Frontier Types.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 879, 4 January 1889, Page 9

Frontier Types.

Theodore Roosevelt, in the ‘Century.’ I have always been treated with the utmost courtesy by. all cowboys, whether on the round-up or in camp ; and the few real desperadoes that I have seen were also perfectly polite. Indeed, I never was shot at maliciously bat once. This was on an occasion when I had to pass the night in a little frontier hotel where the bar-room occupied the whole lower floor, and was in consequence the place where everyone, drunk or sober, had to sit. My- assailant was neither a cowboy nor a bond fide ‘ bad man,’ but a broad-hatted ruffian of cheap and common-place type, who had for the moment terrorised the other men in the bar-room, these beiDg mostly sheep-herders and small grangers. The fact that I wore glasses, together with my evident desire to avoid a fight, apparently gave him the impression—a mistaken one—that I would not resent un injury. The first deadly affray that took place in onr town, after the cattlemen came in and regular settlement began, was between a Scotchman and a Minnesota man, the latter being one of the small stockmen. Both had shooting records, and each was a man with a varied past. The Scotchman, a noted bully, was the more daring of the fc.vo, but ho was much too hot-headed and over-beating to be a match for his grey-eyed, hard-featured foe. After a furious quarrel and threats of

violence, the Scotchman mounted his horse, and, rifle in hand, rode to the door of the mud ranch, perched on the brink of the river-bluff, where the American lived, and was instantly shot down by the latter from behind a corner of the building. Later on 1 once opened a cowboy ball with the wife of the victor in this contest, the husband himself dancing opposite. It was the Lancers, and ho knew all the steps far better than 1 did. He could have danced a minuet very well with a little practice. The soene reminded one of the ball where ®(J6t Harte’s heroine ‘ danced down the middle with the man who shot Sandy Magee.’ But though there were plenty of men present each of whom had shot his luckless Saady Magee, yet there was no Lily of Pov3rty Flat. There is an old and true border saying that ‘ the frontier is hard on women and cattle.’ There are some striking exceptions j but, as a rule, the grinding toil and hardship of a life passed in the wilderness, or on its outskirts, drive the beauty and bloom from a woman’s face long before her youth has left her. By the time she is a mother she is Binewy and angular, with thin, compressed lips and furrowed, sallow brow. But Bhe has a hundred qualities that atone for the grace she lacks. She is a. good mother, and a hard-working housewife, always putting things to rights, washing and cooking for her stalwart spouse and offspring. She is faithful to her husband, and, like the true American that she is, exacts faithfulness in return. Peril cannot daunt her, nor hardship and poverty appal her. Whether on the mountains in a log hut chinked with moss, in a sod or adobe hovel on the desolate prairie, or in a mere temporary camp, where the white-topped waggons have been drawn up in a protection-giving circle near some spring, she is equally at home. Clad in a dingy gown and a hideous sun-bonnet, she goes braveiy about her- work, resolute, silent, uncomplaining. The children grow up pretty much as fate dictates. Even when very small they seem well able to proteot themselves. The wife of one of my teamsters, who lived in a small outlying camp, used to-keep the youngest and most troublesome members of her family out of mischief by the simple expedient of picketing them out, each child being tied by the leg, with a long leather stiing, to a stake driven into the ground, so that it could neither get at another child nor at anything breakable. The best buckskin maker that I ever met was, if not a typical frontiers-woman, at least a woman who could not have reached her full development save on the border. She made first-class hunting shirts, leggings, and gantlets. When I knew her Bhe was living alone in her cabin on mid-prairie, having dismissed her husband six months previously in an exceedingly summary manner. She not only possessed redoubtable qualities of head and hand, but also a nice sense cf justice, even towards Indians, that is not always found on the frontier. Once, going there for a buckskin shirt, I met at her cabin three Sioux, and from their leader, named One Bull, purchased a tobacco pouch, beautifully worked with porcupine quills. She had given them some dinner, for which they had paid with a deer hide. Falling into conversation, she mentioned that just before I came up, a white man, apparently from Deadwood, had passed by, and had tried to steal the Indians’ horses. The latter had been too quick for him, had run him down, and brought him back to the cabin. • I told them to go right on. and hang him, and I wouldn’t never cheep about it,’ said my informant; * but they let him go after taking his gun. There ain’t no sense in stealing from Indians any more than from white folks, and I’m not going to have, it round my ranch neither. There ! 111 give ’em back the deer bide they gave me for the dinner and things, anyway.’ I told her that I sinoerely wished we could make her sheriff and Indian agent. She made the Indians—and whites, too, for that matter— 7 behave themselves and walk the straightest kind of line, not tolerating the least symptom of rebellion, but she had a strong natural sense of justice. The cowboy balls spoken of above are always great events in the small towns where they take place. Being usually given when the round-up passes near, everybody round about comes in for them. They are almost always conducted with great decorum; no unseemly conduct would be tolerated. There is usually some master of the ceremonies, chosen with due regard to brawn as well as brain. He calls off the figures of the square dances so that even the inexperienced may get through them, and • incidentally preserves order. Sometimes wo are allowed to wear our revolvers, and sometimes not. The nature of the band, of coarse, depends upon the size of the place. I remember one ball that came near being a failure because our half-breed fiddler * went and got himself shot,’ as the indignant master of the ceremonies phrased it. But all these things are merely incidents in the cowboy’s life. It i 3 utterly unfair to judge the whole clasß by what a few individuals do in the course of two or three days spent in town, instead of by the long months of weary, honest toil commou to all alike. To appreciate property his fine, manly qualities, the wild rough-rider of the plains should be seen in his own home. There he passes his days; there he does his life-work; there, when he meets death, he faces it as he has faced many other evils, with quiet, uncomplaining fortitude. Brave, hospitable, hardy, and adventurous, he is the grim pioneer of our race; he prepares the way for the civilisation from before whose face he must himself disappear. Hard and dangerous though his existence iB, it has yet a wild attraction that strongly draws to it his bold, free spirit. He lives in the lonely lands where mighty rivers twist in long reaohes between the barren bluffs: where the prairies stretch oat into billowy plains of waving grass, girt only by the blue horizon plains across whose endless breadth he can steer his course for days and.weeks and see neither man to speak to nor hill to break the level ; whore the glory and the burning splendour of the sunsets kindle the blue vault of heaven and the level brown earth till they merge together in an ocean of flaming fire.