Bill Tilghman had survived three decades of gunfights with the likes of the Doolin gang, becoming one of the most celebrated marshals of the American frontier. At 70, long past his famous years, he took one more job: cleaning up Cromwell, Oklahoma, a lawless oil boomtown soaked in bootleg whisky and corruption.
On 1 November 1924, a federal Prohibition agent named Wiley Lynn, drunk and firing his pistol wildly in the street, drew Tilghman’s attention. The old marshal moved in to disarm him as he had disarmed countless outlaws before. Lynn shot him dead instead. The killer, himself notorious for corruption, stood trial but was acquitted, walking free from the death of the man sent to clean up the very town he had helped poison.
