"Beyond this desert region rise the sunny Sierras of California,
with their flower-clad slopes and groves of giant trees; and north
of them, along the coast, the rain-shrouded mountain chains of
Oregon and Washington, matted with the towering growth of the
mighty evergreen forest."

Such, then, was this Western land, so long the home of the out-dweller
who foreran civilization, and who sometimes took matters of the law into
his own hands. For purposes of convenience, we may classify him as the
bad man of the mountains and the bad man of the plains; because he was
usually found in and around the crude localities where raw resources in
property were being developed; and because, previous to the advent of
agriculture, the two vast wilderness resources were minerals and cattle.
The mines of California and the Rockies; the cattle of the great
plains--write the story of these and you have much of the story of
Western desperadoism. For, in spite of the fact that the ideal desperado
was one who did not rob or kill for gain, the most usual form of early
desperadoism had to do with attempts at unlawfully acquiring another
man's property.

The discovery of gold in California caused a flood of bold men, good and
bad, to pour into that remote region from all corners of the earth.
Books could be written, and have been written, on the days of terror in
California, when the Vigilantes took the law into their own hands. There
came the time later when the rich placers of Montana and other
territories were pouring out a stream of gold rivaling that of the days
of '49; and when a tide of restless and reckless characters, resigning
or escaping from both armies in the Civil War, mingled with many others
who heard also the imperious call of a land of gold, and rolled
westward across the plains by every means of conveyance or locomotion
then possible to man.

The next great days of the wild West were the cattle days, which also
reached their height soon after the end of the great war, when the North
was seeking new lands for its young men, and the Southwest was hunting
an outlet for the cattle herds, which had enormously multiplied while
their owners were off at the wars. The cattle country had been passed
over unnoticed by the mining men for many years, and dismissed as the
Great American Desert, as it had been named by the first explorers, who
were almost as ignorant about the West as Daniel Webster himself. Into
this