LIFE IN SHEYENNE. 261 



we could hardly see anything. There were about seventy or 

 eighty men in it, about half of whom were playing, chiefly at 

 faro, rouge et noir, and roulette, the stakes being principally 

 silver with a sprinkling of gold pieces. It was early in the 

 evening, so that there was no one drunk and not much noise, 

 but a man to whom we spoke told us to return about 

 eleven o'clock if we wished to see the fun. In the back room 

 was a young girl doing five hundred miles in five hundred hours 

 and looking wonderfully fresh, though she was supposed to have 

 done more than half that distance the truth being that it was 

 the public who were being done and not the distance, as in the 

 instance I have before mentioned. We then visited a dance- 

 house, where there were three females, two of whom were 

 smoking cigars, and you had to pay half a dollar to dance 

 round the room with one of them, standing drinks afterwards. 

 The room, which was a very long one, was full, a small space 

 being reserved at one end for the dancing, the music for which 

 was a street organ. 



I was told a story of one of these places soon after Sheyenne 

 was started, which my informant declared he had witnessed, 

 but for the truth of which I _will not vouch. He said that he 

 was standing near the bar in a dance-house talking to a chance 

 acquaintance, when a drunken man got on the bar and 

 began shouting and brandishing a revolver, swearing that he 

 would shoot the first man who refused to drink with him, on 

 which the man to whom my informant was speaking stopped 

 in the middle of a sentence, drew a revolver and shot the 

 man dead, merely saying " that he might have hurt some one," 

 and then finished his sentence. 



Certainly human life was thought very little of in such 



