t a big part of the life of the frontiersman
and frightful in its possibilities. Sherman's march to the sea or
through the Carolinas, disgraceful to modern civilization as each
undeniably was, lacked the sickening phase, guerrilla atrocities, that
made the Civil War in the West, to those at least who were in line
to experience it at close range, an awful nightmare. Union and
Confederate soldiers might well fraternize in eastern camps because
there they so rarely had any cause for personal hostility towards each
other, but not in western. The fight on the border was constant and to
the death.

The leaders in the West or many of them, on both sides, were men of
ungovernable tempers, of violent and unrestrained passions, sometimes
of distressingly base proclivities, although, in the matter of both
vices and virtues, there was considerable difference of degree among
them. Lane and Shelby and Montgomery and Quantrill were hardly types,
rather should it be said they were extreme cases. They seem never to
have taken chances on each other's inactivity. Their motto invariably
was, to be prepared for the worst, and their practice, retaliation.

It was scarcely to be supposed that a man like Lane, who had never
known moderation in the course of the long struggle for Kansas or been
over scrupulous about anything would, in the event of his adopted
state's being exposed anew to her old enemy, the Missourian, be able
to pose contentedly as a legislator or stay quietly in Washington,
his role of guardian of the White House being finished.[89] The
anticipated danger to Kansas visibly threatened in the summer of 1861
and the critical moment saw Lane again in the West, energetic beyond
precedent. He took up his position at Fort Scott, it being his
conviction that, from that point and from the line of the Little
Osage, the entire eastern section of the state, inclusive of Fort
Leavenworth, could best be protected.[90]

[Footnote 89: As Villard tells us [_Memoirs_, vol. i, 169],
Lane was in command of the "Frontier Guards," one of the two special
patrols that protected the White House in the early days of the war.
There were those, however, who resented his presence there. For
example, note the diary entry of Hay, "Going to my room, I met the
Captain. He was a little boozy and very eloquent. He dilated on the
troubles of the time and bewailed the existence of a garrison in the
White House 'to give _eclat_ to Jim Lane.'"--Thayer, op. cit.