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Updated: May 15, 2025
At daylight the next morning, several notices, manually written in a rude hand and each bearing the signature of the rude hand that wrote it, were found conspicuously posted between Oregon Street and the Plaza. The signature was, "Bill Stoudenmayer, City Marshal."
Hardly a single man was named in the list lacking a more or less gory record. By the toughs Stoudenmayer was taken as a jest, by respectable citizens as a lunatic. Heavy odds were offered that he would not last till noon, with few takers. And yet throughout the morning Stoudenmayer quietly walked the streets, unaccompanied save by his two guns and his conspicuously displayed marshal's star.
It was such an obviously workmanlike job that it threw a chill into the hardiest of the sixty-eight survivors, so much of a chill that, though Stoudenmayer paraded streets and threaded saloon and dance-hall throngs all the rest of the afternoon, seeking his prey, not a single man of them could he find; all stayed close in their dens.
Then El Paso settled down to the humdrum but profitable task of laying the foundations for the great metropolis of the Farther Southwest. Since then, an occasional sporadic case of triggerfingeritis has developed in El Paso, usually in an acute form; but never once since the night Stoudenmayer turned the El Paso Street Portals into a shambles has it threatened as an epidemic.
But that the thug-leaders were not idle Stoudenmayer was not long learning. In the last moments of twilight, just before the pall of night fell upon the town, the Marshal was standing on the east side of El Paso Street, midway between Oregon and San Antonio Streets, no cover within reach of him.
Some were openly for declining the offer, but in the end a majority gained heart of Stoudenmayer's own hardihood sufficiently to hire him. The rest of the night Stoudenmayer employed in quietly familiarizing himself with the personnel of the enemy. He lost no time.
Nothing happened until about two o'clock, when two men sprang out from ambush behind the big cottonwood tree that then stood on the northeast corner of El Paso and San Antonio Streets, one armed with a shotgun and the other with a pistol, and started to "throw down" on Stoudenmayer, who was approaching from the other side of the street.
In twenty-four hours Bill Stoudenmayer had made his word good and fairly earned his wages; indeed he had accomplished single-handed what the most hopeful El Pasoites had despaired of seeing done with less authority and force than two or three troops of regular cavalry.
Drawing his pistols, Stoudenmayer marched upon the enemy, slowly but steadily, advancing straight, it seemed, into the jaws of death, but firing with such wonderful rapidity and accuracy that seven of his foes were killed and two wounded in almost as many seconds, although all kept close as possible behind the shelter of the portal columns.
It really looked as if nothing short of martial law and a strong body of troops could pacify the town. But one night, into the chamber of the City Council stalked a man, the man of the hour, unheralded and unknown. He gave the name of Bill Stoudenmayer. About all that was ever learned of him was that he hailed from Fort Davis.
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