by Jack DeMattos
For a being such a mysterious character, Jack DeMattos does a good job of revealing to us enough to make the man feel somewhat familiar. The knowledge we have is too limited to produce the volumes that you could find on the likes of Wyatt Earp or Jesse James, but for anyone wanting to round out their knowledge of the western gunfighters, Mysterious Gunfighter suffices well.
In what I would consider to be a worthwhile trade-off, the limits of our information are off-set well enough by the excitement of what we do know. Mysterious Dave was an interesting fellow, and I don’t believe it’s just because of what we do know. I would be willing to bet that the more we know about him, the more intriguing he would become. And that’s really the value in this book, learning about the man’s exploits in many different places, with an assortment of different characters, all while filling various roles with regards to the law and legal standing. He really was a fascinating character of the west, and mysterious applies from several different ways.
DeMattos offers a fairly straight-forward telling, which allows for easy following as the reader tracks Mather’s life. Some might consider the first and last chapters to be filler, but I couldn’t agree. The first chapter gives a thorough background of the Mather family from the very early days of the colonies up to the time Dave Mather left for the frontier, and the last chapter enlightens the reader to the family line following the disappearance of Mather. Were the first chapter to run on for four chapters, or some other significant measure of the book, then I might be inclined to side with the view of excess, but as it is, the bookend chapters work to almost make the man more mysterious. When we have such a clear understanding of where he came from and the family that surrounds him, and then we get a full picture of the surviving family line, it deepens the mystery as to where he went and just how is it that nobody knows anything?
There were probably only one or two points in the book where I felt I might disagree with the authors surmising (which, I think, a little difference of view is healthy), but I always felt that DeMattos was giving us as best a study as we could get, short of new revealing information. If you’re working to put together a complete library of the gunfighters, this is the book you should have when it comes to Dave Mather.
Handy With A Gun...! 