When the railroads came across the Western plains, they brought a man who has been present on the American frontier ever since the revolutionary war,--the land boomer. He was in Kentucky in time to rob poor old Daniel Boone of all the lands he thought he owned. He founded Marietta, on the Ohio river, on a land steal; and thence, westward, laid out one town after another. The early settler who came down the Ohio valley in the first and second decades of the past century passed the ruins of abandoned towns far back to the east even in that day. The town-site shark passed across the Mississippi river and the Missouri, and everywhere his record was the same. He was the pioneer of avarice in very many cases, and often he inaugurated strife where he purported to be establishing law. Each town thought itself the garden spot and center of the universe--one knows not how many Kansas towns, for instance, contended over the absurd honor of being exactly at the center of the United States!--and local pride was such that each citizen must unite with others even in arms, if need be, to uphold the merits of his own "city." This peculiar phase of frontier nature usually came most into evidence over the questions of county seats. Hardly a frontier county seat was ever established without a fight of some kind, and often a bloody one. It has chanced that the author has been in and around a few of these clashes between rival towns, and he may say that the vehemence of the antagonism of such encounters would have been humorous, had it not been so deadly. Two "cities," composed each of a few frame shanties and a set of blue-print maps, one just as barren of delight as the other, and neither worth fighting over at the time, do not seem typical of any great moral purpose; yet at times their citizens fought as stubbornly as did the men who fought for and against slavery in Kansas. One instance of this sort of thing will do, and it is covered in the chapter describing the Stevens County War, one of the most desperate and bloody, as well as one of the most recent feuds of local politicians.