, of the herds laboring upward through the long slow season.
Trail-cutters and herd-combers, licensed or unlicensed hangers-on to the
northbound throngs of cattle, appeared along the lower trails--with some
reason, occasionally; for in a great northbound herd there might be
many cows included under brands other than those of the road brands
registered for the drovers of that particular herd. Cattle thieving
became an industry of certain value, rivaling in some localities the
operations of the bandits of the placer camps. There was great wealth
suddenly to be seen. The weak and the lawless, as well as the strong and
the unscrupulous, set out to reap after their own fashion where they had
not sown. If a grave here or there appeared along the trail or at the
edge of the straggling town, it mattered little. If the gamblers and the
desperadoes of the cow towns such as Newton, Ellsworth, Abilene, Dodge,
furnished a man for breakfast day after day, it mattered little, for
plenty of men, remained, as good or better. The life was large and
careless, and bloodshed was but an incident.

During the early and unregulated days of the cattle industry, the
frontier insisted on its own creed, its own standards. But all the time,
coming out from the East, were scores and hundreds of men of exacter
notions of trade and business. The enormous waste of the cattle range
could not long endure. The toll taken by the thievery of the men who
came to be called range-rustlers made an element of loss which could not
long be sustained by thinking men. As the Vigilantes regulated things in
the mining camps, so now in slightly different fashion the new property
owners on the upper range established their own ideas, their own sense
of proportion as to law and order. The cattle associations, the banding
together of many owners of vast herds, for mutual protection and mutual
gain were a natural and logical development. Outside of these there was
for a time a highly efficient corps of cattle-range Vigilantes, who shot
and hanged some scores of rustlers.

It was a frenzied life while it lasted--this lurid outburst, the
last flare of the frontier. Such towns as Dodge and Ogallalla offered
extraordinary phenomena of unrestraint. But fortunately into the worst
of these capitals of license came the best men of the new regime,
and the new officers of the law, the agents of the Vigilantes, the
advance-guard of civilization now crowding on the heels of the wild m