The Marlow family's experiences became legends of the old west after they settled here during the peak of the cattle drives, when this location was ideal for recovering cattle lost among the thickets and dense cross timber woods to the east. Some held that the Marlow brothers merely rounded up stray longhorns, while others believed they deliberately rustled cattle from the edges of large herds and hid them in the eastern woods. Whatever the truth, a US Marshal falsely accused the brothers of stealing horses and hunted them down. Their story later lived on in literature, ballads, and film, including The Sons of Katie Elder. Local tradition maintained that the brothers used a cave on Wild Horse Creek as a hideout to avoid capture, and Marlow's youth long treated searching for the cave as a rite of passage. In June 2004, when the tire of a city worker's heavy mower dropped into an opening in the ground northwest of here, investigation showed it to be a cave that subsequent research suggests was the Marlow hideout.