known, which the gang had at different times committed.

So ended in blood the career of as bloody a band as might well be
discovered in the robber history of any land or time of the world.
Indeed, it is doubtful if any country ever saw leagues of robbers so
desperate as those which have existed in America, any with hands so red
in blood. This fact is largely due to the peculiar history of this
country, with its rapid development under swift modern methods of
transportation. In America the advance to the westward of the fighting
edge of civilization, where it meets and mingles with savagery, has been
more rapid than has ever been known in the settlement of any country of
the world. Moreover, this has taken place at precisely that time when
weapons of the most deadly nature have been invented and made at a price
permitting all to own them and many to become extremely skilled with
them. The temptation and the means of murder have gone hand in hand. And
in time the people, not the organized law courts, have applied the
remedy when the time has come for it. To-day the Indian Nations are no
more than a name. Civilization has taken them over. Statehood has
followed territorial organization. Presently rich farms will make a
continuous sea of grain across what was once a flood of crime, and the
wheat will grow yellow, and the cotton white, where so long the grass
was red.

Chapter XXII

Desperadoes of the Cities--_Great Cities Now the Most Dangerous
Places_--_City Bad Men's Contempt for Womanhood_--_Nine Thousand Murders
a Year, and Not Two Hundred Punished_--_The Reasonableness of Lynch
Law_.

It was stated early in these pages that the great cities and the great
wildernesses are the two homes for bold crimes; but we have been most
largely concerned with the latter in our studies of desperadoes and in
our search for examples of disregard of the law. We have found a
turbulence, a self-insistence, a vigor and self-reliance in the American
character which at times has led on to lawlessness on our Western
frontier.

Conditions have changed. We still revel in Wild West literature, but
there is little of the wild left in the West of to-day, little of the
old lawlessness. The most lawless time of America is to-day, but the
most lawless parts of America are the most highly civilized parts. The
most dangerous section of America is not the West, but the East.

The worst men are no longer those of the mountains or the pla