continent; but,
incidentally, and more swiftly than was planned, there was builded a
great midway empire on the plains, now one of the grandest portions of
America.

This building of the trans-continental lines was a rude and dangerous
work. It took out into the West mobs of hard characters, not afraid of
hard work and hard living. These men would have a certain amount of
money as wages, and would assuredly spend these wages as they made them;
hence, the gambler followed the rough settlements at the "head of the
rails." The murderer, the thief, the prostitute, the social outcast and
the fleeing criminal went with the gamblers and the toughs. Those were
the days when it was not polite to ask a man what his name had been
back in the States. A very large percentage of this population was wild
and lawless, and it impressed those who joined it instead of being
altered and improved by them. There were no wilder days in the West than
those of the early railroad building. Such towns as Newton, Kansas,
where eleven men were killed in one night; Fort Dodge, where armed
encounters among cowboys and gamblers, deputies and desperadoes, were
too frequent to attract attention; Caldwell, on the Indian border; Hays
City, Abilene, Ellsworth--any of a dozen cow camps, where the head of
the rails caught the great northern cattle drives, furnished chapters
lurid enough to take volumes in telling--indeed, perhaps, gave that
stamp to the West which has been apparently so ineradicable.

These were flourishing times for the Western desperado, and he became
famous, and, as it were, typical, at about this era. Perhaps this was
due in part to the fact that the railroads carried with them the
telegraph and the newspaper, so that records and reports were made of
what had for many years gone unreported. Now, too, began the influx of
transients, who saw the wild West hurriedly and wrote of it as a
strange and dangerous country. The wild citizens of California and
Montana in mining days passed almost unnoticed except in fiction. The
wild men of the middle plains now began to have a record in facts, or
partial facts, as brought to the notice of the reading public which was
seeking news of the new lands. A strange and turbulent day now drew
swiftly on.

Chapter IV

The Early Outlaw--_The Frontier of the Past Century_--_The Bad Man East
of the Mississippi River_--_The Great Western Land-Pirate, John A.
Murrell_--_The Greatest Slave Insurrectio