government is provided for the counties as soon as their population has become at all fixed, the frontiersmen showing their natural aptitude for organization. Their lawlessness is put down pretty effec.tively. For example, as soon as we organized the government of Medora-an excessively unattractive little hamlet-we elected good officers, built a log jail, prohibited all shooting in the streets, and enforced the prohibition, etc. Up to that time there had been a good deal of lawlessness of one kind and another, only checked by an occasional piece of individual retribution or by a sporadic outburst of vigilance committee work. In such a society the desperadoes of every grade flourish. Many are merely ordinary rogues and swindlers wha rob and cheat on occasion, but are dangerous only when led by some villain of real intellectual power. The gambler is scarcely classed as a criminal, indeed he may soon be a very public spirited citizen. But as his trade is so often plied in saloons, and as even if, as sometimes happens, he does not cheat, many of his opponents are certain to attempt to do so, he is of necessity obliged to be skillful and ready with his weapon, and gambling rows are very common. Cow-boys lose much of their money to gamblers. * * * As already explained, they are in the main good men, and the disturbance they cause in a town is done from sheer rough, lightheartedness. They shoot off boot heels or tall hats occasionally, or make some obnoxious butt 'dance' by shooting round his feet, but they rarely meddle in this way with men who have not themselves played the fool. A fight in the street is almost always a duel between men who bear each other malice; it is only in a melée in a saloon that outsiders often get hurt, and then it is their own fault, for they have no business to be there. One evening at Medora a cow-boy spurred his horse up the rickety steps of the hotel piazza into the barroom where he began firing at the clock, the decanters, etc., the bartender meanwhile taking one shot at him, which missed. When

he had emptied his revolver he threw down a roll of banknotes on the counter to pay for the damage he had done and galloped his horse out through the door, disappearing in the darkness with loud yells to a rattling accompaniment of pistol shots interchanged between himself and some passerby who apparently began firing out of pure desire to enter into the spirit of the occasion—for it was the night of the Fourth of July, and all the country round about had come into town for a spree."

Mr. Roosevelt studied, thus, the life in the wild West, as a student and a man who wished to be acquainted with every phase of the country's life. Of course there are plenty of hard characters among cow-boys, he admits, but scarcely more than among lumbermen, and the like; only, the cow-boys are so ready with their guns that a bully in a cow-boy camp is generally a murderer, rather than a mere bruiser. However, as a rule, cow-boys who prefer to be desperadoes soon drop their original characters and are no longer employed on ranches unless in parts of the country where little heed is paid to law and where, consequently, the cattle owner stands in need of a certain number of hired bravos. As a rule, Mr. Roosevelt says, claimjumpers are only blackmailers. They sometimes drive an ignorant foreigner away from his claim by threats, but never a frontiersman. It is their pleasure to squat down beside ranchmen who are themselves trying to hold land to which they have no claim, and who know that their only hope is to bribe or fight out the intruder.

He found cattle thieves not common, though plenty of shiftless, vicious men will kill a cow or a steer in the winter, if they get the chance, for food.

Numerous, however, are horse-thieves, and formidable. Reasons for the severity of the punishment for horse-stealing on the border are evident, he says. Horses are the most valuable property of the frontiersman, and are often absolutely essential to even his life.

Horses are always marketable and are easily stolen, for they walk themselves off. Thus horse-stealing is a tempting business to the more reckless ruffians, and it is followed by armed men. Frequently the thieves band themselves with the road agents, or highwaymen, and other desperadoes, and organize into secret societies, which terrorize whole districts until overthrown by force. When the Civil War was freshly over a great many guerrillas from Arkansas and Missouri went to the plains. They took to horse-stealing and like pursuits. From these have sprung emulators in these latter days, but they have gone farther and farther West, and vengeance usually pursues them. The professional man-killers, or "bad men," as they are called, may be horse-thieves or highwaymen, yet some of the "bad men" are quiet fellows whom accident has driven to wild careers. Perhaps one of them at some time has killed a man in self-defense; he in this way gains some sort of reputation, and the bullies look on him as a rival whom it would be an honor to dispatch; so that henceforth he must be on the watch; he must learn to shoot quickly and with good aim, and may have to take life after life in order to save his own.

"A noted desperado, an Arkansas man, had become involved in a quarrel with two others of the same ilk, both Irishmen and partners. For several days all three lurked about the saloon-infested streets of the roaring little board-and-canvas city, each trying to get 'the drop,' the other inhabitants looking forward to the fight with pleased curiosity, no one dreaming of interfering. At last one of the partners got a chance at his opponent as the latter was walking into a gambling hell, and broke his back near the hips; yet the crippled, mortally wounded man twisted around as he fell and shot his slayer dead. Then, knowing that he had but a few moments to live, and expecting that his other foe would run up on hearing the shooting, he dragged himself by his arms out into the street; immediately afterward, as he

had anticipated, the second partner appeared and was killed on the spot. The victor did not live twenty minutes."

The first deadly affray that took place in the town of Medora was between a Scotchman and a Minnesota man. Both possessed "shooting" records. The Scotchman was a noted bully, and was the more daring of the two, but he was too hot-headed and overbearing to be a match for the hard-headed man from Minnesota. After a furious quarrel the Scotchman mounted his horse and, rifle in hand, rode to the door of the mud ranch perched on the river bluff where the American made his home, and was instantly shot down by the latter from behind a corner of the building.

One time Mr. Roosevelt opened a cow-boy ball with the wife of the victor in this affair, the husband dancing opposite the pair. It was the lancers, and the man knew all the steps far better than his wife's partner.

There is a frontier saying that "the frontier is hard on women and cattle." The toil and hardship of a life passed in the wilderness drive the grace and beauty from a woman's face long before her youth has passed her by. But she has many qualities that atone for the fairness she has lost. She is a good mother; she is a faithful wife; peril does not daunt her and hardship and poverty do not appall her. It was so with the woman who danced at the cow-boy ball. These balls are great events in the little towns where they take place. Everybody roundabout attends them. There is always much decorum observed, unseemly conduct not being tolerated. There is a master of ceremonies. He is selected as much for his strength as for his executive ability in affairs saltatorial. He calls off the figures of the square dances with so much explicitness that even the most inexperienced may prance through them, and all the time he preserves order. Sometimes the guests are allowed to carry their revolvers as a part of their social paraphernalia, and sometimes not. The nature of the orchestra