If a grave here or there appeared along the trail
or at the edge of the straggling town, it mattered little. If the
gamblers and the desperadoes of the cow towns such as Newton,
Ellsworth, Abilene, Dodge, furnished a man for breakfast day
after day, it mattered little, for plenty of men, remained, as
good or better. The life was large and careless, and bloodshed
was but an incident.
During the early and unregulated days of the cattle industry, the
frontier insisted on its own creed, its own standards. But all
the time, coming out from the East, were scores and hundreds of
men of exacter notions of trade and business. The enormous waste
of the cattle range could not long endure. The toll taken by the
thievery of the men who came to be called range-rustlers made an
element of loss which could not long be sustained by thinking
men. As the Vigilantes regulated things in the mining camps, so
now in slightly different fashion the new property owners on the
upper range established their own ideas, their own sense of
proportion as to law and order. The cattle associations, the
banding together of many owners of vast herds, for mutual
protection and mutual gain were a natural and logical
development.
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