Slade--_A Man with a Newspaper Reputation_--_Bad, but Not as
Bad as Painted_--_Hero of the Overland Express Route_--_A Product of
Courage Plus Whiskey, and the End of the Product_.

One of the best-known desperadoes the West ever produced was Joseph A.
Slade, agent of the Overland stage line on the central or mountain
division, about 1860, and hence in charge of large responsibilities in a
strip of country more than six hundred miles in extent, which possessed
all the ingredients for trouble in plenty. Slade lived, in the heyday of
his career, just about the time when men from the East were beginning to
write about the newly discovered life of the West. Bret Harte had left
his indelible stamp upon the literature of the land, and Mark Twain was
soon to spread widely his impressions of life as seen in "Roughing It";
while countless newspaper men and book writers were edging out and
getting hearsay stories of things known at first hand by a very few
careful and conscientious writers.

The hearsay man engaged in discovering the West always clung to the
regular lines of travel; and almost every one who passed across the
mountains on the Overland stage line would hear stories about the
desperate character of Slade. These stories grew by newspaper
multiplication, until at length the man was owner of the reputation of a
fiend, a ghoul, and a murderer. There was a wide difference between this
and the truth. As a matter of fact, there were many worse desperadoes on
the border.

Slade was born at Carlisle, Illinois, and served in the Mexican War in
1848. He appears to have gone into the Overland service in 1859. At once
he plunged into the business of the stage line, and soon became a terror
to the thieves and outlaws, several of whom he was the means of having
shot or hung, although he himself was nothing of a man-hunter at the
time; and indeed, in all his life he killed but one man--a case of a
reputation beyond desert, and an instance of a reputation fostered by
admiring but ignorant writers.

Slade was reported to have tied one of his enemies, Jules Reni, more
commonly called Jules, to the stake, and to have tortured him for a day,
shooting him to pieces bit by bit, and cutting off his ears, one of
which he always afterward wore in his pocket as a souvenir. There was
little foundation for this reputation beyond the fact that he did kill
Jules, and did it after Jules had been captured and disarmed by other
men. But he had