Chapter XI
The Desperado of the Plains—Lawlessness Founded on Loose Methods—The Rustlers of the Cow Country—Excuses for Their Acts—The Approach of the Commercial West.
One pronounced feature of early Western life will have been remarked in the story of the mountain settlements with which we have been concerned, and that is the transient and migratory character of the population. It is astonishing what distances were traveled by the bold men who followed the mining stampedes all over the wilderness of the upper Rockies, in spite of the unspeakable hardships of a region where travel at its best was rude, and travel at its worst well-nigh an impossibility. The West was first peopled by wanderers, nomads, even in its mountain regions, which usually attach their population to
themselves and cut off the disposition to roam. This nomad nature of the adventurers made law almost an impossible thing. A town was organized and then abandoned, on the spur of necessity or rumor. Property was unstable, taxes impossible, and any corps of executive officers difficult of maintenance. Before there can be law there must be an attached population.
The lawlessness of the real West was therefore much a matter of conditions after all, rather than of morals. It proved above all things that human nature is very much akin, and that good men may go wrong when sufficiently tempted by great wealth left unguarded. The first and second decades after the close of the civil war found the great placers of the Rockies and Sierras exhausted, and quartz mines taking their place. The same period, as has been shown, marked the advent of the great cattle herds from the South upon the upper ranges of the territories beyond the Missouri river. By this time, the plains began to call to the adventurers as the mines recently had called.
Here, then, was wealth, loose, unattached, apparently almost unowned, nomad wealth, and waiting for a nomad population to share
it in one way or another. Once more, the home was lacking, the permanent abode; wherefore, once more the law was also lacking, and man ruled himself after the ancient savage ways. By this time frontiersmen were well armed with repeating weapons, which now used fixed ammunition. There appeared on the plains more and better armed men than were ever known, unorganized, in any land at any period of the earth's history; and the plains took up what the mountains had begun in wild and desperate deeds.
The only property on the arid plains at that time was that of live stock. Agriculture had not come, and it was supposed could never come. The vast herds of cattle from the lower ranges, Texas and Mexico, pushed north to meet the railroads, now springing westward across the plains; but a large proportion of these cattle were used as breeding stock to furnish the upper cow range with horned population. Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, western Nebraska, the Dakotas, discovered that they could raise range cattle as well as the southern ranges, and fatten them far better; so presently thousands upon thousands of cattle were turned loose, without a fence in those thousands of
miles, to exist as best they might, and guarded as best might be by a class of men as nomadic as their herds. These cattle were cheap at that time, and they made a general source of food supply much appreciated in a land but just depopulated of its buffalo. For a long time it was but a venial crime to kill a cow and eat it if one were hungry. A man's horse was sacred, but his cow was not, because there were so many cows, and they were shifting and changing about so much at best.