g nations or sections. He does not wholly pass
away with the coming of the law, but his home is essentially in a new
and undeveloped condition of society. The edge between East and West,
between North and South, made the territory of the bad man of the
American interior.

The far Southwest was the oldest of all American frontiers, and the
stubbornest. We have never, as a nation, been at war with any other
nation whose territory has adjoined our own except in the case of
Mexico; and long before we went to war as a people against Mexico, Texas
had been at war with her as a state, or rather as a population and a
race against another race. The frontier of the Rio Grande is one of the
bloodiest of the world, and was such long before Texas was finally
admitted to the union. There was never any new territory settled by so
vigorous and belligerent a population as that which first found and
defended the great empire of the Lone Star. Her early men were, without
exception, fighters, and she has bred fighters ever since.

The allurement which the unsettled lands of the Southwest had for the
young men of the early part of the last century lay largely in the
appeal of excitement and adventure, with a large possibility of worldly
gain as well. The men of the South who drifted down the old River Road
across Mississippi and Louisiana were shrewd in their day and
generation. They knew that eventually Texas would be taken away from
Mexico, and taken by force. Her vast riches would belong to those who
had earned them. Men of the South were even then hunting for another
West, and here was a mighty one. The call came back that the fighting
was good all along the line; and the fighting men of all the South, from
Virginia to Louisiana, fathers and sons of the boldest and bravest of
Southern families, pressed on and out to take a hand. They were
scattered and far from numerous when they united and demanded a
government of their own, independent of the far-off and inefficient head
of the Mexican law. They did not want Coahuila as their country, but
Texas, and asked a government of their own. Lawless as they were, they
wanted a real law, a law of Saxon right and justice.

Men like Crockett, Fannin, Travers and Bowie were influenced half by
political ambition and half by love of adventure when they moved across
the plains of eastern Texas and took up their abode on the firing line
of the Mexican border. If you seek a historic band of bad men, f