The Land of the Desperado--_The Frontier of the Old West_--_The Great
Unsettled Regions_--_The Desperado of the Mountains_--_His Brother of
the Plains_--_The Desperado of the Early Railroad Towns_.
There was once a vast empire, almost unknown, west of the Missouri
river. The white civilization of this continent was three hundred years
in reaching it. We had won our independence and taken our place among
the nations of the world before our hardiest men had learned anything
whatever of this Western empire. We had bought this vast region and were
paying for it before we knew what we had purchased. The wise men of the
East, leading men in Congress, said that it would be criminal to add
this territory to our already huge domain, because it could never be
settled. It was not dreamed that civilization would ever really subdue
it. Even much later, men as able as Daniel Webster deplored the attempt
to extend our lines farther to the West, saying that these territories
could not be States, that the East would suffer if we widened our West,
and that the latter could never be of value to the union! So far as this
great West was concerned, it was spurned and held in contempt, and it
had full right to take itself as an outcast. Decreed to the wilderness
forever, it could have been forgiven for running wild. Denominated as
unfit for the occupation of the Eastern population, it might have been
expected that it would gather to itself a population all its own.
It did gather such a population, and in part that population was a
lawless one. The frontier, clear across to the Pacific, has at one time
or another been lawless; but this was not always the fault of the men
who occupied the frontier. The latter swept Westward with such
unexampled swiftness that the machinery of the law could not always keep
up with them. Where there are no courts, where each man is judge and
jury for himself, protecting himself and his property by his own arm
alone, there always have gathered also the lawless, those who do not
wish the day of law to come, men who want license and not liberty, who
wish crime and not lawfulness, who want to take what is not theirs and
to enforce their own will in their own fashion.
"There are two states of society perhaps equally bad for the promotion
of good morals and virtue--the densely populated city and the
wilderness. In the former, a single individual loses his identity in the
mass, and, being unnoticed, is without the view of the public, and can,
to a certain extent, commit crimes with impunity. In the latter, the
population is sparse and, the strong arm of the law not being extended,
his crimes are in a measure unobserved, or, if so, frequently power is
wanting to bring him to justice. Hence, both are the resort of
desperadoes. In the early settlement of the West, the borders were
infested with desperadoes flying from justice, suspected or convicted
felons escaped from the grasp of the law, who sought safety. The
counterfeiter and the robber there found a secure retreat or a new
theater for crime."
The foregoing words were written in 1855 by a historian to whom the West
of the trans-Missouri remained still a sealed book; but they cover very
fitly the appeal of a wild and unknown land to a bold, a criminal, or
an adventurous population. Of the trans-Missouri as we of to-day think
of it, no one can write more accurately and understandingly than
Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, who thus describes
the land he knew and loved.[A]
[Footnote A: "The Wilderness Hunters." G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York and
London.]
"Some distance beyond the Mississippi, stretching from Texas to
North Dakota, and westward to the Rocky mountains, lies the plains
country. This is a region of light rainfall, where the ground is
clad with short grass, while cottonwood trees fringe the courses of
the winding plains streams; streams that are alternately turbid
torrents and mere dwindling threads of water. The great stretches
of natural pasture are broken by gray sage-brush plains, and tracts
of strangely shaped and colored Bad Lands; sun-scorched wastes in
summer, and in winter arctic in their iron desolation. Beyond the
plains rise the Rocky mountains, their flanks covered with
coniferous woods; but the trees are small, and do not ordinarily
grow very close together. Toward the north the forest becomes
denser, and the peaks higher; and glaciers creep down toward the
valleys from the fields of everlasting snow. The brooks are
brawling, trout-filled torrents; the swift rivers roam over rapid
and cataract, on their way to one or other of the two great oceans.
"Southwest of the Rockies evil and terrible deserts stretch for
leagues and leagues, mere waterless wastes of sandy plain and
barren mountain, broken here and there by narrow strips of fertile
ground. Rain rarely falls, and there are no clouds to dim the
brazen sun. The rivers run in deep canyons, or are swallowed by the
burning sand; the smaller watercourses are dry throughout the
greater part of the year.
"Beyond this desert region rise the sunny Sierras of California,
with their flower-clad slopes and groves of giant trees; and north
of them, along the coast, the rain-shrouded mountain chains of
Oregon and Washington, matted with the towering growth of the
mighty evergreen forest."
Such, then, was this Western land, so long the home of the out-dweller
who foreran civilization, and who sometimes took matters of the law into
his own hands. For purposes of convenience, we may classify him as the
bad man of the mountains and the bad man of the plains; because he was
usually found in and around the crude localities where raw resources in
property were being developed; and because, previous to the advent of
agriculture, the two vast wilderness resources were minerals and cattle.
The mines of California and the Rockies; the cattle of the great
plains--write the story of these and you have much of the story of
Western desperadoism. For, in spite of the fact that the ideal desperado
was one who did not rob or kill for gain, the most usual form of early
desperadoism had to do with attempts at unlawfully acquiring another
man's property.
