se capital consisted of
disregard for the life and property of others. That men like this should
live for years at the very door of large cities, in an old settled
country, and known familiarly in their actual character to thousands of
good citizens, is a strange commentary on the American character; yet
such are the facts.

It has been shown that a widely extended war always has the effect of
cheapening human life in and out of the ranks of the fighting armies.
The early wars of England, in the days of the longbow and buckler,
brought on her palmiest days of cutpurses and cutthroats. The days
following our own civil war were fearful ones for the entire country
from Montana to Texas; and nowhere more so than along the dividing line
between North and South, where feeling far bitterer than soldierly
antagonism marked a large population on both sides of that contest. We
may further restrict the field by saying that nowhere on any border was
animosity so fierce as in western Missouri and eastern Kansas, where
jayhawker and border ruffian waged a guerrilla war for years before the
nation was arrayed against itself in ordered ranks. If mere blood be
matter of our record here, assuredly, is a field of interest. The deeds
of Lane and Brown, of Quantrell and Hamilton, are not surpassed in
terror in the history of any land. Osceola, Marais du Cygne,
Lawrence--these names warrant a shudder even to-day.

This locality--say that part of Kansas and Missouri near the towns of
Independence and Westport, and more especially the counties of Jackson
and Clay in the latter state--was always turbulent, and had reason to
be. Here was the halting place of the westbound civilization, at the
edge of the plains, at the line long dividing the whites from the
Indians. Here settled, like the gravel along the cleats of a sluice,
the daring men who had pushed west from Kentucky, Tennessee, lower Ohio,
eastern Missouri--the Boones, Carsons, Crocketts, and Kentons of their
day. Here came the Mormons to found their towns, and later to meet the
armed resistance which drove them across the plains. Here, at these very
towns, was the outfitting place and departing point of the caravans of
the early Santa Fe trade; here the Oregon Trail left for the far
Northwest; and here the Forty-niners paused a moment in their mad rush
to the golden coast of the Pacific. Here, too, adding the bitterness of
fanaticism to the courage of the frontier, came the bold men of