e he was now accessible to view and within reach of the
tourist and tenderfoot investigator of the Western fauna. These were
palmy days for the wild West.

Unless it be a placer camp in the mountains, there is no harder
collection of human beings to be found than that which gathers in tents
and shanties at a temporary railway terminus of the frontier. Yet such
were all the capitals of civilization in the earliest days. One town was
like another. The history of Wichita and Newton and Fort Dodge was the
history of Abilene and Ellsworth and Hays City and all the towns at the
head of the advancing rails. The bad men and women of one moved on to
the next, just as they did in the stampedes of placer days.

To recount the history of one after another of these wild towns would be
endless and perhaps wearisome. But this history has one peculiar feature
not yet noted in our investigations. All these cow camps meant to be
real towns some day. They meant to take the social compact. There came
to each of these camps men bent upon making homes, and these men began
to establish a law and order spirit and to set up a government. Indeed,
the regular system of American government was there as soon as the
railroad was there, and this law was strong on its legislative and
executive sides. The frontier sheriff or town marshal was there, the man
for the place, as bold and hardy as the bold and hardy men he was to
meet and subdue, as skilled with weapons, as willing to die; and upheld,
moreover, with that sense of duty and of moral courage which is granted
even to the most courageous of men when he feels that he has the
sentiment of the majority of good people at his back.

To describe the life of one Western town marshal, himself the best and
most picturesque of them all, is to cover all this field sufficiently.
There is but one man who can thus be chosen, and that is Wild Bill
Hickok, better known for a generation as "Wild Bill," and properly
accorded an honorable place in American history.

The real name of Wild Bill was James Butler Hickok, and he was born in
May, 1837, in La Salle county, Illinois. This brought his youth into the
days of Western exploration and conquest, and the boy read of Carson and
Fremont, then popular idols, with the result that he proposed a life of
adventure for himself. He was eighteen years of age when he first saw
the West as a fighting man under Jim Lane, of Free Soil fame, in the
guerrilla days of Kansas b