part of Wyoming, and the local courts would not convict them. This fiasco scarcely hastened the advent of the day--which came soon enough after the railroads and the farmers--under which the home dweller outweighed the nomad.[G] [Footnote G: See "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. D. Appleton & Co.] Wars between sheep men and cattle men sometimes took on the phase of armed bodies of men meeting in bloody encounter. The sheep were always unwelcome on the range, and are so to-day, although the courts now adjust such matters better than they formerly did. The cow baron and his men often took revenge upon the woolly nuisances themselves and killed them in numbers. The author knows of one instance where five thousand sheep were killed in one box canon by irate cow men whose range had been invaded. The sheep eat the grass down to the point of killing it, and cattle will not feed on a country which sheep have crossed. Many wars of this kind have been known all the way from Montana to Mexico. Again, factional fights might arise over some trivial matter as an immediate cause, in a community or a region where numbers of men fairly equal were separated in self-interest. In a day when life was still wild and free, and when the law was still unknown, these differences of opinion sometimes led to bitter and bloody conflicts between factions. Chapter XIV The Lincoln County War--_The Bloodiest, Most Dramatic and Most Romantic of all the Border Wars_--_First Authentic Story Ever Printed of the Bitterest Feud of the Southwest_. The entire history of the American frontier is one of rebellion against the law, if, indeed, that may be called rebellion whose apostles have not yet recognized any authority of the law. The frontier antedated anarchy. It broke no social compact, for it had never made one. Its population asked no protection save that afforded under the stern suzerainty of the six-shooter. The anarchy of the frontier, if we may call it such, was sometimes little more than self-interest against self-interest. This was the true description of the border conflict now in question. The Lincoln County War, fully speaking, embraced three wars; the Pecos War of the early '70's, the Harold War of 1874, and the Lincoln County War proper, which may be said to have begun in 1874 and to have ended in 1879. The actors in these different conflicts were all intermingled. There was no blood feud at the bottom of this fighting. It was the war of self-interest against self-interest, each side supported by numbers of fighting men.