mber of the firm, went to
Colorado, and was last heard of at Rocky Ford, where he was prosperous.
The heritage of hatred was about all that McSween left to his widow, who
presently married George L. Barber, at Lincoln, and later proved herself
to be a good business woman--good enough to make a fortune in the cattle
business from the four hundred head of cattle John Chisum gave her to
settle a debt he had owed McSween. She afterward established a fine
ranch near Three Rivers, New Mexico.

Dad Peppin, known as the "Murphy sheriff" by the McSween faction, lived
out his life on his little holding at the edge of Lincoln _placita_. He
died in 1905. His rival, John Copeland, died in 1902. The street of
Lincoln, one of the bloodiest of its size in the world, is silent.
Another generation is growing up. William Brady, Major Brady's eldest
son, and Josefina Brady-Chavez, a daughter, live in Lincoln; and Bob
Brady, another son of the murdered sheriff, was long jailer at Lincoln
jail. The law has arisen over the ruin wrought by lawlessness. It is a
noteworthy fact that, although the law never punished the participants
in this border conflict, the lawlessness was never ended by any
vigilante movement. The fighting was so desperate and prolonged that it
came to be held as warfare and not as murder. There is no doubt that,
barring the border fighting of Kansas and Missouri, this was the
greatest of American border wars.

Chapter XV

The Stevens County War--_The Bloodiest County Seat War of the
West_--_The Personal Narrative of a Man Who Was Shot and Left for
Dead_--_The Most Expensive United States Court Case Ever Tried_.

In the month of May, 1886, the writer was one of a party of
buffalo-hunters bound for the Neutral Strip and the Panhandle of Texas,
where a small number of buffalo still remained at that time. We traveled
across the entire southwestern part of Kansas, below the Santa Fe
railroad, at a time when the great land boom of 1886 and 1887 was at its
height. Town-site schemes in western Kansas were at that time
innumerable, and a steady stream of immigration was pouring westward by
rail and wagon into the high and dry plains of the country, where at
that time farming remained a doubtful experiment. In the course of our
travels, we saw one morning, rising before us in the mirage of the
plains, what seemed to be a series of crenelated turrets, castles peaked
and bastioned. We knew this was but the mirage, and knew