Journal of the Southwest

Trigger Marshal: The Story of Chris Madsen by Homer CroyReview by: Jack HugginsArizona and the West, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Summer, 1959), p. 184Published by: Journal of the SouthwestStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40166945 .

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184 ARIZONA and the WEST

TRIGGER MARSHAL: The Story of Chris Madsen. By Homer Croy. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1958. 267 pp. $4.50.

reviewed by

Jack Huggins

The reviewer teaches Southwestern literature at the University of Arizona.

Homer Croy begins Trigger Marshal with this statement: "Chris Madsen was a

greater peace officer than Wyatt Earp." What Earp had that Madsen didn't, Mr. Croy goes on to say, was luck: "He teamed up with Doc Holliday and Doc helped immor- talize him." I wouldn't have brought up the subject of Wyatt Earp had I been Mr.

Croy - but as long as it is up, let's look at it for a moment.

Wyatt Earp may or may not have been lucky that Doc Holliday threw in with him. There might be considerable argument either way on that question. But certainly a

good deal of Earp's fame is attributable to the fact that he got Stuart N. Lake as his

biographer. There he was really running in luck. Lake's Frontier Marshal is an ex-

citing and effective book. It may be as false as a gambler's smile, as Mr. Croy seems to

think, but it makes its impression. In spite of sporadic attacks in the magazines, the

image of Earp presented by Lake is going to be the one that Americans retain as long as they have any interest in the subject at all. Further, that image informs any num- ber of fictional marshals that have recently been presented to us by writers of West- erns. I would say that Lake's Earp stands in the same relationship to subsequent pic- tures of the lawman as does Wister's Virginian to later portrayals of the cowboy.

Chris Madsen, on the other hand, ran into very bad luck. Trigger Marshal is a very dull book. There are frequent excursions into what is apparently considered the brisk and breezy. For example: "Other unpleasant things were brought up against Zip. He was accused of murdering E. H. Townsend. . . . also of killing Fred Hoffman. . . . Those indiscretions were hard to explain. People were becoming more and more

anti-Zip." There are occasional attempts to inject a sinister and suspenseful note:

"tough, determined fanatics filled the upstairs room, all armed, all dangerous, all

hating this judge who had come to rule their town." But we read on the next page that ". . . anyone suspected of carrying firearms was searched and, if a weapon was

found, he was promptly ejected." This was from the same room. Not as tough, deter-

mined, and fanatical as Mr. Croy thinks, I would guess. But mainly the book is dull in the most ordinary way. We plod through one anecdote after another so flatly told that one could barely put up with them from one's own grandfather, let alone someone else's.

The book is based on an autobiographical manuscript left by Madsen in the usual

family trunk. Mr. Croy has supplemented this by research in newspapers and by con- versations and correspondence with those who knew Madsen. He tells Madsen's story from birth in Denmark in 1851 to death in Oklahoma ninety-three years later. It may well be that Chris Madsen was a greater peace officer than Wyatt Earp. He certainly gave long and honorable service, doing a hard job for little enough pay. It may be that the present book will interest Oklahomans who live in the area which Madsen

operated. I can only warn others against it.

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