ers intolerable,
organize themselves into a Vigilance Committee. "Judge Lynch," with a
few feet of rope, appears on the scene, the majority crystallizes round
the supporters of order, warnings are issued to obnoxious people,
simply bearing a scrawl of a tree with a man dangling from it, with
such words as "Clear out of this by 6 A.M., or----." A number of the
worst desperadoes are tried by a yet more summary process than a
drumhead court martial, "strung up," and buried ignominiously. I have
been told that 120 ruffians were disposed of in this way here in a
single fortnight. Cheyenne is now as safe as Hilo, and the interval
between the most desperate lawlessness and the time when United States
law, with its corruption and feebleness, comes upon the scene is one of
comparative security and good order. Piety is not the forte of
Cheyenne. The roads resound with atrocious profanity, and the rowdyism
of the saloons and bar-rooms is repressed, not extirpated.

The population, once 6,000, is now about 4,000. It is an ill-arranged
set of frame houses and shanties [7] and rubbish heaps, and offal of
deer and antelope, produce the foulest smells I have smelt for a long
time. Some of the houses are painted a blinding white; others are
unpainted; there is not a bush, or garden, or green thing; it just
straggles out promiscuously on the boundless brown plains, on the
extreme verge of which three toothy peaks are seen. It is utterly
slovenly-looking, and unornamental, abounds in slouching
bar-room-looking characters, and looks a place of low, mean lives.
Below the hotel window freight cars are being perpetually shunted, but
beyond the railroad tracks are nothing but the brown plains, with their
lonely sights--now a solitary horseman at a traveling amble, then a
party of Indians in paint and feathers, but civilized up to the point
of carrying firearms, mounted on sorry ponies, the bundled-up squaws
riding astride on the baggage ponies; then a drove of ridgy-spined,
long-horned cattle, which have been several months eating their way
from Texas, with their escort of four or five much-spurred horsemen, in
peaked hats, blue-hooded coats, and high boots, heavily armed with
revolvers and repeating rifles, and riding small wiry horses. A
solitary wagon, with a white tilt, drawn by eight oxen, is probably
bearing an emigrant and his fortunes to Colorado. On one of the dreary
spaces of the settlement six white-tilted wagons, each wit