The discovery of gold in California caused a flood of bold men, good and
bad, to pour into that remote region from all corners of the earth.
Books could be written, and have been written, on the days of terror in
California, when the Vigilantes took the law into their own hands. There
came the time later when the rich placers of Montana and other
territories were pouring out a stream of gold rivaling that of the days
of '49; and when a tide of restless and reckless characters, resigning
or escaping from both armies in the Civil War, mingled with many others
who heard also the imperious call of a land of gold, and rolled
westward across the plains by every means of conveyance or locomotion
then possible to man.
The next great days of the wild West were the cattle days, which also
reached their height soon after the end of the great war, when the North
was seeking new lands for its young men, and the Southwest was hunting
an outlet for the cattle herds, which had enormously multiplied while
their owners were off at the wars. The cattle country had been passed
over unnoticed by the mining men for many years, and dismissed as the
Great American Desert, as it had been named by the first explorers, who
were almost as ignorant about the West as Daniel Webster himself. Into
this once barren land, a vast region unsettled and without law, there
now came pouring up the great herds of cattle from the South, in charge
of men wild as the horned kine they drove. Here was another great wild
land that drew, as a magnet, wild men from all parts of the country.
This last home of the bad man, the old cattle range, is covered by a
passage from an earlier work:[B]
"The braiding of a hundred minor pathways, the Long Trail lay like
a vast rope connecting the cattle country of the South with that of
the North. Lying loose or coiling, it ran for more than two
thousand miles along the eastern ridge of the Rocky mountains,
sometimes close in at their feet, again hundreds of miles away
across the hard table-lands or the well-flowered prairies. It
traversed in a fair line the vast land of Texas, curled over the
Indian Nations, over Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming and
Montana, and bent in wide overlapping circles as far west as Utah
and Nevada; as far east as Missouri, Iowa, Illinois; and as far
north as the British possessions. Even to-day you may trace plainly
its former course, from its faint beginnings in the lazy land of
Mexico, the Ararat of the cattle range. It is distinct across
Texas, and multifold still in the Indian lands. Its many
intermingling paths still scar the iron surface of the Neutral
Strip, and the plows have not buried all the old furrows in the
plains of Kansas. Parts of the path still remain visible in the
mountain lands of the far North. You may see the ribbons banding
the hillsides to-day along the valley of the Stillwater, and along
the Yellowstone and toward the source of the Missouri. The hoof
marks are beyond the Musselshell, over the Bad Lands and the
_coulees_ and the flat prairies; and far up into the land of the
long cold you may see, even to-day if you like, the shadow of that
unparalleled pathway, the Long Trail of the cattle range. History
has no other like it.
"This was really the dawning of the American cattle industry. The
Long Trail now received a gradual but unmistakable extension,
always to the north, and along the line of the intermingling of the
products of the Spanish and the Anglo-Saxon civilizations. The
thrust was always to the north. Chips and flakes of the great
Southwestern herd began to be seen in the northern states. Meantime
the Anglo-Saxon civilization was rolling swiftly toward the upper
West. The Indians were being driven from the plains. A solid army
was pressing behind the vanguard of soldier, scout and plainsman.
The railroads were pushing out into a new and untracked empire. In
1871 over six hundred thousand cattle crossed the Red river for the
Northern markets. Abilene, Newton, Wichita, Ellsworth, Great Bend,
"Dodge," flared out into a swift and sometime evil blossoming. The
Long Trail, which long ago had found the black corn lands of
Illinois and Missouri, now crowded to the West, until it had
reached Utah and Nevada, and penetrated every open park and _mesa_
and valley of Colorado, and found all the high plains of Wyoming.
Cheyenne and Laramie became common words now, and drovers spoke
wisely of the dangers of the Platte as a year before they had
mentioned those of the Red river or the Arkansas. Nor did the Trail
pause in its irresistible push to the north until it had found the
last of the five great trans-continental lines, far in the British
provinces. The Long Trail of the cattle range was done. By magic
the cattle industry had spread over the entire West."
[Footnote B: "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. D. Appleton & Co.,
New York.]
By magic, also, the cattle industry called to itself a population unique
and peculiar. Here were great values to be handled and guarded. The
cowboy appeared, summoned out of the shadows by the demand of evolution.
With him appeared also the cattle thief, making his living on free beef,
as he had once on the free buffalo of the plains. The immense domain of
the West was filled with property held under no better or more obvious
mark than the imprint of a hot iron on the hide. There were no fences.
The owner might be a thousand miles away. The temptation to theft was
continual and urgent. It seemed easy and natural to take a living from
these great herds which no one seemed to own or to care for. The
"rustler" of the range made his appearance, bold, hardy, unprincipled;
and the story of his undoing by the law is precisely that of the finish
of the robbers of the mines by the Vigilantes.
Now, too, came the days of transition, which have utterly changed all
the West. The railroad sprang across this great middle country of the
plains. The intent was to connect the two sides of this 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.