CHAPTER XX. 



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 mountains, 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 shortcomings not a few traits that obtain 

 scant mercy in older communities. Many of the desper- 

 adoes, the man-killers, and road-agents have good sides to 

 their characters. Often they are people who, in certain 

 stages of civilization, do, or have done, good work, but 



412 



