of going too far in defiance of law and decency.

What has been true regarding the camps of Florence, Bannack, and
Virginia City, had been true in part in earlier camps and was to
be repeated perhaps a trifle less vividly in other camps yet to
come. The Black Hills gold rush, for instance, which came after
the railroad but before the Indians were entirely cleared away,
made a certain wild history of its own. We had our Deadwood stage
line then, and our Deadwood City with all its wild life of
drinking, gambling, and shooting--the place where more than one
notorious bad man lost his life, and some capable officers of the
peace shared their fate. To describe in detail the life of this
stampede and the wild scenes ensuing upon it is perhaps not
needful here. 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