Chamber Chatter for September 19 - Debbe Ridley

by Debbe Ridley

The Chamber has an annual tradition of highlighting our history and our “Marlow Outlaw” heritage after the school year kicks off. We can’t help but be reminded each year that the family and their saga continue to have a universal appeal.
Barbara Ledbetter’s book, Marlow Brothers Ordeal 1888-1892 138 Days of Hell in Graham on the Texas Frontier, published in 1991, tells us we are certainly not alone in our strong feelings toward the family and “our boys.”

In her book she quotes “What other outstanding western writers and historians say about the Marlows.” In his Riata and Spurs Charles H. Siringo says: “The five Marlow boys grew up learning to ride, shoot and throw a lasso....They were thrown in jail for theft of 130 head of Indian ponies.....which charge was afterwards proved false.... but this did not lessen the sting of being branded as horse thieves....”

“Boone shot and killed Sheriff Wallace, a warm friend of his, thinking he was Tom Collier, who had fired a shot at him when demanding his arrest.... on his deathbed Wallace forgave Boone, who shed tears over his sad mistake......”

“....the five Marlow brothers can hardly be placed in the bad-man cowboy class. They rightly belong to the dare-devil class....(after trials were over).....George and Charley were appointed deputy sheriffs of Gunnison County, Colorado....... Sheriff C. W. ‘Doc’ Shores knew that the Marlows would make good peace officers as they were not afraid of man or devil.”

William McLeod Raines says, in Famous Sheriffs and Western Outlaws: “The stage driver was a tanned, weather-beaten little westerner with fixed blue eyes and long drooping moustache. The most unassuming of men, the last person(s) I should have picked as the survivor of an adventure so grim and desperate that it stands in a class by itself even on the frontier where life and death used so often to hang balance by a hair. Yet the claim to this unique distinction might fairly have been made by George Marlow and Charles. Twice, entirely unarmed, the Marlows were attacked by mobs fully equipped with Winchesters and Colts. Each time they drove back the would-be lynchers, leaving dead and many wounded on the fields of battle. It is an incredible tale—but it happens to be true.”

“It is only fair to add that in those days the branding of another man’s calf was rather a casual offense. Many of the big cattlemen had used a running iron freely themselves in the days before they achieved respectability and a large herd.”

“There were men in that masked crowd just as game as the Marlows.....Others of those present were tough, hard-riding cattlemen of the border country. They had come to lynch the Marlows. They were forty to four. The masked men were all armed. The four were not only without weapons, they were shackled, but the mob had had enough. It fell back, panic-stricken.”

While Mrs. Ledbetter’s book is now extremely hard to find, copies of Life of the Marlows originally written in 1892, and expanded in 1930, re-released in 2004 by Robert K. DeArment, along with A Pilgrim Shadow by Alan C. Huffines, are available in the Chamber office at a cost of $15 each.