and leaving them--good, bad and indifferent--as they were originally
printed, one is forced to the conclusion that sentiment--which would
seem to arouse what is most hostile in the cultivated dweller in
cities--is an all-pervading essence in primitive communities,
colouring and discolouring every phase of life and thought. One
instance among a thousand will suffice. Stage coaches, in the writer's
county, used to be held up, single-handed, by a highwayman, known as
Black Bart. All the foothill folk pleaded in extenuation of the robber
that he wrote a copy of verses, embalming his adventure, which he used
to pin to the nearest tree. Black Bart would have been shot on sight
had he presented his doggerel to any self-respecting Western editor;
nevertheless the sentiment that inspired a bandit to set forth his
misdeeds in execrable rhyme transformed him from a criminal into a
popular hero! The virtues that counted in the foothills during the
eighties were generosity, courage, and that amazing power of
recuperation which enables a man to begin life again and again,
undaunted by the bludgeonings of misfortune. Some of the stories in
this volume are obviously the work of an apprentice, but they have
been included because, however faulty in technique, they do serve to
illustrate a past that can never come back, and men and women who were
outwardly crude and illiterate but at core kind and chivalrous, and
nearly always humorously unconventional. The bunch grass, so beloved
by the patriarchal pioneers, has been ploughed up and destroyed; the
unwritten law of Judge Lynch will soon become an oral tradition; but
the Land of Yesterday blooms afresh as the Golden State of To-day--and
Tomorrow.


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