own the Ohio
valley in the first and second decades of the past century passed the
ruins of abandoned towns far back to the east even in that day. The
town-site shark passed across the Mississippi river and the Missouri,
and everywhere his record was the same. He was the pioneer of avarice in
very many cases, and often he inaugurated strife where he purported to
be establishing law. Each town thought itself the garden spot and center
of the universe--one knows not how many Kansas towns, for instance,
contended over the absurd honor of being exactly at the center of the
United States!--and local pride was such that each citizen must unite
with others even in arms, if need be, to uphold the merits of his own
"city."

This peculiar phase of frontier nature usually came most into evidence
over the questions of county seats. Hardly a frontier county seat was
ever established without a fight of some kind, and often a bloody one.
It has chanced that the author has been in and around a few of these
clashes between rival towns, and he may say that the vehemence of the
antagonism of such encounters would have been humorous, had it not been
so deadly. Two "cities," composed each of a few frame shanties and a set
of blue-print maps, one just as barren of delight as the other, and
neither worth fighting over at the time, do not seem typical of any
great moral purpose; yet at times their citizens fought as stubbornly as
did the men who fought for and against slavery in Kansas. One instance
of this sort of thing will do, and it is covered in the chapter
describing the Stevens County War, one of the most desperate and bloody,
as well as one of the most recent feuds of local politicians.

For some reason, perhaps that of remoteness of time, the wars of the cow
men of the range seem to have had a bolder, a less sordid and more
romantic interest, if these terms be allowable. When the cow man began
to fence up the free range, to shut up God's out-of-doors, he intrenched
upon more than a local or a political pride. He was now infringing upon
the great principle of personal freedom. He was throttling the West
itself, which had always been a land of freedom. One does not know
whether all one's readers have known it, that unspeakable feeling of
freedom, of independence, of rebellion at restraint, which came when one
could ride or drive for days across the empire of the plains and never
meet a fence to hinder, nor need a road to show the way.