ILLUSTRATIONS
| FACING PAGE | |
| Plummer's Men Holding Up the Bannack Stage | [Frontispiece] |
| The Scene of Many Little Wars | [12] |
| Types of Border Barricades | [36] |
| The Scene of Many Hangings | [138] |
| How the Rustler Worked | [164] |
| Wild Bill Hickok's Desperate Fight | [172] |
| John Simpson Chisum | [198] |
| Men Prominent in the Lincoln County War | [218] |
| The "Women in the Case" | [222] |
| The McSween Store and Bank | [240] |
| Billy the Kid | [258] |
| "The Next Instant He Fired and Shot Ollinger Dead" | [272] |
| Pat F. Garrett | [294] |
| A Typical Western Man-Hunt | [302] |
| The Old Chisum Ranch | [330] |
| The Old Fritz Ranch | [358] |
| A Border Fortress | [358] |
| "Afterward" | [398] |
Chapter I
The Desperado—Analysis of His Make-up—How the Desperado Got to Be Bad and Why—Some Men Naturally Skillful with Weapons—Typical Desperadoes.
Energy and action may be of two sorts, good or bad; this being as well as we can phrase it in human affairs. The live wires that net our streets are more dangerous than all the bad men the country ever knew, but we call electricity on the whole good in its action. We lay it under law, but sometimes it breaks out and has its own way. These outbreaks will occur until the end of time, in live wires and vital men. Each land in the world produces its own men individually bad—and, in time, other bad men who kill them for the general good.
There are bad Chinamen, bad Filipinos, bad Mexicans, and Indians, and negroes, and bad
white men. The white bad man is the worst bad man of the world, and the prize-taking bad man of the lot is the Western white bad man. Turn the white man loose in a land free of restraint—such as was always that Golden Fleece land, vague, shifting and transitory, known as the American West—and he simply reverts to the ways of Teutonic and Gothic forests. The civilized empire of the West has grown in spite of this, because of that other strange germ, the love of law, anciently implanted in the soul of the Anglo-Saxon. That there was little difference between the bad man and the good man who went out after him was frequently demonstrated in the early roaring days of the West. The religion of progress and civilization meant very little to the Western town marshal, who sometimes, or often, was a peace officer chiefly because he was a good fighting man.
We band together and "elect" political representatives who do not represent us at all. We "elect" executive officers who execute nothing but their own wishes. We pay innumerable policemen to take from our shoulders the burden of self-protection; and the policemen do not do this thing. Back of all the law is the undelegated