THE CATTLE COUNIRY OF rilK FAR WEST n 



country, and in every kind of weather, proud of their really wonderful 

 skill as reinsmen and conscious of their high standing in any frontier 

 community, look down on and sneer at the "skin hunters" and the 

 plodding drivers of the white-topped prairie schooners. Besides these 

 there are trappers, and wolfers, whose business is to poison wolves, with 

 shaggy, knock-kneed ponies to carry their small bales and bundles of 

 furs — beaver, wolf, fox, and occasionally otter; and silent sheep-herders, 

 with cast-down faces, never able to forget the absolute solitude and 

 monotony of their dreary lives, nor to rid their minds of the thought 

 of the woolly idiots they pass all their days in tending. Such are the 

 men who have come to town, either on business or else to frequent the 

 flaunting saloons and gaudy hells of all kinds in search of the coarse, 

 vicious excitement that in the minds of many of them does duty as 

 pleasure — the only form of pleasure they have ever had a chance to 

 know. Indians too, wrapped in blankets, with stolid, emotionless faces, 

 stalk silently round among the whites, or join in the gambling and horse- 

 racing. If the town is on the borders of the mountain country, there will 

 also be sinewy lumbermen, rough-looking miners, and packers, whose 

 business it is to guide the long mule and pony trains that go where 

 wagons can not and whose work in packing needs special and peculiar 

 skill ; and mingled with and drawn from all these classes are desperadoes 

 of every grade, from the gambler up through the horse-thief to the mur- 

 derous professional bully, or, as he is locally called, ''bad man" — now, 

 however, a much less conspicuous object than formerly. 



But everywhere among these plainsmen and mountain-men, and more 

 important than any, are the cowboys, — the men who follow the calling 

 that has brought such towns into being. Singly, or in twos or threes, 

 they gallop their wiry little horses down the street, their lithe, supple fig- 

 ures erect or swaying slightly as they sit loosely in the saddle; while 

 their stirrups are so long that their knees are hardly bent, the bridles not 

 taut enough to keep the chains from clanking. They are smaller and 

 less muscular than the wielders of ax and pick ; but they are as hardy 

 and self-reliant as any men who ever breathed — with bronzed, set faces, 

 and keen eyes that look all the world straight in the face without flinch- 

 ing as they flash out from under the broad-brimmed hats. Peril and 

 hardship, and years of long toil broken by weeks of brutal dissipation, 

 draw haggard lines across their eager faces, but never dim their reckless 

 eyes nor break their bearing of defiant self-confidence. They do not 

 walk well, partly because they so rarely do any work out of the saddle, 

 partly because their chaperajos or leather overalls hamper them when on 



