Doolin saw that he was trapped and obeyed. Tilghman asked the clerk to get the outlaw’s gun, but the man was so nervous that he made several attempts before he succeeded in getting it out of the holster. The other men in the lobby had run like quail when the trouble started.
Tilghman put handcuffs on Doolin and took him to his hotel to get his belongings. Among the items on the dresser was a silver cup the outlaw had bought for his baby boy. Tilghman put it in the suitcase along with other things and they were on their way to the depot to catch the 4 o’clock train. A boy was sent to the carpenter to tell him the box would not be needed.
When they got on the train, Doolin promised to make no attempt to escape and the handcuffs were removed. They arrived in Guthrie, Okla., at 10 p. m., and Doolin was placed in the federal jail to await trial. But that trial never came. He made a jail break in July, hid out on a Texas ranch for several months, and was killed by officers when he attempted to return to Oklahoma to get his wife and baby.
(Credit for source material on the capture of Bill Doolin goes to the late Charley Stehm, an article in the Eureka Springs Times-Echo by Annie House, “Eureka Springs: Stair-Step Town” by Cora Pinkley Call, and “Marshall of the Frontier—Life and Stories of William Matthew (Bill) Tilghman”, written by his wife, Zoe Tilghman and published by Arthur H. Clark and Company, Cleveland in 1949. The incidents of the capture are somewhat similar in all these accounts but Mrs. Tilghman goes into greater detail in reporting the story.)
XV
STORIES IN STONE
According to the information on the pictorial sign board in the Basin Circle Park, Eureka Springs has fifty-six miles of retaining walls. Several years ago an old-timer told me he figured that the walls of this town, if put end to end, would reach a distance of forty miles. No one has taken the trouble to measure these walls so one guess is as good as another. In addition to the walls, a large amount of stone has been used in the construction of hotels, homes and business buildings. 60,000 cubic yards of stone in the walls and buildings of the city is a conservative estimate. In comparison with the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt, the only survivor of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, this mass of stone-work is comparatively small, but it is a lot of stone to go into the make-up of one small town. It would make a single wall four feet high, one foot thick, and approximately sixty-six miles long.
The great Egyptian Pyramid consists of 3,150,000 cubic yards of stone or about fifty times as much material as used in the building of Eureka Springs. The pyramid is about 450 feet high and covers 13½ acres of land. It is made of 2,300,000 limestone blocks each weighing 2½ tons. According to ancient historians, it took 100,000 men twenty years to build it. At Eureka Springs, workmen in Powell Clayton’s time, “the roaring eighties,” put up most of the walls and buildings in a period of eight or ten years. The Crescent Hotel was built in the mid-eighties and several business buildings were constructed of stone after the big fire of 1888.
The stone work of Eureka Springs may be only 1/50th of that of the great pyramid, but the labor involved was immense. The weight of 60,000 cubic yards of limestone is approximately 132,000 tons. The stone was quarried near Beaver six miles away. It had to be transported in wagons or on railroad flat cars to the townsite. If brought by rail it was handled three or four times before it reached its destination. The mere lifting of the stone required at least three hundred million foot-pounds of work. If we knew how many foot-pounds a man can do in a day, we could figure the labor potential. The stone had to be cut and laid by skilled workmen. Most of this stone, laid seventy years ago, is in excellent condition today.
Both limestone and sandstone are used for building material in northwest Arkansas, but the sandstone must be of the harder varieties to be useful for this purpose. Limestone is preferred, either of the Boone variety or marble. Marble limestone is found in Carroll County, but it is not as plentiful as other grades. The block of marble sent from Arkansas to be placed in the national Washington monument, was quarried near the corner of Carroll and Newton counties.
Onyx marble is found in this section and at one time Eureka Springs had an onyx factory which used the stone in manufacturing jewelry. Great slabs of it were taken from the caves in the vicinity. It is a stone of many colors—white, cream, dull red, and yellowish brown, with the colors usually in alternate stripes. It takes a brilliant polish.