nd. No ranchman by himself,
or with the aid only of his own employees, would ever have been able
to collect his widely scattered property. It was only by the
cooeperative effort known as "the round-up" that it was possible once
or twice a year for every man to gather his own. The very persistence
of the range as a feeding-ground and the vitality and very life of the
cattle depended upon the honest cooeperation of the stock-owners. If
one man over-stocked his range, it was not only his cattle which
suffered, but in an equal measure the cattle of every other ranchman
along the river.

Regulating this industry, which depended so largely on a self-interest
looking beyond the immediate gain, was a body of tradition brought
from the cattle ranges of the South, but no code of regulations. There
were certain unwritten laws which you were supposed to obey; but if
you were personally formidable and your "outfit" was impressive, there
was nothing in heaven or earth to force you to obey them. It was
comparatively simple, moreover, to conduct a private round-up and ship
to Chicago cattle whose brands were not your own. If ever an industry
needed "regulation" for the benefit of the honest men engaged in it,
it was the cattle industry in Dakota in 1884.

But the need of a law of the range which the stockmen would respect,
because it was to their own interests to respect it, was only a phase
of a greater need for the presence in that wild and sparsely settled
country of some sort of authority which men would recognize and accept
because it was an outgrowth of the life of which they were a part.
Sheriffs and marshals were imposed from without, and an independent
person might have argued that in a territory under a Federal governor,
they constituted government without the consent of the governed. Such
a person would look with entirely different eyes on a body created
from among the men with whom he was in daily association.

Medora was blest with a deputy United States Marshal, and much good
did law and order derive from his presence. He happened to be the same
Joe Morrill who had gained notoriety the preceding winter in the
Stoneville fight, and who had long been suspected, by law-abiding folk
between Medora and the Black Hills, of being "in cahoots" with
everything that was sinister in the region. He had for years been
stationed at Deadwood for the purpose mainly of running down deserting
soldiers, and one of the rumors that followe