The Story of Dallas Stoudenmire
Leon Metz is a qualified western historian author, but even so, there still just hasn’t been much to say about Dallas Stoudenmire. Pretty much everything that’s known comes from his time as the Marshal of El Paso, and so, given our limits of information, this book is, understandably, not a very long read. Fortunately, Metz still gives us plenty of reason to pick it up and enjoy.
To the delight of some, and to the chagrin of others, one thing that Metz doesn’t do is load the book with pages and chapters of social and economic conditions of the areas relevant to the life of Stoudenmire. I hear complaints, sometimes, of authors filling in a book with too much information about the history of said valley, or context on how a certain town was built up, and who moved in first, and how they all voted to build a well, and then the well couldn’t be built because of a municipal issue, and then, fifteen years later, our subject gunman finally came riding into town. This is obviously facetious, but the point being that some love more and more context, and some find it tedious.
Metz goes the less-is-more route in this book, but still gives plenty of context. In fact, I’d say his historical summation of El Paso was just the right balance. The strongest points in this area are probably his looks at the various players of the time in El Paso. In only roughly 130 pages he gives a great snapshot of the current climate that Dallas walked into, and connects you to the man and his dilemma’s.
The biggest problem I had with this book is wishing that there was more to say about Dallas Stoudenmire, but there just isn’t much known. Given Metz’s wonderful telling, and the intriguing nature of Dallas Stoudenmire, I really wish we could have a book two or three times the page count, but in absence of that, thank goodness we have what we do.
If Dallas Stoudenmire is a character you don’t know much about you should really get familiar. And this is just the gunfighter that you can learn about with out the inevitable continuous heavy involvement of the world of Wyatt Earp or Billy the Kid.
Handy With A Gun...! 