Appointments to public office must of course be made primarily because of the presumable fitness of the man for the position. But even the most rigid moralist ought to pardon the occasional inclusion of other considerations. I am glad that I have been able to put in office certain outdoor men who were typical leaders in the old life of the frontier, the daring adventurous life of warfare against wild man and wild nature which has now so nearly passed away. Bat Masterson, formerly of Dodge City and the Texas cattle trail, the most famous of the oldtime marshals, the iron-nerved gun-fighters of the border, is now a deputy marshal in New York, under District Attorney Stimson—himself a big game hunter, by the way. Pat Garret, who slew Billy the Kid, I made Collector of Customs at El Paso; and other scarred gun-fighters of the vanished frontier, with to their credit deeds of prowess as great as those of either Masterson or Garret, now hold my commissions, on the Rio Grande, in the Territories, or here and there in the States of the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES 1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling. 2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed. 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Outdoor pastimes of an American hunter, by Theodore Roosevelt