Writing Bill Tilghman’s Biography

Zoe Agnes Stratton was a 22-year-old school teacher when famed lawman Bill Tilghman came-a-courtin’.  Despite the difference in ages—he was 48—the two fell in love and married in 1903.

They had three children before Bill was killed in a gunfight in Cromwell, OK in 1924.  Zoe went into mourning—and then got to work, burnishing her late husband’s reputation.

Mrs. Tilghman wrote Marshal of the Last Frontier in 1949, a bio of Bill that tended to leave out any negative facts.  And until her 1964 death, she offered pungent critiques of anything written about Tilghman.