protection and mutual gain were a natural and logical
development. Outside of these there was for a time a highly
efficient corps of cattle-range Vigilantes, who shot and hanged
some scores of rustlers.

It was a frenzied life while it lasted--this lurid outburst, the
last flare of the frontier. Such towns as Dodge and Ogallalla
offered extraordinary phenomena of unrestraint. But fortunately
into the worst of these capitals of license came the best men of
the new regime, and the new officers of the law, the agents of
the Vigilantes, the advance-guard of civilization now crowding on
the heels of the wild men of the West. In time the lights of the
dance-halls and the saloons and the gambling parlors went out one
by one all along the frontier. By 1885 Dodge City, a famed
capital of the cow trade, which will live as long as the history
of that industry is known, resigned its eminence and declared
that from where the sun then stood it would be a cow camp no
more! The men of Dodge knew that another day had dawned. But this
was after the homesteaders had arrived and put up their wire
fences, cutting off from the town the holding grounds of the
northbound herds.

This innovation of barb-wire fences in the seventies had caused a
tremendous alteration of conditions over all the country. It had
enabled men to fence in their own water-fronts, their own
homesteads. Casually, and at first without any objection filed by
any one, they had included in their fences many hundreds of
thousands of acres of range land to which they had no title
whatever. These men--like the large-handed cow barons of the
Indian Nations, who had things much as they willed in a little