and that is the transient and migratory character of the population. It
is astonishing what distances were traveled by the bold men who followed
the mining stampedes all over the wilderness of the upper Rockies, in
spite of the unspeakable hardships of a region where travel at its best
was rude, and travel at its worst well-nigh an impossibility. The West
was first peopled by wanderers, nomads, even in its mountain regions,
which usually attach their population to themselves and cut off the
disposition to roam. This nomad nature of the adventurers made law
almost an impossible thing. A town was organized and then abandoned, on
the spur of necessity or rumor. Property was unstable, taxes impossible,
and any corps of executive officers difficult of maintenance. Before
there can be law there must be an attached population.

The lawlessness of the real West was therefore much a matter of
conditions after all, rather than of morals. It proved above all things
that human nature is very much akin, and that good men may go wrong when
sufficiently tempted by great wealth left unguarded. The first and
second decades after the close of the civil war found the great placers
of the Rockies and Sierras exhausted, and quartz mines taking their
place. The same period, as has been shown, marked the advent of the
great cattle herds from the South upon the upper ranges of the
territories beyond the Missouri river. By this time, the plains began to
call to the adventurers as the mines recently had called.

Here, then, was wealth, loose, unattached, apparently almost unowned,
nomad wealth, and waiting for a nomad population to share it in one way
or another. Once more, the home was lacking, the permanent abode;
wherefore, once more the law was also lacking, and man ruled himself
after the ancient savage ways. By this time frontiersmen were well armed
with repeating weapons, which now used fixed ammunition. There appeared
on the plains more and better armed men than were ever known,
unorganized, in any land at any period of the earth's history; and the
plains took up what the mountains had begun in wild and desperate deeds.

The only property on the arid plains at that time was that of live
stock. Agriculture had not come, and it was supposed could never come.
The vast herds of cattle from the lower ranges, Texas and Mexico, pushed
north to meet the railroads, now springing westward across the plains;
but a large proportion of these cattle