Civilization undoubtedly means an awful lot of trouble.
VIII.
ALL SORTS AND CONDITIONS OF MEN.
The frontier is the place to find all sorts of conditions and also of men. Monotony is not one of the troubles of the minute-man. He is frequently too poor to dress in a ministerial style, and quite often he is not known until he begins the services. This sometimes leads to the serio-comic, as witness the following:—
Our man was looking over a portion of the country where he wished to locate, and in making the necessary inquiries he asked many questions about homesteads and timber claims. Notice having been given that there would be preaching at the schoolhouse, the people assembled; and while waiting for the preacher, they discussed this stranger, whom they all thought to be a claim jumper. He certainly was not a very handsome man. They proposed to hang him to the first tree. Trees were scarce there, and possibly that fact saved him. He came up while they were talking, entered the schoolhouse, and from the desk told them he was the preacher, and was going to settle among them. Here was a promising field, where people were ready to hang a man on their way to church. It is a fact that where we find people ready for deeds of this kind we have the material for old-fashioned revivals of the Cartwright type.
When Jesse James was shot, it was easy to find a man to preach a sermon full of hope to the bereaved relations, and to crown the ruffian with martyrdom.
The minute-man has some hair-breadth escapes. He comes upon a crowd of so-called vigilants, who have just hanged some men for horse-thievery; and, as he has on store-clothes, he narrowly escapes the same fate. In one instance he was able to prove too late that they had hanged an innocent lad; and in that case the poor boy had not only pleaded his innocence but had explained that he was tired, and had been invited to ride by the gang who had stolen the horses, the men themselves corroborating his story; but it did not avail; and the poor boy was strung up, and a mother's heart was broken in the far East. Often these border ruffians act from unaccountable impulse, just as the Indians would torture some captives and adopt others from mere whim.
It is an awful commentary on the condition of things on our frontiers, that a man has a better chance of escape when he has murdered a fellow creature than when he has stolen a horse. And yet in this year 1895, I have seen a man who was trying in vain to sell a horse for $1.50.