he Cowboy," by E. Hough. D. Appleton &
Co.]

Wars between sheep men and cattle men sometimes took on the phase of
armed bodies of men meeting in bloody encounter. The sheep were always
unwelcome on the range, and are so to-day, although the courts now
adjust such matters better than they formerly did. The cow baron and his
men often took revenge upon the woolly nuisances themselves and killed
them in numbers. The author knows of one instance where five thousand
sheep were killed in one box canon by irate cow men whose range had been
invaded. The sheep eat the grass down to the point of killing it, and
cattle will not feed on a country which sheep have crossed. Many wars of
this kind have been known all the way from Montana to Mexico.

Again, factional fights might arise over some trivial matter as an
immediate cause, in a community or a region where numbers of men fairly
equal were separated in self-interest. In a day when life was still wild
and free, and when the law was still unknown, these differences of
opinion sometimes led to bitter and bloody conflicts between factions.

Chapter XIV

The Lincoln County War--_The Bloodiest, Most Dramatic and Most Romantic
of all the Border Wars_--_First Authentic Story Ever Printed of the
Bitterest Feud of the Southwest_.

The entire history of the American frontier is one of rebellion against
the law, if, indeed, that may be called rebellion whose apostles have
not yet recognized any authority of the law. The frontier antedated
anarchy. It broke no social compact, for it had never made one. Its
population asked no protection save that afforded under the stern
suzerainty of the six-shooter. The anarchy of the frontier, if we may
call it such, was sometimes little more than self-interest against
self-interest. This was the true description of the border conflict now
in question.

The Lincoln County War, fully speaking, embraced three wars; the Pecos
War of the early '70's, the Harold War of 1874, and the Lincoln County
War proper, which may be said to have begun in 1874 and to have ended in
1879. The actors in these different conflicts were all intermingled.
There was no blood feud at the bottom of this fighting. It was the war
of self-interest against self-interest, each side supported by numbers
of fighting men.

At that time Lincoln County, New Mexico, was about as large as the state
of Pennsylvania. For judicial purposes it was annexed to Donna Ana
County, and