The main thing is that the great quartz lodes of
the Black Hills support in the end a steady, thrifty, and
law-abiding population.
All over that West, once so unspeakably wild and reckless, there
now rise great cities where recently were scattered only
mining-camps scarce fit to be called units of any social compact.
It was but yesterday that these men fought and drank and dug
their own graves in their own sluices. At the city of Helena, on
the site of Last Chance Gulch, one recalls that not so long ago
citizens could show with a certain contemporary pride the old
dead tree once known as "Hangman's Tree." It marked a spot which
might be called a focus of the old frontier. Around it, and in
the country immediately adjoining, was fought out the great
battle whose issue could not be doubted--that between the new and
the old days; between law and order and individual lawlessness;
between the school and the saloon; between the home and the
dance-hall; between society united and resolved and the
individual reverted to worse than savagery.
Chapter VI. The Pathways Of The West
Since we have declared ourselves to be less interested in bald
chronology than in the naturally connected causes of events which
make chronology worth while, we may now, perhaps, double back
upon the path of chronology, and take up the great early highways
of the West--what we might call the points of attack against the
frontier.
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