ndings additional figures of solitary desperadoes, each to
have his list of victims, and each himself to fall before the weapons of
his enemies or to meet the justice of the law or the sterner meed of the
Vigilantes. It would not be wholly pleasant to read even the names of
a long list of these; perhaps it will be sufficient to select one, the
notorious Joseph Slade, one of the "picturesque" characters of whom a
great deal of inaccurate and puerile history has been written. The
truth about Slade is that he was a good man at first, faithful in the
discharge of his duties as an agent of the stage company. Needing at
times to use violence lawfully, he then began to use it unlawfully. He
drank and soon went from bad to worse. At length his outrages became so
numerous that the men of the community took him out and hanged him. His
fate taught many others the risk of going too far in defiance of law and
decency.

What has been true regarding the camps of Florence, Bannack, and
Virginia City, had been true in part in earlier camps and was to be
repeated perhaps a trifle less vividly in other camps yet to come. The
Black Hills gold rush, for instance, which came after the railroad
but before the Indians were entirely cleared away, made a certain
wild history of its own. We had our Deadwood stage line then, and
our Deadwood City with all its wild life of drinking, gambling, and
shooting--the place where more than one notorious bad man lost his life,
and some capable officers of the peace shared their fate. To describe in
detail the life of this stampede and the wild scenes ensuing upon it is
perhaps not needful here. The main thing is that the great quartz lodes
of the Black Hills support in the end a steady, thrifty, and law-abiding
population.

All over that West, once so unspeakably wild and reckless, there now
rise great cities where recently were scattered only mining-camps scarce
fit to be called units of any social compact. It was but yesterday
that these men fought and drank and dug their own graves in their own
sluices. At the city of Helena, on the site of Last Chance Gulch,
one recalls that not so long ago citizens could show with a certain
contemporary pride the old dead tree once known as "Hangman's Tree." It
marked a spot which might be called a focus of the old frontier. Around
it, and in the country immediately adjoining, was fought out the great
battle whose issue could not be doubted--that between the new and t