|ONCE more has Laramie been, slandered and traduced. Once more our free
and peculiar style has been spoken lightly of and our pride trailed in
the dust.
Last week the _Police Gazette_, an illustrated family journal of great
merit, appeared with a half page steel engraving, executed by one of the
old masters, representing two Laramie girls on horseback yanking a fly
drummer along the street at a gallop, because he tried to make a mash on
them and they did not yearn for his love.
There are two or three little errors in the illustration, to which we
desire to call the attention of the eastern reader of Michael Angelo
masterpieces that appear in the Police Gazette. First, the saloon or
hurdy-gurdy shown in the left foreground is not the exact representation
of any building in Laramie, and the dobe pig pens and A tents of which
the town seems to be composed, are not true to nature.
Again, the streets do not look like the streets of Laramie. They look
more like the public thoroughfares of Tie City or Jerusalem. Then the
girls do not look like Laramie girls, and we are acquainted with all the
girls in town, and consider ourself a judge of those matters. The girls
in this illustration look too much as though they had mingled a great
deal with the people of the world. They do not have that shy, frightened
and pure look that they ought to have. They appear to be that kind of
girls that one finds in the crowded metropolis under the gas light,
yearning to get acquainted with some one.
There are several features of the illustration which we detect as
erroneous, and among the rest we might mention, casually, that the
incident illustrated never occurred here at all. Aside from these little
irregularities above named, the picture is no doubt a correct one. We
realize fully that times get dull even in New York sometimes, and it is
necessary, occasionally, to draw on the imagination, but the _Gazette_
artist ought to pick up some hard town like Cheyenne, and let us alone
awhile.