\ 

 208 HUNTING THE GRISLY. 



CHAPTER IX. 



IN COWBOY LAND. 



OUT on the frontier, and generally among 

 those who spend their lives in, or on the 

 borders of, the wilderness, life is reduced to 

 its elemental conditions. The passions and 

 emotions of these grim hunters of the moun- 

 tains, and wild rough-riders of the plains, are 

 simpler and stronger than those of people 

 dwelling in more complicated states of society. 

 As soon as the communities become settled 

 and begin to grow with any rapidity, the 

 American instinct for law asserts itself ; but 

 in the earlier stages each individual is obliged 

 to be a law to himself and to guard his rights 

 with a strong hand. Of course the transition 

 periods are full of incongruities. Men have 

 not yet adjusted their relations to morality and 

 law with any niceness. They hold strongly by 

 certain rude virtues, and on the other hand 

 they quite fail to recognize even as shortcom- 

 ings not a few traits that obtain scant mercy 

 in older communities. Many of the despera- 

 does, the man-killers, and road-agents have 

 good sides to their characters. Often they 

 are people who, in certain stages of civiliza- 

 tion, do, or have done, good work, but who, 



