow Creek. First in January 1897 we hear that “the new bridge on the Bell Cow at the Neal Brown crossing is ready for the flooring.” Then in April we hear about the flooding.

The Bell Cow creek was higher Sunday than it had been since 1892. The bridge at Owens’ mill washed out, and a good deal of other damage was done. Wednesday morning it was two feet higher still, the bridge at the Neal Brown crossing also going out.

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For old-time Chandlerites, the name Owens immediately locates the bridge and confirms the location of the Tilghman and Brown farms, for D. R. (“Doc”) Owens was a successful early day entrepreneur who invested in farms northwest of town in the vicinity of Bell Cow and owned two or three cotton gins in the county. (This I know from family history, for my grandfather rented a farm from him on Bell Cow northwest of town and he would occasionally drop by to enjoy my grandmother’s Kentucky biscuits and pies.) It is noteworthy that by 1897 Brown had lived there long enough for a bridge to be known as Neal Brown crossing.

In September 1901 Tilghman’s and Brown’s names appear together again as witnesses to prove the homestead claim of Nancy Dodrill, a widow whose property was located in Union Township, a few miles from Wright Cemetery where her husband is buried. In proving homestead claims, the common practice was to call on neighbors, who were in a good position to witness to the claimant’s continual residence. But Tilghman and Brown were not the Dodrills’ neighbors but but in fact resided some miles away. This I can only account for by guessing that the lawmen’s names had acquired a degree of prominence, and Ms. Dodrill (as I know from other research) was a woman with a decided sense of self- importance.

In March 1909, we learn something of greater interest--of interest at least as concerns Brown’s legacy in Chandler. The Oklahoma Senate had just passed a bill authorizing “the leasing to the Oklahoma National guard of three quarters of the school section adjoining Chandler on the [west] for use as a permanent encampment and drill ground.” Though this whole large area today forms part of Tilghman Park, the level ground that formed the rifle range

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didn’t come from him but from Brown and a Union National Bank officer named Roy Hoffman, a Colonel in the National Guard. The News reported:

In this connection it is interesting also to note that the deeds for the land for the rifle range for the state militia have been sent to the war department at Washington for approval. This is to be located on the section adjoining Chandler on the west--part of it on the Hoffman farm and part on the Neal Brown tract.

Probably all three men--Tilghman, Hoffman, and Brown-- contributed land to the project, though the park is known only by the name of the first of them.

The life of Neal Brown is marked by one more event of public importance, and that is the death of his long-time partner and friend Bill Tilghman, who as Oklahomans all believe was killed by a state prohibition agent in Cromwell on 1 November 1924. The official spin on the story of this killing was provided by Tilghman’s many influential friends, contributing to the admiration in which Tilghman’s name is held to this day. Unsurprisingly, there is an opposite but unequal spin provided by the legal team defending Wiley Lynn. the supposed killer. I don’t feel competent to judge between the two interpretations, nor do I feel that the present essay is the place to retry the case.6

6. A short version of the opposing argument can be found in my story “The Duel in the Drugstore” in The Lives of Lawmen, available at Amazon. The case is retried at length in Samuelson’s Shoot from the Lip: The Lives, Legends, and Lies of the Three Guardsmen of Oklahoma (1998).

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The newspaper archives that I rely on for my primary sources are silent about Brown’s final years and those of his wife, who died eight years later. The only print source I have found is Jack DeMattos’s 2013 essay on the Dodge City Peace Commission. There he writes:

When Brown's term as a deputy United States marshal expired in 1900, his friend Bill Tilghman then sheriff of Lincoln County, Oklahoma, promptly made Brown his jailer. After serving as jailer for four years Brown, now sixty, retired to his farm near Chandler, Oklahoma. His farm was only a short distance from the one owned by Tilghman. During his last years Brown suffered from dementia. Though he wasn't aware of where he was, his family took him to Tilghman's funeral in I924.

Cornelius "Neil" Brown died on March 18 1926 in Chandler, Oklahoma--three days before what would have been his eighty-second birthday.

DeMattos errs in stating that Brown died on March 18th. The date on his wooden memorial says March 13th and is verified elsewhere.

Another error, much harder to fix, is the way that the thousand acres of bottom land that had once been the National Guard’s rifle range are referred to locally as Tilghman Park. The rifle range, as we’ve seen, came into existence about 1909. As early as 1911 the Chandler News was calling the area around it

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Tilghman park. Thus, I believe, the name does not reflect any donation on Tilghman’s part, but the fact that he had once owned a substantial part of it. The name honors land once owned by Bill Tilghman. Some of that land was also once owned by Neal Brown. Therefore, to do justice to both individuals, the park should be called Tilghman-Brown Park. In it, both men have their final resting place.

Sources

Miller, Nyle H. and Joseph W. Snell. Great Gunfighters of the Kansas Cowtowns 1867-1886. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963.

O’Neal, Bill. Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters. Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1979.

Pounds, Wayne. “The Duel in the Drugstore.” The Lives of Lawmen: Historical Narratives, Many But Not All about Oklahomans. Middletown DE: Kindle Books, 2020,

Samuelson, Nancy B. Shoot from the Lip: The Lives, Legends, and Lies of the Three Guardsmen of Oklahoma and U.S. Marshal Nix. Dexter MI: Thompson-Shore Inc., 1998.

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