Now, too, came the days of transition, which have utterly changed all the West. The railroad sprang across this great middle country of the plains. The intent was to connect the two sides of this continent; but, incidentally, and more swiftly than was planned, there was builded a great midway empire on the plains, now one of the grandest portions of America. This building of the trans-continental lines was a rude and dangerous work. It took out into the West mobs of hard characters, not afraid of hard work and hard living. These men would have a certain amount of money as wages, and would assuredly spend these wages as they made them; hence, the gambler followed the rough settlements at the "head of the rails." The murderer, the thief, the prostitute, the social outcast and the fleeing criminal went with the gamblers and the toughs. Those were the days when it was not polite to ask a man what his name had been back in the States. A very large percentage of this population was wild and lawless, and it impressed those who joined it instead of being altered and improved by them. There were no wilder days in the West than those of the early railroad building. Such towns as Newton, Kansas, where eleven men were killed in one night; Fort Dodge, where armed encounters among cowboys and gamblers, deputies and desperadoes, were too frequent to attract attention; Caldwell, on the Indian border; Hays City, Abilene, Ellsworth--any of a dozen cow camps, where the head of the rails caught the great northern cattle drives, furnished chapters lurid enough to take volumes in telling--indeed, perhaps, gave that stamp to the West which has been apparently so ineradicable. These were flourishing times for the Western desperado, and he became famous, and, as it were, typical, at about this era. Perhaps this was due in part to the fact that the railroads carried with them the telegraph and the newspaper, so that records and reports were made of what had for many years gone unreported. Now, too, began the influx of transients, who saw the wild West hurriedly and wrote of it as a strange and dangerous country. The wild citizens of California and Montana in mining days passed almost unnoticed except in fiction. The wild men of the middle plains now began to have a record in facts, or partial facts, as brought to the notice of the reading public which was seeking news of the new lands. A strange and turbulent day now drew swiftly on. Chapter IV The Early Outlaw--_The Frontier of the Past Century_--_The Bad Man East of the Mississippi River_--_The Great Western Land-Pirate, John A. Murrell_--_The Greatest Slave Insurrection Ever Planned_.