CHAPTER IX.--IN COWBOY LAND.
Out on the frontier, and generally among those who spend their lives in,
or on the borders of, the wilderness, life is reduced to its elemental
conditions. The passions and emotions of these grim hunters of the
mountains, and wild rough-riders of the plains, are simpler and stranger
than those of people dwelling in more complicated states of society.
As soon as the communities become settled and begin to grow with any
rapidity, the American instinct for law asserts itself; but in the
earlier stages each individual is obliged to be a law to himself and to
guard his rights with a strong hand. Of course the transition periods
are full of incongruities. Men have not yet adjusted their relations to
morality and law with any niceness. They hold strongly by certain rude
virtues, and on the other hand they quite fail to recognize even
as shortcomings not a few traits that obtain scant mercy in older
communities. Many of the desperadoes, the man-killers, and road-agents
have good sides to their characters.
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